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Headless insurgency found in topless war

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Today’s lead item in the New York Times reports the following:

  American and Iraqi officials agree on the essential structure of the Iraqi insurgency: it is horizontal as opposed to hierarchical, and ad hoc as opposed to unified. They say this central characteristic, similar to that of terrorist organizations in Europe and Asia, is what is making the Iraqi insurgency so difficult to destroy. Attack any single part of it, and the rest carries on largely untouched. It cannot be decapitated, because the insurgency, for the most part, has no head. Only recently, American and Iraqi experts say, have they begun to grasp the new organizational structure that, among other things, is making the insurgency so difficult to stop.

Except for that word “new” — is there any evidence that the Iraqi insurgency was ever any more centralized? — this makes eminent sense. In fact, it has seemed fairly obvious for at least two years. Every time I’d hear the latest report of the capture of some former Baathist honcho or “dead-ender” touted by Rumsfeld or Cheney as the beginning of the end for the rebels, I’d just shake my head: they seemed to imagine that the Iraqi insurgency was like the Prussian Army, when anyone could see it was more of a self-organizing network.

What’s impossible to fathom is why it should have been possible for me — on this subject, an armchair journalist and avid pursuer of information online and off, but not a “member of the intelligence community” or consumer of classified information — to understand this as a fundamental aspect of the conflict in Iraq, and yet for it to be something that the experts shaping our policy could “only recently” begin to grasp.

What is it with our experts, anyway? Are these the same experts who thought there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Are these the same experts who believed that invading Iraq would hurt rather than help Al-Qaida? Are these the same experts who figured out how to topple the Saddam Hussein regime but didn’t spare a thought for how to build something in its place?

Maybe we need some new experts.

(One excellent source on the topic for a long time — someone you could call an expert without irony — has been John Robb, a former military guy who has not only kept tabs on the news but offered his own analytic framework interpreting the phenomenon of what he calls “global guerrillas.”)

The ultimate irony here is that the U.S. military has always justly prided itself on its independence, flexibility and initiative at the small-unit level. Our people, the self-image was, fight smarter and more opportunistically than the other guys. This was true when we thought the “other guys” were the Soviets; it was obviously true when the other guys were Saddam Hussein’s uniformed troops. But in Iraq, we’re now the top-heavy, hierarchical, leaden-footed forces of central control, and our enemies are the wild-card forces with the initiative and the agility. They may be evil people who blow up civilians in suicide attacks, but to believe that they are not smart or, in their own way, courageous, is to doom ourselves to endless casualties and ultimate defeat.

Did we hear about any of this in President Bush’s recent pep talk? Perhaps his experts have not yet grasped it.

Hots for the smarts

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I schlepped through two hours of rush hour traffic last night to drive down to Saratoga and hear Richard Thompson play at the rustic, remote Villa Montalvo, a mansion in the Santa Cruz mountains converted into an arts center. It’s hard for me to believe it’s been almost ten years since I interviewed Thompson for the then new-born Salon; it’s almost as hard to believe that, this far into a career that stretches back to the late ’60s, he has continued to grow as a musician and songwriter.

Last night, he mixed up timeless, heartache-filled classics like “Genesis Hall,” “Down Where the Drunkards Roll,” and “The Great Valerio” with newer material split between boisterous upbeat love-songs (“Cooksferry Queen,” “Bathsheba Smiles”) and wry, punning novelties like a ditty in praise of Alexander Graham Bell (“Edison, he was a thief / And Tesla nuts beyond belief
/ But Alexander was a gent / So philanthropic, so well meant”).

One moment, he was playfully putting the lie to the old Dorothy Parkerism that “Guys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses” with “I’ve Got the Hots for the Smarts,” a jazzy ode to the turn-on of intellectual dames (“I like a girl in satin / who talks dirty in Latin”). Then he turned around to look at the realm of the intellect from the perspective of a Taliban-style fundamentalist, who, in his post-9/11 portrait, “Outside of the Inside,” dismisses the entire record of human civilization: “Shakespeare, Isaac Newton / Small ideas for little boys / Adding to the senseless chatter / Adding to the background noise.”

At this stage of his musicianship, Thompson is entirely capable of impersonating an entire rock ensemble using one acoustic guitar; bass line, rhythm, melody and solo all somehow emerge from a single pair of hands playing a single instrument. His show is a remarkable thing, yet the little house at Montalvo still had empty seats. If there are any more of those, as this three-night engagement continues tonight and tomorrow night, you might want to grab them.

