We Live In A World Gone Mad!

I am getting more frightened by the minute. If anyone can read Tom Engelhardt's analysis of the situation in Iraq and feel comfortable, that poor soul should seek immediate medical assistance. If this is (fair & balanced) terror, so be it.

[x History New Network]
Custer? The Alamo? Iraq 2004
By Tom Engelhardt

"One senior American officer said that in any urban fight, American troops could turn Falluja into 'a killing field in a couple of days…' One senior American officer said, 'How Falluja is resolved has huge reverberations, not just in Iraq but throughout the entire area.' Or, as another senior officer put it, 'We have the potential to turn this into the Alamo if we get it wrong.'" (Eric Schmitt, U.S. General at Falluja Warns a Full Attack Could Come Soon, the New York Times)

"A security contractor killed in Iraq last week was once one of South Africa's most secret covert agents, his identity guarded so closely that even the Truth and Reconciliation Commission did not discover the extent of his involvement in apartheid's silent wars… In South Africa he joined the SA Defence Force's secret Project Barnacle, a precursor to the notorious Civil Co-operation Bureau (CCB) death squad… In 1985 he was involved in planning the now notorious SADF raid on Gaborone in which 14 people, including a five-year-old child, were killed." (Julian Rademeyer, Iraq victim was top-secret apartheid killer, the Sunday Times [of South Africa])

"A former British soldier shot while guarding workers in Iraq predicted being 'over-run' in an e-mail the night before his death in the town of Hit… Mr Bloss, who is believed to have served with the parachute regiment in Northern Ireland, was working for a Virginia-based security firm, Custer Battles." (Iraq Briton's final tragic e-mail, BBC News)

"In the first months of the occupation, [said Bessam Jarrah, an Iraqi surgeon,] we, the educated people, thought America would show us a humanitarian way, a political way, to solve problems… But this use of force means the efforts to find a political solution for Iraq has failed, and now America is using Saddam's approach to problems: brute force. America won the war on April 9 last year; they lost the war on April 9 this year. That is what Iraqis feel." (Alissa J. Rubin, Carnage Dims Hopes for Political Way in Iraq, the Los Angeles Times)

A New Word Order

Imagine that: The Iraqis of Fallujah in "the Alamo" and a British "security contractor," with previous experience in Northern Ireland, working for the oddly named Custer Battles, a Virginia "security firm," and dying in the Iraqi town of Hit. Custer Battles, by the way, also " has the airport security contract in Baghdad. Airport security in this context does not mean bored attendees standing by an X-ray machine, but rather former Green Berets and Ghurka fighters defending the airport from mortars, rockets and snipers."

So we now have potential Iraqi Davy Crocketts and Jim Bowies facing off against the modern equivalent of "the Seventh Cavalry," filled with Gurkhas, Chileans of the Pinochet regime, South African former death squad members, former British special forces officers, American ex-Seals and the like amid what Alissa Rubin of the Los Angeles Times calls a "culture of impunity" in Iraq. Though she's referring to the world of Iraqi kidnappers and assassins, the word "impunity," which means "exemption from punishment, penalty, or harm," and has an old-fashioned imperial edge to it, also catches something of the Bush administration stance toward Iraq and the greater world.

The men of Custer Battles guard Baghdad's airport, while the men of Blackwater USA -- if still waters run deep, how do blackwaters run, and where do they get these names? -- four of whom were killed and mutilated in Fallujah, provide the fulltime security team of ten guarding our "administrator" in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, and various members of the Iraqi Governing Council. They are part of a new word and world order taking disheveled shape in what may indeed become the "killing fields" of Iraq, an order that we have no reasonable language whatsoever to describe.

In Imperial China, a new dynastic emperor ascending the throne performed a ceremony involving what was called "the rectification of names." This was on the theory that the previous dynasty had fallen, in part, because the gap between reality and the way it was named had grown to abyss-like proportions. Of course, this yawning gap between the world out there and the words used to describe it has been an essential aspect of Bush-induced American reality since September 11, 2001. It has been at the heart of the American bubble (like the moving "bubble" within which our President travels the world, emptying the centers of whole cities as he passes by in the process of creating some kind of Potemkin planet).

We can see the results of this in an unnerving survey just conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland (www.pipa.org/) and discussed this week by Jim Lobe of Inter Press News (Bush's believe it or not). Not only, he reports, does "a majority of the public still believe Iraq was closely tied to the al-Qaeda terrorist group and had WMD stocks or programs before US troops invaded the country 13 months ago," but a significant majority believe that Saddam's Iraq was in some way involved in the 9/11 attacks and believe that "experts" back them on all these points. They believe as well that global opinion favored our going to war with Iraq or at least was "evenly balanced" on the subject -- and most of these figures vary at best only slightly from prewar polling figures (even as dissatisfaction over presidential "handling" of post-war Iraq policy has risen dramatically). Holding such misperceptions is, in turn, closely correlated with the urge to reelect George Bush in November.

Explain this as you will -- and certainly a ceaseless drumbeat of administration "explanations," magnified (until just about yesterday) in the echo chamber of the media, has to account for much of this -- the disjuncture between the world and how Americans insist on seeing it remains wide indeed and a willingness to acknowledge this in the mainstream -- certainly among mainstream politicians -- low indeed. For instance, all of official Washington, as Tony Karon of Time magazine recently wrote, speaks as one about "staying the course" in Iraq, and though that "course" is, at best, an obstacle course, woe be to anyone who breaks ranks. ("Washington may be deeply divided over how the Bush administration took America into Iraq, but there is a remarkable unanimity in support of the President's resolve to finish the job.")

This is what passes for "security" thinking in America just as companies like Custer Battles, Dyncorp, and Blackwater USA pass for "security firms." Such thinking -- and the language that goes with it -- is part and parcel of the creation of what should perhaps be called a National Insecurity State itself teetering atop an Insecurity Planet.

Bush administration officials have assumed that the globe's only superpower can simply insist on and define the reality it wants; and no one, whatever the objections, will have the brute power to redefine it. The world, however, is -- as they are discovering in Iraq -- a far more complex and recalcitrant place than they've cared to imagine.

With that in mind, let's consider a few of the key terms that both in government pronouncements and in media coverage of Iraq add up to the bubble language that stands between Americans and a reasonable perception of the world out there:

"Security firms": It's in the nature of human beings, when they take marginal activities and bring them into the mainstream to want to professionalize them and so upgrade their status. Once upon a time, there were scattered "soldiers of fortune" and "mercenaries" in our world, former soldiers or wannabe soldiers who, as in Southern Africa in the 1980s, sold themselves to any bidder and shouldered arms for various, largely right-wing regimes. Now, this seat-of-the-pants mercenary business has become a $100 billion dollar global operation (with the U.S. government as its largest employer) and you can search our press far and wide rarely coming across the terms "mercenary," "soldier of fortune," "hired guns," "rent-a-cops," or anything else that might bring us closer to the tawdry reality of what these so-called security companies are actually selling. The employees of these firms are in turn usually called "contractors" in our press -- which sounds like such an up-and-up, modest, business-like thing to be -- even when they're heavily armed and out in the field fighting Iraqis. Of course, the basic "gap" here lies in the very word "security." You simply can't have a more "secure" world in which such firms can freely make multimillions of dollars by hiring out to the highest -- and most powerful -- bidders.

In Iraq, this new "security" business has already reached monumental proportions. Looking at the military situation there logically, as Paul Rogers, the sober geopolitical analyst for the openDemocracy website, recently did (A strategy disintegrates), you can see why. Though we now have perhaps 135,000 American troops in Iraq, "what has to be remembered is that a large proportion of [them]… are reservists working on a wide range of projects. The core group of perhaps 80,000 combat troops is far too small to secure Iraq even if it were aided by effective Iraqi forces, and these are simply not there."

As it stands, reports Brendan O'Neill at the Alternet website (Outsourcing the Occupation), American troop strength is so low that most Iraqis -- 77% by one poll -- have never had an encounter with a member of the occupation forces. (This reflects as well the strain of the Pentagon's being committed to an ever greater global imperial mission with ever smaller military forces -- since so much of the Pentagon's budget actually goes into the creation of a vast array of 21st and 22nd century high-tech weapons and into the "pockets" of the megacorporations that create them.) As a result, in places like Najaf, it's been the "contractors," often brutal forces under no legal constraints or oversight in a land of which they know nothing, who have been left in small numbers to man the battlements.

The men of Blackwater and Custer Battles now find themselves at war and, as O'Neill reports, often can't even call on the U.S. military for backup when attacked. As a result, the various, otherwise competitive private outfits in Iraq are beginning to band together -- with their own helicopter support teams and their own intelligence -- to defend themselves more effectively. The Bush administration has for months now been hyping the infiltration of dangerous and unscrupulous "foreign fighters" into Iraq. As it happens they've been right. According to Brookings Institute expert Peter W. Singer, "We're talking somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 private personnel, and that is expected to rise to 30,000 when the coalition hands over power to Iraqis on 30 June." These men, living in their own Wild West, are, for some Iraqis, "the most hated and humiliating aspect" of an occupation which probably couldn't continue without them.

As the different "security contractors" mesh more closely with each other, they are, in a sense, becoming the real "coalition" in Iraq -- in conjunction of course with the American military. Here is how David Barstow described the situation in a recent front-page piece in the New York Times (Security Companies: Shadow Soldiers in Iraq):

"They have come from all corners of the world. Former Navy Seal commandos from North Carolina. Gurkas from Nepal. Soldiers from South Africa's old apartheid government. They have come by the thousands, drawn to the dozens of private security companies that have set up shop in Baghdad. The most prized were plucked from the world's elite special forces units. Others may have been recruited from the local SWAT team.

"But they are there, racing about Iraq in armored cars, many outfitted with the latest in high-end combat weapons. Some security companies have formed their own 'Quick Reaction Forces,' and their own intelligence units that produce daily intelligence briefs with grid maps of 'hot zones.' One company has its own helicopters, and several have even forged diplomatic alliances with local clans… With every week of insurgency in a war zone with no front, these companies are becoming more deeply enmeshed in combat, in some cases all but obliterating distinctions between professional troops and private commandos."

In this, Iraq is leading the way into a new world of war-fighting that places not security by pell-mell "insecurity" and -- since such mercenaries are, in the end, answerable to no one -- complete impunity at the heart of the Bush administration's new global order.

"Coalition": It's in this context that the continued use of the term "coalition" should obviously be reconsidered. The term has been an endlessly used -- and rarely challenged -- cover for Bush administration go-it-alone-ism. From the beginning, of course, the formation of the "coalition" -- against the desires of popular majorities in almost every one of the joining states -- involved major arm-twisting and/or large-scale bribery of a sort that has been as striking as it's been under-reported. Most members of the coalition, ranging from Poland to El Salvador, seem to have received some financial support from us for their "contributions" and were generally using their troops as pawns in bargaining for advantageous terms from the U.S. in other areas entirely; or were currying favor with the Bush administration in hopes of other kinds of help (as the South Korean government was in order to ameliorate the American negotiating stance toward North Korea); or were hoping to get cut in on lucrative "reconstruction" deals (almost all of which went to American firms anyway); or, in the case of Japan, was using Iraq to break the "peace constitution" that came out of the post-World War II American occupation of that country.

Almost all of these countries sent minimal numbers of troops, often of a relatively peaceful type (say, engineering forces), and in many cases only to engage in peacekeeping work, not to fight a war. Now, these countries are starting to fall away. This week Spain, Honduras and the Dominican Republic announced that they would withdraw their troops; the South Koreans hesitated over their promise to send another 3,500 troops, while Polish officialdom faltered slightly in its commitment; the Thais, who are reconsidering their commitment, asked for U.S. troops to "protect" their 400 troops in Karbala; and so on. Only Britain indicated that it might send more troops, while the European Union's top diplomat, Javier Solano, ruled out any NATO role there in the near future. This is obviously part of a process of delamination which could sooner or later reduce the "coalition" largely to the Americans, the mercenaries, and the Brits (in that order) -- which is generally the truth of the matter anyway. What should the term for the "coalition" be then?

"Sovereignty": The Bush administration has been touting the July 1 "hand-over" of "sovereignty" to some as-yet-unknown Iraqi administrative body for many months. "Sovereignty" is usually defined as "complete independence and self-government" or "supremacy of authority or rule as exercised by a sovereign or sovereign state." It's a term that high administration officials from the President on down seem to bring up almost daily in public briefings of every sort in Washington and Baghdad. It's often referred to as putting an "Iraqi face" (read: mask) on occupied Iraq.

Friday, the lead paragraph of a front-page New York Times piece by Steven R. Weisman with the modest title, White House Says Iraq Sovereignty Could Be Limited, was:

"The Bush administration's plans for a new caretaker government in Iraq would place severe limits on its sovereignty, including only partial command over its armed forces and no authority to enact new laws, administration officials said Thursday."

In fact, the Iraqi army, such as it is, will not be under Iraqi command; an American military army of occupation will remain, ensconced in permanent bases; the privatized economy will be beyond the reach of the new "supreme" body; and L. Paul Bremer has nailed in place a whole untouchable infrastructure that the new body will be able to do nothing about -- so just remind me under these circumstances, what exactly does "sovereignty" mean and why does our media continue to use the term?

Several weeks ago, Jonathan Schell, on a panel at a conference on covering the Iraq war at the Journalism School of the University of California at Berkeley, suggested that not only do the Americans have no intention of turning actual sovereignty over to the Iraqis but that, in fact, they do not possess sovereignty in Iraq and so, in a sense, have nothing not to turn over. How true that is likely to prove.

"Democracy": We entered Iraq to bring "democracy" to an oppressed and tyrannized people -- so this administration said over and over again (particularly as other explanations for our invasion slowly peeled away). But, as with sovereignty above, our administrators and the men they report back to in Washington have had a very specific definition of "democracy," one you're not likely to find in any dictionary -- and it's had nothing whatsoever to do with "elections" or "the will of the people." It's had to do with maneuvering to get Iraqis of our choice, mainly exiles, preferably led by Ahmed Chalabi into whatever passed for control in Iraq.

In recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on Iraq, historian Juan Cole offered the following as part of his testimony on U.S. Mistakes in Iraq:

"One strategy that might have forestalled a lot of opposition would have been to hold early municipal elections. Such free and fair elections were actually scheduled in cities like Najaf by local US military authorities in spring of 2003, but Paul Bremer stepped in to cancel them. A raft of newly elected mayors who subsequently gained experience in domestic politics might have thrown up new leaders in Iraq who could then move to the national stage. This development appears to have been deliberately forestalled by Mr. Bremer, in favor of a kind of cronyism that aimed at putting a preselected group of politicians in power. In Najaf, the US appointed a Sunni Baathist officer as mayor over this devotedly Shiite city. He had turned on Saddam only at the last moment. Since Sunni Baathists had massacred the people of Najaf, he was extremely unpopular. He took the children of Najaf notables hostage for ransom and engaged in other corrupt practices. Eventually even the US authorities had to remove him from power and try him. But the first impression the US made on the holy city of Najaf, and therefore on the high Shiite clerics such as Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, was very bad."

The same might be said more generally of nationwide elections. Month after month, the Americans resisted Ayatollah Sistani's insistence that national elections be organized quickly, well before the November American presidential election. They resisted for so long, in fact, that their argument -- it was impracticable -- finally came true. Now under ludicrously worse conditions, they will turn over only, it seems, the supposed power to organize national elections within seven months to whatever new body is decided upon -- a body guaranteed to be seen by many or most Iraqis as without legitimacy. In the meantime, the Americans will remain an occupying force, at least theoretically in control of more or less everything. What do we call this?

Iraq Today

"Insecurity": The essence of Iraq today might be summed up in the word "insecurity." The continued employment of brute force by the Americans -- the decision as in Fallujah to, in the words of a British officer in Basra, use "a sledgehammer to crack a walnut" -- has evidently turned even the merchants on the commercial Boulevard of Outer Karada in middle-class Baghdad, who should be America's staunchest allies, against us. Edward Wong of the New York Times writes that these merchants tend to feel that "the fighting in Falluja had proven the occupiers to be barbarians" (Battle for Falluja Rouses the Anger of Iraqis Weary of the U.S. Occupation):

"'Frankly, we started to hate the Americans for that,' Towfeek Hussein, 36, an electronics salesman, said of the siege of Falluja as he sat behind a desk in his shop. 'The Americans will hit any family. They just don't care. Children used to wave to the American soldiers when their patrols passed by here. Two days ago, the children turned their faces away.'

"More than anything else, Falluja has become a galvanizing battle, a symbol around which many Iraqis rally their anticolonial sentiments. Some say the fighting there exposes the lie of American justice by showing that the world's sole superpower is ready to avenge the killings and mutilation of four American security contractors by sending marines to shell and invade a city of 300,000 people… The gap between the expectations of many Iraqis and the flagging abilities of the occupiers to improve conditions seems to have widened to a chasm."

At the Mother Jones on-line website, Nir Rosen writes of life in Baghdad this way in a piece that describes the assassination of a Iraqi police colonel in broad daylight on a major thoroughfare (Everyday Chaos):

"And the attacks are everywhere in Baghdad. The violence is relentless. You will never hear about most of it, because the American reporters here don't hear about most of it. Baghdad is a huge sprawling city with a barely functional communications infrastructure, and it's impossible for the journalists or the occupying army to know what is happening everywhere. We only hear the distant thunder of the explosions.

"All day and all night, Baghdad shakes with explosions; explosions from bombs, from rocket-propelled grenades, from artillery, from guns. But it's usually impossible to figure out just where the firing is taking place, even if you're foolish enough to search for the fighting after dark, when gangs and feral dogs own the streets. There are systematic assassinations of policemen, translators, local officials, and anybody associated with the American occupiers. In the Sunni neighborhood of Aadhamiya, the Americans come under attack on a nightly basis, and the streets erupt in cheers and whistles at the sounds of the first explosions. Most of the time, the Americans stay behind their concrete walls and big guns. But the Iraqi police have only handguns and a few AK-47's to use against a foe armed with car bombs and heavy weaponry. So the new Iraqi police are hunted at all times in all places, and they are losing every day. The pace of the violence has become so constant, it's almost normal, almost mundane."

This is not quite the Iraq we usually read much about.

In the meantime, just to offer a list of recent events in that unraveling country in no particular order: Major highways into and out of Baghdad have been shut down due to constant guerrilla attacks, with the dangers of shortages rising; 1,500 foreign engineers have reportedly fled the country so far; reporters largely don't dare to leave Baghdad, and often not even their hotels for fear of kidnapping or death; the BBC is reducing its staff in the country to barebones; the police and civil defense forces as well as the new army largely refused to fight in recent weeks and, according to American Major General Martin Dempsey, about 10% of them simply went over to rebels; some reconstruction projects have halted entirely and large contractors are beginning to either shut down, suspend work in the country, or withdraw workers -- GE and Siemens did so the other day, slowing work in particular on the countries power/electricity output as another hot summer with limited lights and air-conditioning looms; some of Saddam's former generals are being dusted off, as de-Baathification is chucked out the window, and put in charge of the "new" Iraqi army, while in Kut, the police chief and his deputy have been replaced with two of Saddam's former Republican Guards; kidnappings of foreigners continue apace as do targeted assassinations of translators, policemen, anyone working with the Americans; shootings of people who look "non-Arab, whether Western, Asian, or African are becoming routine"; at a desert camp in southern Iraq, American troops sleep in their trucks and Humvees because Iraqi merchants are afraid to deliver tents to them, while goods pile up at Baghdad Airport because Iraqi truckers refuse to drive the main highway to the capital or drive supplies to U.S. bases; suicide bombers hit Basra devastatingly last week as, on Saturday, suicide boats went after oil facilities in Basra harbor, and that seems to be but a beginning to such a list.

Finally, I recommend a piece first spotted by the editors of Antiwar.com from Army News Service about a squad of puzzled soldiers bringing "democracy" to Iraq by tearing down posters of the radical Shiite cleric al-Sadr in the shops of a Baghdad neighborhood and causing a near riot. It ends on the following paragraph -- a quote from the captain who ordered the posters torn down -- worthy, I suspect, of The Onion, rather than the Army News Service:

"I think it was important [to remove the posters] because al-Sadr currently stands for all things that are anti-coalition… It's important to show that we can deal with the propaganda in a non-threatening way, rather than coming in hard and forcefully."

"Escalation": Here's an old Vietnam-era term that might prove modestly useful in the new Iraq.

Troops: Our military forces in Iraq are now at 135,000 and General Abizaid, Centcom commander, is considering asking for more. The British are also evidently planning to send in another 1,700 troops and possibly expand their area of operations, and private "security firms" may add up to 10,000 more well-paid mercenaries, bringing their numbers to 30,000. In the meantime, the President is evidently on the verge of deciding to order the Marines to take Fallujah, no matter whether it becomes an Iraqi "Alamo" or not. This is unsurprising. For the men (and woman) of this administration, brute force and the threat of force is the only option they really know. It is, in fact, option A, B, and C. They really have nothing else in their arsenal and frustration has set in.

Funds: It's no shock to discover, given the last weeks in Iraq, that funds are running short. The Bush administration has been reluctant -- for obvious reasons -- to ask Congress to appropriate more money before the November election. (Why tell the American people what the ever-growing price tag is on "their" occupation?) Still just this week, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard B. Myers told Congress that the military part of the occupation, already costing $4.7 billion a month, was about to experience a $4 billion "shortfall" by late this summer. This would include the $700 million dollars needed to keep those 20,000 extra troops in Iraq for three more months and the higher fuel costs the military is paying due, in part, to OPEC/Saudi oil production cuts.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the general's figure doesn't seem to cover the half of it. The Army alone has "identified" $6 billion "in funding needs that were not addressed in the defense budget" including funds for repairing worn and destroyed equipment in Iraq, adding heavy armor to vehicles, buying combat helmets, boots, underwear, and so on.

The Marines, Jonathan Weisman of the Washington Post reports, have their own list of unmet needs including $40 million for body army, lightweight helmets and other equipment. His piece includes the following curious passage:

"Scrambling to fill its needs, the Pentagon last week diverted 120 armored Humvees purchased by the Israel Defense Forces to Iraq. Yesterday, the Army announced a $110 million contract for still more armored Humvees."

How the $4 billion "shortfall" and the $6 billion-plus-plus in unmet needs mesh -- is the $4 billion included in the $6 billion figure? -- I have no idea. But I think you can count on the fact that from here on, funds for the occupation are only going to escalate.

Detainees: And, oh yes, in the escalatory realm, Aaron Glantz of Inter Press Service reports far higher figures for Iraqi detainees than I've previously seen. He writes: "The U.S. military is currently holding more than 20,000 Iraqis behind bars -- most of them taken during house to house searches by the U.S. military." Maybe we could just imprison the whole population and be done with it.

"Reconstruction": There has been endless talk about "reconstructing" Iraq. It's what we're there for, aren't we? But what exactly is this "reconstruction." Here's one thing we now know: perhaps 20-25% of all reconstruction monies going into corporate hands are being spent on "security" -- think "insecurity" -- in Iraq.

Now, we have another figure to go with that. According to Tom Regan of the Christian Science Monitor in a piece entitled, Operation kickback?:

"Iraq's private companies routinely pay bribes to get reconstruction contracts - often to Iraqi officials but sometimes to employees of US contractors. That's one of the allegations that has been made by a special investigation undertaken by public radio's Marketplace and the Center for Investigative Reporting, and funded by The Economist magazine. The result, according to experts monitoring the situation, is almost 20 percent of the billions of American taxpayers dollars being spent to rebuild Iraq is being lost to corruption."

He adds that "every Iraqi ministry is touched by corruption, the report alleges" and that "the problem is as deeply embedded in Washington as it is in Baghdad… in the past three months, US investigators have disputed more than $1 billion worth of contract fees because of 'inflated charges, incompetence, lack of documentation to support invoices and kickbacks related to subcontract awards.'"

Now, add to the moneys being poured into security and being siphoned off by corruption, the unknown percentage of reconstruction funds that are simply and legally pocketed by large corporations like Bechtel and Halliburton as profits for their work and you have to wonder exactly how much of these Iraqi-bound, congressionally-mandated funds actually make it anywhere near any reasonable group of Iraqis. I mean, we may be talking about one of the great scams of history here, the sort of thing that could make Teapot Dome seem like a sprinkle on a spring day and, given all this, should we still really be talking about "reconstructing" Iraq?

And then we need some term to cover whatever the downward spiraling process is that we're watching (and the Iraqis are experiencing). We could, of course, just turn the term "reconstruction" upside down and talk about the "deconstruction" of Iraq, intended or otherwise, but perhaps the term "devolution" would better fit the larger situation -- and our world itself.

The question that lies under all this language, somewhere beneath the gap between our description of reality and what's going on out there, beneath the new word and world order, somewhere deep in that dark abyss, is whether, as Paul Rogers of openDemocracy puts the matter, the U.S. situation in Iraq is "actually becoming unsustainable." Put another way, whatever the immediate profits and advantages, even to the Bush administration, is such a world unsustainable?

What, I wonder, will this administration do, to take but a simple example, if fighting boils up again in the land that time forgot -- Afghanistan -- now seemingly covered with opium poppies, in a state of remarkable disarray, still filled with warlords, and with a resurgent Taliban? Just the other day a story from that land broke through to Americans because an American soldier killed in an ambush there happened to be a former National Football League player who had walked away from multimillions to become a member of the Army Rangers.

We know that George Bush imagines himself striding into town as The Law in a western; but, wedded to the gun as he is, the ranks of his supporters filling with mercenaries as they are, what he seems to be intent on creating is a spaghetti-western world -- and, given his corporate cronies, A Fistful of Dollars wouldn't be a bad title for his "film," which unfortunately also happens to be our world.

This article first appeared on www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, a long time editor in publishing, the author of The End of Victory Culture, co-editor of History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles For The American Past, and a fellow of the Nation Institute.

Copyright © 2004 Tom Engelhardt

9 Pillars Of Truth About Al Qaeda

There is a lot said and written about Al Qaeda that is utter nonsense. The constant chatter about a war on terror also is nonsense. It is easier to nail jelly to the barndoor. Make war on nations, not on ideas. Jason Burke sets the record straight about Al Qaeda. If this is (fair & balanced) demythologizing, so be it.

[x Foreign Policy]
Think Again: Al Qaeda
By Jason Burke

The mere mention of al Qaeda conjures images of an efficient terrorist network guided by a powerful criminal mastermind. Yet al Qaeda is more lethal as an ideology than as an organization. “Al Qaedaism” will continue to attract supporters in the years to come—whether Osama bin Laden is around to lead them or not.

“Al Qaeda Is a Global Terrorist Organization”

No. It is less an organization than an ideology. The Arabic word qaeda can be translated as a “base of operation” or “foundation,” or alternatively as a “precept” or “method.” Islamic militants always understood the term in the latter sense. In 1987, Abdullah Azzam, the leading ideologue for modern Sunni Muslim radical activists, called for al-qaeda al-sulbah (a vanguard of the strong). He envisaged men who, acting independently, would set an example for the rest of the Islamic world and thus galvanize the umma (global community of believers) against its oppressors. It was the FBI—during its investigation of the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in East Africa—which dubbed the loosely linked group of activists that Osama bin Laden and his aides had formed as “al Qaeda.” This decision was partly due to institutional conservatism and partly because the FBI had to apply conventional antiterrorism laws to an adversary that was in no sense a traditional terrorist or criminal organization.

Although bin Laden and his partners were able to create a structure in Afghanistan that attracted new recruits and forged links among preexisting Islamic militant groups, they never created a coherent terrorist network in the way commonly conceived. Instead, al Qaeda functioned like a venture capital firm—providing funding, contacts, and expert advice to many different militant groups and individuals from all over the Islamic world.

Today, the structure that was built in Afghanistan has been destroyed, and bin Laden and his associates have scattered or been arrested or killed. There is no longer a central hub for Islamic militancy. But the al Qaeda worldview, or “al Qaedaism,” is growing stronger every day. This radical internationalist ideology—sustained by anti-Western, anti-Zionist, and anti-Semitic rhetoric—has adherents among many individuals and groups, few of whom are currently linked in any substantial way to bin Laden or those around him. They merely follow his precepts, models, and methods. They act in the style of al Qaeda, but they are only part of al Qaeda in the very loosest sense. That's why Israeli intelligence services now prefer the term “jihadi international” instead of “al Qaeda.”

“Capturing or Killing Bin Laden Will Deal a Severe Blow to Al Qaeda”

Wrong. Even for militants with identifiable ties to bin Laden, the death of the “sheik” will make little difference in their ability to recruit people. U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recently acknowledged as much when he questioned in an internal Pentagon memo whether it was possible to kill militants faster than radical clerics and religious schools could create them. In practical terms, bin Laden now has only a very limited ability to commission acts of terror, and his involvement is restricted to the broad strategic direction of largely autonomous cells and groups. Most intelligence analysts now consider him largely peripheral.

This turn of events should surprise no one. Islamic militancy predates bin Laden's activities. He was barely involved in the Islamic violence of the early 1990s in Algeria, Egypt, Bosnia, and Kashmir. His links to the 1993 World Trade Center attack were tangential. There were no al Qaeda training camps during the early 1990s, although camps run by other groups churned out thousands of highly trained fanatics. Even when bin Laden was based in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, it was often Islamic groups and individuals who sought him out for help in finding resources for preconceived attacks, not vice versa. These days, Islamic groups can go to other individuals, such as Jordanian activist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who set up his al Tauhid group in competition with bin Laden (rather than, as is frequently claimed, in alliance with him) to obtain funds, expertise, or other logistical assistance.

Bin Laden still plays a significant role in the movement as a propagandist who effectively exploits modern mass communications. It is likely that the United States will eventually apprehend bin Laden and that this demonstration of U.S. power will demoralize many militants. However, much depends on the manner in which he is captured or killed. If, like deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, he surrenders without a fight, which is very unlikely, many followers will be deeply disillusioned. If he achieves martyrdom in a way that his cohorts can spin as heroic, he will be an inspiration for generations to come. Either way, bin Laden's removal from the scene will not stop Islamic militancy.

“The Militants Seek to Destroy the West so They Can Impose a Global Islamic State”

False. Islamic militants' main objective is not conquest, but to beat back what they perceive as an aggressive West that is supposedly trying to complete the project begun during the Crusades and colonial periods of denigrating, dividing, and humiliating Islam. The militants' secondary goal is the establishment of the caliphate, or single Islamic state, in the lands roughly corresponding to the furthest extent of the Islamic empire of the late first and early second centuries. Today, this state would encompass the Middle East, the Maghreb (North Africa bordering the Mediterranean), Andalusia in southern Spain, Central Asia, parts of the Balkans, and possibly some Islamic territories in the Far East. Precisely how this utopian caliphate would function is vague. The militants believe that if all Muslims act according to a literal interpretation of the Islamic holy texts, an almost mystical transformation to a just and perfect society will follow.

The radical Islamists seek to weaken the United States and the West because they are both impediments to this end. During the 1990s, militants in countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Algeria began turning their attention abroad as they grew frustrated by their failure to change the status quo at home. The militants felt that striking at the Arab regimes' Western sponsors (the “far enemy” as opposed to the “near enemy”) would be the best means to improve local conditions. This strategy, which bin Laden and those around him aggressively advocate, remains contentious among Islamic radicals, especially in Egypt.

Yet, as the March 11, 2004, terrorist bombings in Madrid revealed, attacks on the “far enemy” can still be employed with great effect. By striking Spain just before its elections, the militants sent a message to Western governments that their presence in the Middle East would exact a heavy political and human toll.

“The Militants Reject Modern Ideas in Favor of Traditional Muslim Theology”

No. Although Islamic hard-liners long to return to an idealized seventh-century existence, they have little compunction about embracing the tools that modernity provides. Their purported medievalism has not deterred militants from effectively using the Internet and videocassettes to mobilize the faithful.

At the ideological level, prominent thinkers such as Sayyid Qutb and Abu Ala Maududi have borrowed heavily from the organizational tactics of secular leftist and anarchist revolutionaries. Their concept of the vanguard is influenced by Leninist theory. Qutb's most important work, Ma'alim fi'l-tariq (Milestones), reads in part like an Islamicized Communist Manifesto. A commonly used Arabic word in the names of militant groups is Hizb (as in Lebanon's Hizb Allah, or Hezbollah), which means “party”—another modern concept.

In fact, the militants often couch their grievances in Third-Worldist terms familiar to any contemporary antiglobalization activist. One recent document purporting to come from bin Laden berates the United States for failing to ratify the Kyoto agreement on climate change. Egyptian militant leader Ayman al-Zawahiri has decried multinational companies as a major evil. Mohammed Atta, one of the September 11 hijackers, once told a friend how angered he was by a world economic system that meant Egyptian farmers grew cash crops such as strawberries for the West while the country's own people could barely afford bread. In all these cases, the militants are framing modern political concerns, including social justice, within a mythic and religious narrative. They do not reject modernization per se, but they resent their failure to benefit from that modernization.

Also, within the context of Islamic observance, these new Sunni militants are not considered traditionalists, but radical reformers, because they reject the authority of the established clergy and demand the right to interpret doctrine themselves, despite a general lack of academic credentials on the part of leading figures such as bin Laden or Zawahiri.

“Since the Rise of Al Qaeda, Islamic Moderates Have Been Marginalized”

Incorrect. Al Qaeda represents the lunatic fringe of political thought in the Islamic world. While al Qaedaism has made significant inroads in recent years, only a tiny minority of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims adhere to its doctrine. Many sympathize with bin Laden and take satisfaction at his ability to strike the United States, but that does not mean they genuinely want to live in a unified Islamic state governed along strict Koranic lines. Nor does anti-Western sentiment translate into a rejection of Western values. Surveys of public opinion in the Arab world, conducted by organizations such as Zogby International and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, reveal strong support for elected government, personal liberty, educational opportunity, and economic choice.

Even those who believe “Islam is the solution” disagree over precisely what that solution might be and how it might be achieved. Radical militants such as bin Laden want to destroy the state and replace it with something based on a literal reading of the Koran. However, some political Islamists want to appropriate the structures of the state and, in varying degrees, Islamicize them, usually with a view toward promoting greater social justice and outflanking undemocratic and powerful regimes. An example of the latter would be the Pakistani Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) movement, currently led by veteran activist Qazi Hussein Ahmed. JI represents a significant swath of Pakistani popular opinion, and although it is tainted by appalling levels of anti-Semitism, it has taken a stance against bin Laden and the Taliban when politically feasible. Often, as in Iraq, Jordan, and Turkey, such groups are relatively moderate and can serve as useful interlocutors for the West. They should not be rejected out of hand as “Islamists”; refusing to engage them only allows the extremists to dominate the political discourse.

“The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Is Central to the Militants' Cause”

Wrong. Televised images of Israeli troops violently repressing Palestinian protesters in the occupied territories certainly reinforce the militants' key message that the lands of Islam are under attack and that all Muslims must rise up and fight. However, although a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would help alleviate political tensions in the region, it would not end the threat of militant Islam.

The roots of contemporary Sunni Islamic militancy cannot be reduced to any single, albeit thorny, problem. Militants feel the umma is under attack. In their view, Israel is merely the West's most obvious outpost—as it was when it became a Crusader kingdom in the 12th century. If the Jewish state disappeared, the Islamists would still fight in Chechnya, Kashmir, Egypt, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, and Algeria. Their agenda is typically determined by local grievances, often with lengthy histories. For instance, although bin Laden was already calling for a boycott of U.S. goods to protest support for Israel in the late 1980s, he had never been involved in an attack on an Israeli target until recently. His primary focus has always been to topple the regime in his homeland of Saudi Arabia. Likewise, Zawahiri's lengthy 2002 book, Knights Under the Prophet's Banner—part autobiography, part militant manifesto, which first appeared in serial form in 2001—focuses almost exclusively on the author's native Egypt.

Moreover, considerable support for the Islamic cause stems from Muslims' sense of humiliation. A two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which would still leave the “Zionist entity” intact, would therefore offer little succor to the wounded pride of any committed militant or, more crucial, to the pride of those in the wider community who support and legitimize extremism and violence.

“Sort Out Saudi Arabia and the Whole Problem Will Disappear”

No. Saudi Arabia has contributed significantly to the spread of radicalism through the government-subsidized export of its Wahhabist strand of hard-line Islam. This policy arose from the turmoil of the late 1970s, when outrage over government corruption and the royal family's decadence prompted hundreds of Islamic radicals to occupy the Grand Mosque in Mecca. The 1978-79 Shiite revolution in Iran threatened Saudi leadership in the Muslim world and offered a cautionary tale of the fate that could await the House of Saud. In an effort to appeal to religious conservatives and counter the Iranian regime, the royal family gave the Wahhabi clerics more influence at home and a mandate to expand their ideology abroad.

Since then, Saudi money disbursed through quasi-governmental organizations such as the Muslim World League has built hundreds of mosques throughout the world. The Saudis provide hard-line clerics with stipends and offer financial incentives to those who forsake previous patterns of worship. In Pakistan, money from the Persian Gulf has funded the massive expansion of madrasas (Islamic schools) that indoctrinate young students with virulent, anti-Western dogma. This Saudi-funded proselytism has enormously damaged long-standing tolerant and pluralist traditions of Islamic observance in East and West Africa, the Far East, and Central Asia. Wahhabism was virtually unknown in northern Iraq until a massive push by Gulf-based missionaries in the early 1990s. And many of the mosques known for radical activity in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Canada were built with donations from private and state sources in Saudi Arabia.

The inequities of the Saudi system—in which most people are very poor and ruled by a super-rich clique—continues to create a sense of disenfranchisement that allows extremism to flourish. Many of the most militant preachers (and some of the Saudi hijackers who perpetrated the September 11 terrorist attacks) come from marginalized tribes and provinces. A more inclusive style of government and a more just redistribution of resources would undercut the legitimacy of local militants and deny radicals new recruits. Yet, while such reforms might slow the spread of Wahhabism and associated strands outside Saudi Arabia, in much of the world the damage has already been done. As with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Saudi Arabia is one of the many causes of modern Islamic militancy, but it has no monopoly on blame.

“It Is Only a Matter of Time Before Islamic Militants Use Weapons of Mass Destruction”

Calm down. Although Islamic militants (including bin Laden) have attempted to develop a basic chemical or biological arsenal, those efforts have been largely unsuccessful due to the technical difficulty of creating, let alone weaponizing, such materials. As one of the first journalists to enter the research facilities at the Darunta camp in eastern Afghanistan in 2001, I was struck by how crude they were. The Ansar al-Islam terrorist group's alleged chemical weapons factory in northern Iraq, which I inspected the day after its capture in 2003, was even more rudimentary. Alleged attempts by a British group to develop ricin poison, but for the apparent seriousness of the intent, could be dismissed as farcical.

Nor is there any compelling evidence that militants have come close to creating a “dirty bomb” (a conventional explosive packaged with radioactive material). The claim that Jose Padilla, an alleged al Qaeda operative arrested in the United States in 2002, had intended to deploy a dirty bomb has been largely discounted—it was an aspiration rather than a practical plan. Constructing a dirty bomb is more difficult than most imagine. Although the International Atomic Energy Agency warns that more than 100 countries have inadequate control of radioactive material, only a small percentage of that material is lethal enough to cause serious harm. It also requires considerable technical sophistication to build a device that can effectively disperse radioactive material. Some have also voiced the fear that militants might obtain a “prepackaged” working nuclear warhead from Pakistan. However, that would only be a plausible scenario if an Islamic regime came to power, or if high-ranking elements of the Pakistani military developed greater sympathy for the Islamists than currently exists.

The 1995 Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack in Japan highlights the difficulties terrorist groups face in deploying weapons of mass destruction. Despite possessing sophisticated research facilities funded by an estimated $1 billion in assets, the group failed nine times to launch a successful attack prior to the incident in the Tokyo subway system. (Even then, the fatalities were mercifully limited to a dozen people.) Confronted with such constraints, Islamic militants are far more likely to use conventional bombs or employ conventional devices in imaginative ways—as was the case with the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States and the March 11, 2004, train bombings in Spain.

“The West Is Winning the War on Terror”

Unfortunately, no. The military component of the war on terrorism has had some significant success. A high proportion of those who associated with bin Laden between 1996 and 2001 are now either dead or in prison. Bin Laden's own ability to commission and instigate terror attacks has been severely curtailed. Enhanced cooperation between intelligence organizations around the world and increased security budgets have made it much harder for terrorists to move their funds across borders or to successfully organize and execute attacks.

However, if countries are to win the war on terror, they must eradicate enemies without creating new ones. They also need to deny those militants with whom negotiation is impossible the support of local populations. Such support assists and, in the minds of the militants, morally legitimizes their actions. If Western countries are to succeed, they must marry the hard component of military force to the soft component of cultural appeal. There is nothing weak about this approach. As any senior military officer with experience in counterinsurgency warfare will tell you, it makes good sense. The invasion of Iraq, though entirely justifiable from a humanitarian perspective, has made this task more pressing.

Bin Laden is a propagandist, directing his efforts at attracting those Muslims who have hitherto shunned his extremist message. He knows that only through mass participation in his project will he have any chance of success. His worldview is receiving immeasurably more support around the globe than it was two years ago, let alone 15 years ago when he began serious campaigning. The objective of Western countries is to eliminate the threat of terror, or at least to manage it in a way that does not seriously impinge on the daily lives of its citizens. Bin Laden's aim is to radicalize and mobilize. He is closer to achieving his goals than the West is to deterring him.

Jason Burke is chief reporter for Britain's Observer and author of Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2003).

Copyright © 2004 Foreign Policy

B.D. Not Only Has Hair, But It's Gray At The Temples!

B. D. has been a Doonesbury character from the beginning (1968). However, he has never been without a helmet until now. If this is (fair & balanced) astonishment, so be it.

Copyright © 2004 Garry Trudeau

The Best TV Series You Never Saw

I stopped watching network (NBC, CBS, ABC) TV in 2001 or so. While I was in the final days of viewing network offerings, I was a fan of a little-watched and canceled mid-season show: "Freaks and Geeks." The reissue of those shows on DVD is tempting. Ruth Franklin of the New Republic claims that "Freaks and Geeks" is a rare TV series that merits repeat viewing. If this is (fair & balanced) nostalgia for geekdom, so be it.

[x TNR Online]
Revenge of the Nerds
by Ruth Franklin

When John Donne wrote that "humiliation is the beginning of sanctification," he wasn't talking about high school. But it's hard to think of a better credo for "Freaks and Geeks," the agonizingly honest television show about angst-riddled American teenagers that had a brief run on NBC five years ago. Set in a suburban Michigan public school in 1980, the show tracks 16-year-old Lindsay Weir, a brainy former "Mathlete" trying to win acceptance by the freaks (burnouts who listen to hard rock and hang out on the smokers' patio), and her brother, Sam, a freshman who just wants to get through each school day with some portion of his pride intact. Though "Freaks and Geeks" originally ran for less than a season, followed by a brief reappearance on cable, it generated sufficient enthusiasm to make "cult following" an understatement. (I confess to having bought, via eBay, a complete set of bootleg tapes of the show.)

For a while it looked like "Freaks and Geeks" was gone for good: As Judd Apatow, one of the producers, put it, "Try convincing someone that a program that very few people watched on TV will become a blockbuster on video." But this week all 18 episodes were finally reissued on DVD, which might actually be the perfect format for "Freaks and Geeks"--the rare TV show that benefits from repeated watching. That's partly because of its complexity: Though the show isn't overly intellectual, its character development and story progression are unusually sophisticated. But it's also because on first viewing, many of the episodes are simply too painful to be enjoyable. Critics may have called "Freaks and Geeks" a "warts-and-all" depiction of high school, but it's more like a case of melanoma.

Humiliation is hardly unique to "Freaks and Geeks"--it's the basis, of course, of reality TV, to which millions still tune in to watch people get booted off the island or dissed by Donald Trump. But while the producers of such shows go to great lengths to make the participants look like everymen, no one identifies with the women competing for "Joe Millionaire" or the contestants imprisoned on "Big Brother." The thrill we get from these programs is a form of schadenfreude, condescension's uglier sibling--and that emotion, unlike pity, can only be directed at others. But there's no joy, sadistic or otherwise, in seeing people you care about--not to mention yourself--get hurt. And that's exactly what happens on "Freaks and Geeks." As Paul Feig, one of the show's creators, said of Sam, "I'm making him relive the horrible things that happened to me."

From The Breakfast Club to "Saved by the Bell," pop-culture depictions of high school have generally foundered in cliché. But from the start "Freaks and Geeks" was admirably free of caricature. In one early episode, Daniel, the leader of the freaks, convinces Lindsay to help him cheat on a test, delivering a teary monologue about how his teachers marked him for failure early on--"How do you think it feels to be told you're dumb when you're eleven years old?" There's something suspiciously rehearsed about this speech, but we don't find out for sure until the last scene. Confronted by the math teacher and the guidance counselor, Daniel is called on to vindicate himself by completing a single problem from the test. He scribbles furiously for a minute--will he be able to stick it to the adults? But this is as close to real life as television comes, and so what Daniel is writing turns out to be not the correct answer but the Led Zeppelin logo. Boxed into a corner, he delivers the same speech again, verbatim. The adults are visibly moved, but Lindsay bursts into hysterical laughter.

Since this is a show about high school, much of it has to do with the beauty and terror of teenage love. But even the episodes tracking Lindsay's evolving relationship with Daniel's friend Nick, one of the show's most endearing characters, are largely cliché-free. Nick is a classic romantic who dreams of becoming a drummer like his idols Jon Bonham (of Led Zeppelin) and Neil Peart (of Rush), practicing on his 29-piece kit with an illuminated disco ball and dry ice for atmosphere. He approaches his love for Lindsay with similarly cheesy exuberance: At one point he ushers her into his candle-strewn basement and intones Styx's "Lady," complete with dramatic hand gestures. Meanwhile, Sam (who is 14 but looks more like 12) pines for cheerleader Cindy Sanders, a good six inches taller than he. At homecoming, he finally works up the courage to ask her for a dance, but as he leads her onto the floor, the song's tempo (Styx again--"Come Sail Away") suddenly changes from slow to fast. Sam's face can't conceal his surprise and consternation, but soon he realizes that he is, after all, dancing with the girl he likes, and as the camera zooms out they are spinning sweetly together. (The show's creators put a lot of love into the 80s period details, from the perfectly tuned soundtrack to the board games and TV programs often visible in the background of shots.)

Sam emerges from this incident with his innocence largely intact. But it doesn't stay that way for long. The death of childhood is the show's true subject, and the source of its deepest pain. In one of the more heartbreaking moments, Sam's friend Neal, who suspects that his father is cheating on his mother, finds another house's garage-door opener beneath his father's seat. As night falls, he is still riding his bike through the neighborhood, clicking at each door in search of his father's car. Bill, another of Sam's friends, might win the show's award for most persecuted character: Over the course of just a few episodes, a bully sneaks a peanut into his lunch, putting him in a coma, and his mother starts dating his gym teacher, witness to his daily torments by more athletic classmates. (The gym class scenes--Sam's clothes stolen in the locker room, a dodge-ball game that turns into a survival of the fittest--may be the show's epicenter of humiliation.) The freaks, too, get their share of torture, especially Kim, Daniel's girlfriend, who endures a home life so wretched that NBC initially refused to show the episode that depicts it.

The writers did their best to be true to the yin and yang of the show's title, but their hearts were clearly with the geeks. The result is that the freaks feel a little less true-to-life. In the final episode, for instance, Daniel spends a happy evening playing Dungeons and Dragons with Sam and his friends. The subtext is believable enough--one of the show's main themes is that the line between freak and geek is more porous than it appears. But it strains credulity to imagine Daniel even sitting at the same table as these kids, much less laughing with them over a can of diet Faygo.

These sour notes occur more than once in the last few episodes, in which a new theme starts to emerge: the redemption of geekdom. During a game of "Seven Minutes in Heaven," the beautiful head cheerleader grabs Bill and French-kisses him. One of the bullies confesses his secret desire to accompany the geeks to the science-fiction convention. Even Lindsay turns her attention to Neal's older brother Barry, a college student who is really just a grown-up geek. Why the shift? The show's low ratings seem to have had something to do with it. "I love the characters," Garth Ancier, NBC's president for entertainment, was quoted as saying in a New York Times piece about the show that ran in January 2000, just as "Freaks and Geeks" was moved from its original slot--8 p.m. on Saturday night--to one where it might have more of a chance. "I just want them to have less depressing lives. We felt they needed one decent-sized victory per episode."

This new direction might indeed have saved "Freaks and Geeks"--we'll never know, because the show was killed after episode 13, in which Lindsay smokes pot for the first time. ("Man, no wonder we got cancelled," Apatow writes in the DVD liner notes.) The happy endings do make the show a bit less excruciating to watch. But they contradict the very spirit that makes it so original. If Feig and Apatow had stayed true to their vision rather than trying to fit in, at least "Freaks and Geeks" would have been spared one last humiliation.

Ruth Franklin is a senior editor at TNR.

Copyright © 2003, The New Republic

Bushworld? + Doonesbury's Take On W As Constitutional Scholar

What a Sunday! The Cobra (Maureen Dowd) takes us on a tour of Bushworld and Garry Trudeau takes on W's constitutional nonsense. If this is (fair & balanced) sublime punditry, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
The Orwellian Olsens
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

It's their reality. We just live and die in it.

In Bushworld, our troops go to war and get killed, but you never see the bodies coming home.

In Bushworld, flag-draped remains of the fallen are important to revere and show the nation, but only in political ads hawking the president's leadership against terror.

In Bushworld, we can create an exciting Iraqi democracy as long as it doesn't control its own military, pass any laws or have any power.

In Bushworld, we can win over Falluja by bulldozing it.

In Bushworld, it was worth going to war so Iraqis can express their feelings ("Down With America!") without having their tongues cut out, although we cannot yet allow them to express intemperate feelings in newspapers ("Down With America!") without shutting them down.

In Bushworld, it's fine to take $700 million that Congress provided for the war in Afghanistan and 9/11 recovery and divert it to the war in Iraq that you're insisting you're not planning.

In Bushworld, you don't consult your father, the expert in being president during a war with Iraq, but you do talk to your Higher Father, who can't talk back to warn you to get an exit strategy or chide you for using Him for political purposes.

In Bushworld, it's O.K. to run for re-election as the avenger of 9/11, even as you make secret deals with the Arab kingdom where most of the 9/11 hijackers came from.

In Bushworld, you get to strut around like a tough military guy and paint your rival as a chicken hawk, even though he's the one who won medals in combat and was praised by his superior officers for fulfilling all his obligations.

In Bushworld, it makes sense to press for transparency in Mr. and Mrs. Rival while cultivating your own opacity.

In Bushworld, you can reign as the antiterror president even after hearing an intelligence report about Al Qaeda's plans to attack America and then stepping outside to clear brush.

In Bushworld, those who dissemble about the troops and money it will take to get Iraq on its feet are patriots, while those who are honest are patronizingly marginalized.

In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq, even as they increasingly merge the two in America.

In Bushworld, you can claim to be the environmental president on Earth Day while being the industry president every other day.

In Bushworld, you brag about how well Afghanistan is going, even though soldiers like Pat Tillman are still dying and the Taliban are running freely around the border areas, hiding Osama and delaying elections.

In Bushworld, imperfect intelligence is good enough to knock over Iraq. But even better evidence that North Korea is building the weapons that Saddam could only dream about is hidden away.

In Bushworld, the C.I.A. says it can't find out whether there are W.M.D. in Iraq unless we invade on the grounds that there are W.M.D.

In Bushworld, there's no irony that so many who did so much to avoid the Vietnam draft have now strained the military so much that lawmakers are talking about bringing back the draft.

In Bushworld, we're making progress in the war on terror by fighting a war that creates terrorists.

In Bushworld, you don't need to bother asking your vice president and top Defense Department officials whether you should go to war in Iraq, because they've already maneuvered you into going to war.

In Bushworld, it's perfectly natural for the president and vice president to appear before the 9/11 commission like the Olsen twins.

In Bushworld, you expound on remaking the Middle East and spreading pro-American sentiments even as you expand anti-American sentiments by ineptly occupying Iraq and unstintingly backing Ariel Sharon on West Bank settlements.

In Bushworld, we went to war to give Iraq a democratic process, yet we disdain the democratic process that causes allies to pull out troops.

In Bushworld, you pride yourself on the fact that your administration does not leak to the press, while you flood the best-known journalist in Washington with inside information.

In Bushworld, you list Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack" as recommended reading on your campaign Web site, even though it makes you seem divorced from reality. That is, unless you live in Bushworld.

Copyright © 2004 The New York Times Company



Copyright © 2004 Garry Trudeau

Doonesbury Arouses Hypocrisy In Alaska, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Minnesota

B.D.'s discovery of his amputed leg was accompanied by the expletive, son of a BITCH! Eleven fishwraps across the country complained to Doonesbury's distributor and the AP reported that newspapers had pulled the strip, moved it from the comics section to the editorial page (where it resides in the Amarillo fishwrap), or edited the expletive. W can call a NYTimes reporter a world-class son of a bitch on a live microphone during a political rally and none of these journalistic guardians of family values raised a whimper. Garry Trudeau portrays an honest reaction by an amputee and look what happens. Well, W (and his war) is a world-class son of a bitch. However, Millie wouldn't have him. If this is (fair & balanced) obscenity (not profanity), so be it.

[x AP]
Some Newspapers Pull Doonesbury Cartoon
By ELIZABETH McKINLEY, Associated Press Writer

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - A few newspapers around the country edited Friday's "Doonesbury" comic strip to remove an expletive used by a character injured while fighting in Iraq, and at least two newspapers pulled the strip altogether.

In a story line that began Monday, B.D., a football coach-turned-soldier, lost a leg after being reactivated in the Army at the end of 2002.

In Friday's strip, his doctor explains how amputees go through a grieving process that starts with denial, followed by anger.

In the final panel, B.D. curses from behind a hospital curtain, skipping the denial.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning comic strip written by Garry Trudeau appears in 1,400 newspapers nationwide. The Anchorage Daily News declined to run the strip, instead publishing a note saying the comic "contained an unnecessary profanity."

The (Nashville) Tennessean also declined to run the comic. Editor Frank Sutherland said in a column that it uses language "we consider inappropriate for newspaper use."

The Green Bay News-Chronicle in Wisconsin edited out the mild expletive.

"I'd have a hard time printing that phrase as a direct quote in a news story, let alone as part of a piece of fiction on the comics page in big, bold letters," editor Tom Brooker wrote in a story published Friday.

The phrase was, "Son of a bitch!"

The Beacon Journal in Akron, Ohio, also removed the expletive.

"Context is everything," managing editor Mike Burbach said in an article explaining his decision. "In the Beacon Journal, 'Doonesbury' runs on the comics page. In that context, we decided it was best to bleep out the bad word."

The Duluth (Minn.) News Tribune ran the strip on its editorial page instead of the comics section, and said the move would be permanent.

The strip's distributor, Kansas City-based Universal Press Syndicate, said newspapers weren't contractually allowed to edit the strip, and the syndicate said it planned to contact those that did.

"I don't know what will happen," said Kathie Kerr, a spokesman for Universal Press. "It may just be a heads up just to refresh their memory about the protocol."

Kerr said 11 newspapers had called Universal to talk about the strip. She said she knew of two papers that were not going to print Friday's installment but declined to name them. Newspapers are not required to inform the syndicate when they pull a comic strip.

Trudeau said he started the story line to illustrate the sacrifices American soldiers are making.

"We are at war, and we can't lose sight of the hardships war inflicts on individual lives," said Trudeau, who began writing "Doonesbury" in 1968 while a student at Yale University.

The strip has a history of addressing controversial topics.

Just before the 2000 presidential election, at least two newspapers pulled an installment that accused George W. Bush of cocaine abuse. In February 1998, at least four newspapers refused to run strips about accusations that President Clinton had sex with a White House intern.

Copyright © 2004 Associated Press

B. D. Update and Pat Tillman, RIP

B.D. expresses it just right: son of a BITCH! The news just broke that Pat Tillman—who left the Arizona Cardinals of the NFL for the Army Rangers in Afghanistan—was a casualty in recent fighting against the Taliban fighters. Tillman walked away from a $3.6 million contract to join the Army and pursue assignment to the Rangers. He was among the 35% who succeed. If this (fair & balanced) sorrow, so be it.



Copyright © 2004 Garry Trudeau

The Kinkster Goes To Hanoi; Baghdad Next?

The Radical Right is trying to link John Kerry with Jane Fonda. Opposition to the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time=Treason. The Kinkster needs to go to Baghdad next. Perhaps the Kinkster could take W with him? W needs to go to Fallujah for a first-hand look at the situation since he doesn't read newspapers (or his PNB). If this is (fair & balanced) Treason, so be it.

[x Texas Monthly]
Let Saigons Be Bygones
by Richard (Kinky) Friedman

Thirty-five years ago, I refused to let my government send me to Vietnam. So why did I finally go? Because my kid sister asked me to.

WHY DID I GO TO VIETNAM recently when I refused to 35 years ago? The answer is that this time I was going to visit my sister, Marcie. Another answer to that good question is that Vietnam was a bad war. In the late sixties I'd been in the Peace Corps in Borneo helping people who wore conical hats and worked with water buffalo in rice paddies. When I returned to the good ol' USA, I found myself in the basement thinkin' 'bout the government. They wanted to send me back over to Asia to kill the same people. It was unconscionable, I told them. It wasn't even cost-effective. Neither argument, however, seemed to cut much ice with the draft board. I had to trot out a phalanx of rabbis and shrinks to confirm my insanity and thereby, perhaps quite literally, dodge the bullet.

But that was then and this is now. People in both the East and the West long ago decided to let Saigons be bygones. My own kid sister is currently, in fact, the head of the American Red Cross in Vietnam. Marcie has been based in Hanoi for several years and is in love with the culture and the people. "You won't believe it," she told me. "It's a country of eighty million people with no Christians, no Jews, no Muslims, no Starbucks, no McDonald's, and no Burger Kings. It's paradise!" So a few months ago I went to Vietnam to visit her. And guess what? She wasn't wrong.

Vietnam is halfway around the world from the sign in front of the Kerrville church that used to read "Jesus Is Our Quarterback." If you travel west you can get to the East in roughly 24 hours. That gave me a lot of time to think about Marcie, who's sixteen years younger than I, though we've always been close. I've watched with pride as she's developed into what she humorously refers to as a "professional do-gooder." She grew up in Austin, attended Yale and Berkeley, and came within a tadpole of being a Ph.D. in biology before jumping species and deciding to devote her efforts to that most troublesome and needy of all living creatures, the human being.

Soon Marcie was heading up disaster-relief teams in Nicaragua, after torrential flooding; in Kauai, after Hurricane Iniki; and in Turkey, after a series of devastating earthquakes. She has traveled and lived in places like China, Mexico, Australia, and Easter Island. Marcie also spent several years in Washington as a senior program manager at the Red Cross and seven summers directing our family's summer camp, Echo Hill Ranch, with our father. By the time I visited her in Hanoi, she already had a large, colorful group of friends and colleagues. I didn't have to make new friends; I just borrowed hers.

One friend, Professor Nguyen Trong Nhan, a former Vietnamese minister of health, grew up watching old Hollywood cowboy movies. He said it had broken his heart to know that the American cowboy was fighting on the other side. Another friend, Larry Holtzman, had been a Peace Corps volunteer in Liberia when JFK was assassinated and was now busy dispensing contraceptives throughout Vietnam. I told him it was probably an easier gig than it would be in the States. "One nation under what's-his-name?" he said. Dr. Le Cao Dai had been a legendary Viet Cong hospital commander. His name has many meanings, depending on inflection and tonality; thus it was that a Swedish social worker followed the revered man around for seven years calling him Dr. Urine. Mr. Phan Thanh Hai works for the Danang Red Cross. When Marcie and I saw signs everywhere that read "March 29," we asked Mr. Hai what was up. Merely stating historical fact, he said, "That's the day we defeated the running dogs of American imperialism." Then there was Marcie's friend who owned a sugar factory and named his small boy Ice Cream.

The children of Vietnam are among the most attractive and charming in the world. They are bright, friendly, and inquisitive, and they often call out to American strangers like shy little birds singing, "Hen-no," which, of course, is how they pronounce "hello." Marcie has a special bond with these children: She recently helped procure, through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, an $8 million soy milk program for the country's schools—the largest American Red Cross package of its kind in Southeast Asia.

Hanoi itself is a magical, ancient city currently inhabited by three million people, three million cell phones, and three million motorbikes. Throw some cars, bicycles, and rickshaws into the soup, and crossing the street becomes a Zen exercise. There are almost no traffic lights, signals, or lanes, so you must walk very slowly and confidently, allowing the motorbikes to zip by from both directions on either side of you. Whatever you do, once you've committed to crossing the street, you mustn't stop. If you freeze in the middle, they can't tell which way you're going to jump.

The Vietnamese people are intelligent, kindhearted, and industrious and, as Marcie says, "the very last people on earth with whom we should have gone to war." The Vietnamese like Americans; we are merely a footnote in their long history. They don't seem to carry grudges, even when perhaps they should—e.g. Agent Orange. I walked with Marcie on China Beach, in Danang, a long, lovely, nearly deserted stretch of sandy, scenic shoreline. It was hard to believe that the 300,000 American GI's who had once been garrisoned here had left almost no footprints in the sand. (For a brief time, Marcie thought about putting a message on the answering machine at her office saying, "Welcome to the American Red Cross office in Hanoi. We apologize for our thirty-year disruption in service.")

As I left Vietnam, oddly enough, I thought of the cheerful taxi driver who'd taken me to the Honolulu airport for the flight over. She'd been born in Saigon, and she'd never been to Hanoi. But her father had spent twenty years there in a re-education camp after the war. As a child she'd drifted with the boat people on a horrifying journey to Malaysia, the Philippines, and finally, Hawaii. Did she like it here? I asked. "I love America," she said.

So it is with all wars: Some will die, some will be heroes, some will be liberated, and some are still not free. The only thing we can be sure of is that nobody ever really wins.

Copyright © 2004 Texas Monthly Magazine

Doonesbury Brought Iraq Home To Me

John (Chuckie) Manzanares was a childhood playmate in Lafayette, CO. He died in Vietnam and I found his name on the Wall of the Vietnam Memorial in DC. Tom Casteen and I would have been in the same Marine Platoon Leaders' Class at Quantico and I found his name on the Wall. Stanley McPherson was an acquaintance in Hobbs, NM and I found his name on the Wall. Now, when I read Doonesbury from Monday, April 19, 2004, onward, Garry Trudeau punched me in the gut. The past four Doonesbury episodes are below. Parents should exercise discretion due to graphic violence.

Monday, April 19, 2004


Tuesday, April 20, 2004


Wednesday, April 21, 2004


Thursday, April 22, 2004

Who Are These People?

B.D.

College football star, Vietnam Vet, third-string quarterback for the Rams, Gulf War reservist, California Highway Patrol officer -- B.D. has worn many helmets o ver the years. He and his wife, starlet Barbara Ann Boopstein, share many memories of the 70s and their years at Walden Commune -- she posing for Playboy , he volunteering for Vietnam to get out of writing a term paper. Though captured by a Vietcong terrorist named Phred and wounded by a beer can, B.D. left the Nam relatively unscathed.

In his subsequent role as Boopsie's hardheaded Hollywood manager, B.D. exhibited minor skills and major attitude, a combination that did not help extend her list of credits. Their main production was Samantha, born in 1992. Better suited to life in uniform, B.D. was called to serve in Desert Storm, and later as a CHIP officer, but a diagnosis of Gulf War Syndrome left him sidelined and bitter.

A return to Vietnam helped him bury old demons and dig up several old war buddies - including Phred, now a mover and shaker in the new Vietnam. Hired by his alma mater to coach the football team he once quarterbacked, B.D. has come full circle, he and Boopsie once again living in the house at Walden where they first met.

Reactivated for a second Gulf War, B.D. was shipped out to Kuwait, leaving the Fighting Swooshes in Acting-Coach Boopsie's care. He serves as a public affairs officer at Camp Blowback, embedding journalists in frontline army combat units.

The noncom in these panels is B.D.'s buddy from Gulf War I: Ray. Ray is an unsentimental African-American and counterfoil to B.D., but he is committed to his comrade in arms. By the way, Trudeau started Doonesbury in the Yale campus newspaper and the football star at Yale at that time was Brian Dowling (note the initials). If this is (fair & balanced) shock, so be it.

All contents copyright © 2004 Garry Trudeau.

2-Year College Open Admissions Policies Are A Fraud

Just yesterday, the Amarillo fishwrap ran a story about the demographic tsunami that is poised to hit Texas higher education this fall. The grandchildren of the Baby Boomers will be freshman in 2004. The solution? 4-year institutions will raise admission requirements. Why, West Texas A&M University (just down the road from Amarillo) will require students to present an SAT score of 950! They might as well hold a mirror under the nose of each applicant for admission. If the mirror is fogged, let 'em in. The 2-year institutions in the area: Amarillo College (my former institution), Frank Phillips College in Borger (50 miles northeast of Amarillo) proclaimed themselves unconcerned about the admissions tsunami. Both schools are open-admissions institutions and both are on the AAUP Censure List; birds of a feather. Well, I am NOT a believer in open admissions. Never have been. I have been a square peg in a round hole for an entire career in higher education. Thank goodness for James Rosenbaum. Why do 2-year colleges in Texas perpetrate academic fraud? State funding is tied to enrollment. Follow the money. If this is (fair & balanced) muckraking, so be it.

[x American Educator]
It's Time To Tell the Kids: If You Don't Do Well in High School, You Won't Do Well in College (or on the Job)

By James E. Rosenbaum

Every year I ask my college class how many students have seen a high school teacher cry, and most students raise their hands. When I ask what provoked the crying, most stories are about teachers who threaten to give students bad grades and students who do not care. When I ask my colleagues the same question about their high school teachers from one or two generations ago, virtually none can recall such tears. This is not a systematic survey, but it suggests a big change.

Today, nearly all high school seniors believe that they are going to college--and that bad grades won’t stop them. They are right: With the dramatic increase in open admissions colleges, it is true that they can go.

But as I report in my recent book Beyond College for All, students who perform poorly in high school probably won’t graduate from college--many won’t even make it beyond remedial courses. High enrollment rates and low graduation rates are well-known facts of life in most open admissions and less selective colleges (both two- and four-year). The tight connection between high school preparation (in terms of both the rigor of courses taken and grades received) and college completion are well known to statisticians, researchers, and policymakers who follow such matters.

But research suggests that students still do not understand this connection. Consider the following: Seventy-one percent of the class of 1982 planned to get a college degree. Ten years later, 63.9 percent of those with A averages had attained an A.A. degree or higher, but only 13.9 percent of those with C averages (or lower) had done so (Rosenbaum, 1998, 2001). (In a more recent cohort [the class of 1992], students with C averages or lower fared a little better; 20.9 percent attained an A.A. degree or higher within eight years of graduating from high school [Rosenbaum and Gordon-McKeon, 2003]). As of 1992, 84 percent of high school seniors planned to get a college degree (NELS, 1992); but data from the high school classes of 1972, 1982, and 1992 tell us that only 45 to 49 percent of students who enter college and earn more than 10 credits actually earn a bachelor's degree--many even fail to earn 10 credits (Adelman, 2004). For students with high school averages of C or lower, the chances that they will earn even one college credit are less than 50-50 (Rosenbaum, 2001). Do your students know that? Do your colleagues? Did you know that?

Despite the availability of open admissions institutions and increased student aspirations for college degrees--factors that increase college enrollment--the easiest-to-use predictor of a student’s likelihood of graduating from a two- or four-year college is still his or her high school grade point average.* Although any single grade is imperfect, when averaged over a high school career, the grade point average is an excellent predictor of how a student will do in college. This has always been true and there is no reason to expect it to change. Unfortunately, our well-intentioned efforts to encourage all students to go to college regardless of their grades inadvertently gives them the impression that high school grades don’t matter.

In this article, we will look at the facts, indeed the tragedy, behind the façade of widespread college entry--and at what we can do to change the picture, either by increasing the odds that college enrollment will lead to college graduation or by helping students find more productive, successful post-high school paths.

New Dreams, New Misconceptions
The past 40 years brought three radical social transformations that together have dramatically increased the percentage of students who want to attend college. First, the earnings advantage of college graduates has grown (Grubb, 1996). Second, college--especially community college (a minor factor in the prior generation)--has become much more accessible. In the past four decades, while enrollments at four-year colleges doubled, enrollments increased five-fold at community colleges (NCES, 1999). Third, and perhaps most remarkably, virtually all community colleges adopted a revolutionary policy of open admissions. Unlike many four-year colleges, virtually all two-year colleges opened their doors to admit all interested high school graduates, regardless of students’ prior academic achievement. Even high school graduates with barely passing grades are routinely welcomed because almost all two-year colleges offer a wide array of remedial courses. Indeed, in many cases, students do not even have to be high school graduates because most two-year colleges offer these students access to some non-credit courses, including GED courses.

These three transformations have dramatically altered the rules of college attendance and given students remarkable new opportunities. However, as with all revolutions, there are also unintended consequences. The revolutions spawned a set of myths--we’ll call them misconceptions--that combined to send a message to students: Don’t worry about high school grades or effort; you can still go to college and do fine. This message has not been sent to high achievers aiming for prestigious colleges, where grades and scores matter--and the students headed there know it. But it is the message that students who know little about college have received--particularly those whose parents did not go to college. These students (and their parents) are being misled with disastrous consequences. Their motivation to work hard in high school is sapped; their time to prepare for college is wasted; their college savings are eaten up by remedial courses that they could have taken for free in high school; and their chances of earning a college degree are greatly diminished. Further, the effect on many colleges has been to alter their mission and lower their standards.

This article reviews some of the misconceptions spawned by these three revolutions and rebuts them--and considers how schools can mitigate the terrible impact these misconceptions are having on individual students and, inevitably, on the overall school environment.

Misconception 1: College success is not linked to high school preparation.
A national survey (NELS, 1992) found that 84 percent of high school seniors in the class of 1992 planned to get a two- or four-year college degree. Even students with bad grades, low test scores, and poor high-school attendance planned to complete a college degree. Attaining a college degree can be difficult even for students who have worked hard and done well in high school; for those who haven’t, it is nearly impossible. Look at the table below on grades and college completion for the class of 1982. On average, 37.7 percent of seniors with college plans earned a two-year or higher degree. But low high school grades cut students’ chances markedly--only 13.9 percent of seniors with averages of C or lower completed college. For this 13.9 percent, open admissions at community colleges provided an extremely helpful second chance. However, for the vast majority of students, the other 86 percent, their second chance was only another experience of failure. Shouldn’t we tell the students: If you want to graduate from college, exert the effort and get good grades in high school?

Misconception 2: College plans lead to increased school effort.
It is often assumed that planning to go to college makes students more motivated, giving them reason to work hard in high school. Unfortunately, this is often not the case. For many decades, work-bound students believed that high school achievement would not influence their future careers (Stinchcombe, 1965), but now many college-bound students also hold this belief. In a survey of over 2,000 seniors in 12 urban and suburban high schools, researchers found that almost 40 percent of college-bound students believed that school effort had little relevance for their future careers (Rosenbaum, 1998; cf. Steinberg, 1996).

[TABLE]

Seniors with college plans (A.A. or higher) who complete an A.A. degree or higher within 10 years of HS graduation.

Average HS Grades	                     As	Bs        Cs or Lower	        All

% Attaining AA Degree or Higher         63.9	37.1	13.9	                37.7

% Not Attaining Any Degree	            36.1	62.9	86.1	                62.3

Seniors with college plans (A.A. or higher) who complete an A.A. degree or higher within 10 years of high school graduation. 

Source: Beyond College for All: High School and Beyond data.

Misconception 3: High school homework doesn’t matter for college success.
Since open admissions policies allow everyone to enter college, no matter how poorly they do in high school, some students report that they can wait until college to exert academic effort. But research shows that effort during high school is absolutely essential. Take homework, for example: Students doing no homework end up with 1.2 years less education and 19 percent lower earnings than average. Students doing 15 hours or more a week of homework attain almost 1.5 more years of education and attain 16 percent higher earnings than average. This 2.7-year spread in educational attainment and 35 percent spread in earnings are both extremely large (especially considering that these outcomes are associated with variation in self-reported homework time in high school).

Misconception 4: Going to college means taking college-level classes.
If you are taking classes in a college, are you taking college classes? Not necessarily. Many college students" are actually in remedial courses--high school-level classes (or even lower) that give no college credits (Deil-Amen and Rosenbaum, 2002). The best estimates of the extent of remedial education come from careful analyses of college transcripts from national samples of students in the classes of 1982 and 1992. From 1982 to 1992 there has been substantial improvement in the need for remediation among students entering four-year colleges. Forty-four percent of those from the class of 1982, but only 25 percent from the class of 1992 (still too many), took at least one remedial course. Unfortunately, there has not been a similar improvement among students entering two-year colleges. Sixty-three percent of those from the class of 1982, and 61 percent from the class of 1992, took at least one remedial course (Adelman, 2004). A more recent survey in two urban community colleges found that 25 percent of students were taking three or more remedial courses (Deil-Amen and Rosenbaum, 2002).

Moreover, in an effort to reduce students’ feelings of inferiority, college advisors often downplay the fact that courses are remedial. As a result, many students do not even realize the nature of their coursework. In one research survey, students were given a list of the colleges’ remedial courses, asked which ones they had taken and whether the courses counted toward a degree. From interviews with administrators, the researchers knew that none of these courses counted toward a degree. Unfortunately, most students did not (see chart below). Among first-year students taking three remedial courses, 36 percent reported that these courses counted, and another 48 percent were not sure. Even among second-year students taking three remedial courses, 36 percent believed the courses counted for college credit and 44 percent were unsure (Deil-Amen and Rosenbaum, 2002).

Misconception 5: Going to college for a two- or four-year degree takes two or four years.
How long does a two-year associate’s degree take? If you think the answer is obvious, you are wrong. At one community college, a top administrator confided that because of remedial needs, a "two-year associates degree" takes full-time students an average of 3.5 years to complete. Statistics like this are not widely known--with three serious implications. First, since the remedial courses often carry no credit, students who plan for two-year or four-year degrees discover that they cannot complete their degrees in the time they have scheduled or within the budget they have planned. Second, their failure to collect credits is exacerbated by the "secret" nature of the remedial courses; discovering after 1.5 years that you are still two years away from a two-year degree is not only demoralizing, but may present virtually insurmountable time and budget problems. Third, high school students heading toward college do not understand college remedial placements. They know that their older peers who graduated high school with poor grades went on to college--and they assume they can, as well. But most high school students probably do not realize that these "college students" are not accumulating college credits and are unlikely to graduate. This partial picture may encourage lax academic effort and college-for-all fantasies on the part of many high school students--maybe even on the part of school faculty. (These fantasies are fed by high school administrators who boast about the high percentage of students they send to college--but neglect to mention how few graduate. More on this later.)

Misconception 6: School counselors should not offer discouraging words about the hard work necessary for college success.
Given the widespread public belief in the misconceptions above, counselors rarely discourage college plans or suggest alternatives. A recent study in eight diverse urban and suburban high schools found that even if students had poor grades, school counselors did not dissuade them from attending college, nor did they warn students when they had poor chances of college success (Krei and Rosenbaum, 2001; Rosenbaum, Miller, and Krei, 1997). National data suggest that these practices are widespread. While only 32 percent of a national survey of seniors in 1982 indicated that their counselors urged them to go to college, 10 years later, fully 66 percent of seniors made the same statement (Boesel, 2001; Gray, 1996). Indeed, 57 percent of seniors in the bottom half of the academic rankings reported that counselors urged them to attend college.

In interviews we conducted with counselors, it was clear that counselors who do wish to warn students that they are unprepared for college believe that they lack the authority to do so (Rosenbaum et al., 1997). As one counselor said, "Who am I to burst their bubble?" At the same time, counselors report that when they warn students that they are unprepared for college, parents complain, and principals support the parents. Counselors are not sure they have the authority to be candid and to report that students are not well prepared for college. The following example, though just an anecdote, offers some sense of the pressures that counselors feel. A student with an IQ of 70 wanted to be a doctor, and although the counselor tried to explain the difficulties this student would face, he ultimately advised the student to attend "a two-year college first and see how it goes."

Clearly, some counselors do not feel free to give their professional opinions. If they are too candid, they can be accused of "low expectations," even if their concerns arise from students’ school records. When counselors fear they may have to pay for honestly explaining students’ future options, they back away from doing so. They not only yield to parents’ wishes, but they sometimes change their initial advice to avoid trouble. Many counselors report that they advise students with D-averages to attend a community college and later transfer to a four-year college. One student with a D-average wanted to apply to Harvard, so his counselor suggested that he could begin at community college and then look to transfer to Harvard after two years. The college-for-all mentality is a perfect way to avoid unpleasant issues that are likely to arise as students make plans for the future.

In the past, counselors often acted as "gatekeepers," advising low-achieving students on alternatives to college (Cicourel and Kitsuse, 1963; Rosenbaum, 1976), including providing advice about which non-college training options could lead to well-paid, respected occupations and even using their contacts to place non-college-bound students into respectable jobs. (For more information on the importance of high school for the non-college bound, see Sidebar: All Good Jobs Don't Require a College Degree....)

If heavy-handed gatekeeping by counselors has indeed become less common, no one will grieve its loss; only two generations ago, counselors often had a decisive, sometimes secretive, impact on which colleges students would apply and go to. But if counselors are not giving students the information they need about the requirements for completing college, then many students may be aimlessly drifting through high school and community colleges without any notion of what requirements they will have to meet to earn a degree. In that case, gatekeeping has not ended, it has only been deferred, and many students will haplessly find themselves failing out of college without any forewarning of what is happening. Today, many students are making college plans that are not likely to be realized. Parents, administrators, counselors, and teachers must work together to understand the connection between high school effort and college success--and to convey this reality to students. It should go without saying that counselors can’t take on this countercultural mission on their own. In the next article, high school staff can see what students need to know to be prepared for college; for distribution to students, a college fact sheet (What You Need To Do in High School If You Want To Graduate from College).

The New Rules of the Game
Beyond the negative effect that the college-for-all push has on individual students, there is the broader negative effect it has on high schools’ academic climate. Seeing that college access is guaranteed, some students believe that they can challenge teachers’ authority and suffer no penalty; some teachers may respond to their diminished authority by leaving the profession or by reducing their demands on students (Sedlak et al., 1986). While these changes have their greatest impact on low-achieving students, even high-achieving students will be in classes where teachers’ authority is questioned, and such students may wonder if they could prepare for college with less effort.

Those looking for justice may see it in the finding that unmotivated students will end up worse off--stuck with remedial classes, fewer college credits and degrees, and lower earnings. But this is not a happy ending. Students waste their high school years, disrupt high school for others, drag down the standards in high school, and force colleges to provide high school courses as an increasingly larger segment of their curriculum.

How can we improve the situation? Since the playing field has drastically changed in the world of higher education, new "rules of the game" have arisen. New high school practices must be established to match them. These new rules of college can be summarized succinctly:

All students can plan to get a college degree; but if they are unprepared, they must be willing to repeat high school courses in college, spending the extra time, money, and effort in non-credit, remedial courses.

All students can attend college, but low-achieving students should be warned about remedial courses and their own unlikely prospects for graduation.

College completion, as opposed to enrollment, requires increased high school effort. If students delay their academic effort until they get to college, the delay will make degree completion take longer, cost more, and be less likely.

Policies to improve students’ preparation for college do not remove a school’s obligation to provide students with information about their college prospects.

Students whose college prospects are dim should be provided good information about alternatives to college that can lead to a successful employment life. These students can also be informed about opportunities to attend college later in life.

School staff could play a critical role in providing information and resources to help students make choices that will support their own long-term goals before it is too late. Unfortunately, it seems that students are not getting this information, nor is there a clear mandate for high school counselors or teachers (or, for that matter, administrators) to give this advice. How could a better job be done in this area?

High schools should monitor and publicize the academic preparation and college completion rates of their college-bound graduates. It is common practice for high schools to trumpet the percentage of kids they send on to college--as if this were the major indicator of a high school’s success. Instead of focusing on just the number of seniors who go to college, high school administrators should monitor their graduates’ preparation for college-credit classes (through, for example, achievement test scores and success in the first year of college) and brag about that: College preparation, not college attendance, is the real achievement. They should also inform students about degree completion rates for prior graduates (by showing the percentage of students who earn college degrees broken down by grade point average, for example). In addition, high schools should provide information about various local colleges, including degree-completion rates and the average number of years students took to complete their degrees.

High schools should require students aiming for college to take modified college placement exams. Society needs to give students clear information about the achievement prerequisites for college courses. Since colleges already give tests to assess whether incoming freshmen are assigned to credit or remedial classes, one solution is relatively straightforward: These tests could be modified and given to high school students to tell them whether they are ready for college-level work. If colleges do not want to prepare a new test, they could recommend an existing one or simply give high schools the previous year’s freshman placement exams. These exams could be given to high school seniors, and a modified exam could be given to high school sophomores, to tell them whether they are making satisfactory progress toward college. If not, students must improve their achievement, revise their goals, or accept the fact that they will have to take remedial courses in college.

Having high school students take college placement exams may appear unnecessary since more and more states are developing high school exit exams. But in many states the high school exit exams were developed to assess minimum competence. So every year many students pass a high school exit exam, but then do poorly on a college placement exam and end up in remedial courses. According to a recent study that compared 66 state high school exams (35 in English and 31 in mathematics) to a set of standards for university success found that just three of them (all in English) could offer useful information about students’ preparation for college (Conley, 2003).

In 2000, Kentucky became the first state in the nation to pass a state law creating an online mathematics assessment developed specifically to let high school sophomores and juniors know if they are ready for college-level algebra and calculus. Called the Kentucky Early Mathematics Testing Program (KEMTP), the test assesses Algebra I, Geometry, and Algebra II and was developed by high school and college mathematics teachers from Kentucky. This purely diagnostic assessment does not become part of the high school transcript and is not used for admissions to college; it does give students (and their schools) immediate feedback on which topics they have--and have not--mastered and urges students to use the one to two years they have left in high school to address those weaknesses. (To learn more about KEMTP, go to www.mathclass.org/welcome-kemtp.htm.)

High schools should clear up the misconceptions. Counselors are the front line here, and they’ll need a lot of support. All school personnel should be well-armed with the facts and encouraged to convey them to students. And the facts are clear: High school performance matters. Hard work in high school matters. Doing homework matters. Taking rigorous courses matters. Getting good grades matters. All of these are closely connected to whether students succeed in college. (And, interestingly, they’re also closely connected to whether non-college bound students succeed in their jobs.) High schools should also make sure students are well informed about college remedial courses, specifically: These are the courses they will be enrolled in if their high school work is not up to snuff; these courses do not bear college credit; taking them amounts to paying for an education that could have been had for free in high school; and students who have to take several of them almost never reach college graduation. (The sidebar, What You Need To Do in High School If You Want To Graduate from College, is a student-friendly fact sheet on the importance of high school achievement for college.)

High schools should serve college- and work-bound students equally well. Teachers, counselors, and administrators dream of students working hard, doing well in school, and graduating from college. It is a wonderful dream--but that doesn’t mean it is in every student’s best interest. Those who haven’t done well academically and those whose interests are not in the liberal arts are best served with an honest look at their current chances in college and a serious examination of the alternatives, such as training opportunities and job placement assistance. The fact is, despite the economy’s growing preference for college degrees, there are many good jobs available to high school graduates. (For more information on the importance of high school for the non-college bound, see the sidebar All Good Jobs Don't Require a College Degree....) Postponing college is also a viable option. Many students enter college when they are older, often after several years of work. More than half of the students in two-year colleges are older than 24, and about one-quarter of them are over 35 (NCES 1999). Their age and employment may give them the experience to make better course choices, the maturity to be more disciplined students, skills that will help them pass some courses, and perhaps even employer-paid tuition benefits.

Too often, we think students’ problems are inside of them, and we blame students’ poor motivation. However, most students tend to be motivated if they see incentives for effort. But in the case of high school performance, we obscure what is at stake for most students. While top quartile students (those aiming for highly selective colleges) are told the incentives for better grades and test scores, the vast majority of students get the impression that high school achievement, grades, and test scores are irrelevant.

Students must realize that high school grades are important: Grades strongly predict future careers. There are strong incentives for school effort and students can improve their adult attainments by improving their high school grades. Although most colleges are not selective--and most unselective colleges (and most employers) ignore grades in selecting applicants--even unselective colleges and employers discover that youths with better high school grades are more successful in attaining college degrees and higher earnings.

The American educational system has taken a bold step in making college accessible to so many students. However, the revolution is still incomplete, and research has identified a number of difficulties in educators’, parents’, and students’ understandings of college and what it requires. This revolution poses new challenges and a set of unintended consequences. We will need thoughtful solutions to address them.

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James E. Rosenbaum is professor of sociology, education, and social policy at Northwestern University and a faculty fellow with the university's Institute for Policy Research. He is author of Beyond College for All: Career Paths for the Forgotten Half and Crossing the Class and Color Lines: From Public Housing to White Suburbia.

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* Grade point average is the easiest-to-use predictor of college success. Research by Clifford Adelman (1999), however, shows that the intensity and quality of one's high school curriculum is actually an even more powerful predictor. But since course content and teacher expectations vary widely from school to school, making use of this indicator can be difficult. Nonetheless, the gist of both Adelman's and my research is clear: College-bound students should take the most difficult courses possible and work hard to earn the highest grades possible. To read more about Adelman's findings, see High School Preparation Is the Best Predictor of College Graduation.

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References

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Adelman, C. (2004). Principal Indicators of Student Academic Histories in Postsecondary Education, 1972-2000. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education.

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Rosenbaum, J. E., Miller, S., and Krei, M. (1997). "What role should counselors have?" In K. K. Wong (Ed.), Advances in educational policy, (Volume 3, pp. 79-92). Greenwood, Conn.: JAI Press.

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