Vietnamization, Iraqization

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Seymour Hersh’s latest report in the New Yorker is profoundly depressing in any number of ways. Here’s one big way: each point Hersh makes brings the parallels between the Vietnam and Iraq debacles into clearer focus.

Sure, there are differences: There’s no draft today. (If there were, it’s hard to imagine the war ever being launched.) And there’s no mass protest movement with the same scale or social impact as the ’60s antiwar movement. (Not yet, at any rate.) Instead of a backdrop of Cold War thermonuclear horror, we’ve got a backdrop of post-9/11 terror nightmares.

But then there are so many similarities.

Let’s see: you’ve got the war that drags on for years without any indication of a clear strategy for winning or any clue as to who it is we’re really fighting or why they’re fighting.

You’ve got the hastily hatched plan to hand the war over to the locals and replace American boots on the ground with American bombs from the air.

You’ve got the score-settling civil war waiting to happen the moment the U.S. leaves.

You’ve got the policymakers attempting to scare the public with domino-theory-style scenarios of global disaster should the U.S. “mission” end in anything but victory — yet no one has offered a credible picture of that victory or a map toward it.

You’ve got the critics in Congress beginning to speak up and say the things that the dissenters in the military have been muzzled from saying.

You’ve got the corrupt president isolated, in denial, unwilling to face the reality of error and disaster, venturing forth only among supportive crowds and listening only to the murmurings of yes-men. (Bush’s millenarian religious belief is, however, unique to his disaster scenario, and unlike either of his Vietnam-era predecessors in disgrace, Johnson and Nixon.)

You’ve even got the beginning of covert operations in neighboring countries: If we could only block those foreign supply routes through Cambodia Syria, then victory would be ours!

Coming of political age as I did in the mid-’70s, my sense of the U.S.’s role in the world has always been shaped by the ghosts of Vietnam. Whatever mistakes we would make in the future, I thought as a teenager, we won’t ever make those ones again. I was naive; I didn’t reckon with the power of revisionist thinking and delusional leadership.

The invasion of Iraq, after all, was planned and managed by men who still think that the only U.S. mistake in Vietnam was not “staying the course.” They are still cherrypicking the intelligence today, just as they did in the selling of the war three years (three years!) ago. The only question now — as we leave the Iraqis to their fate and (under Bush or some clearer-eyed successor) return to the real war with al-Qaeda –is, how long will the madness continue, how many Iraqis and Americans will die, and how bad will the damage to the U.S. military be?

Powazek’s Cole Valley tale

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Derek Powazek and Heather Powazek Champ now live in the neighborhood I called my home for seven years, San Francisco’s Cole Valley. (I moved to Berkeley right as the area hit the steep part of the trendiness hockey-stick curve.) It’s a little place, sandwiched between UCSF’s hilltop campus and the wilds of Haight Street, with Cole Street’s two-block commercial zone serving as Main Street, and the N-Judah as a lifeline to the rest of the city. Recently, Derek told a heartwarming tale of collective action in the face of inconsiderate auto-owner behavior. It made me nostalgic for my Cole Valley days of mornings munching on cinnamon snails from the long-gone Tassajara Bakery and evenings downing Liberty Ale at the Kezar Pub. (But I don’t miss the perennial fog.)

Hundred dollar laptop debate

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There’s been a lot of press about the effort being led by Nicholas Negroponte and others to develop a $100 laptop. It appears to be a well-intentioned plan, but like so many tech-industry causes, it seems to be starting from the position of “we’ve got the answers” instead of asking good questions and listening to people’s needs. That, at any rate, is the thoughtful analysis offered here and here by personal-computing pioneer Lee Felsenstein, who has done his own work in the area of bringing computing to rural third-world communities

Programmers and cuisine

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I’ve spent a lot of time attempting to fathom the mindset and thought patterns of software engineers in the course of my labors on my book. Two sites that reflect the collision of programmers and cuisine are fascinating in their own right: First, there’s Cooking for Engineers, which applies an analytical mindset to techniques for cooking bacon or making Rice Krispies treats. (Shades of the Twinkies Project!) After indulging in such fare, you can have a look at the Hacker’s Diet, in which Autodesk founder John Walker explains the essential similarities between computing systems and the human body (garbage in, garbage out; calories in, calories out).

Warning: random links ahead

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While deepest in my book work over the past couple months I found it easier to stash links for future posting rather than to write real posts. So now I’ve got a backlog that I am going to unload here, in no particular order, and with no promise of timeliness.

Chicken delight

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Enough with the turkey, already. My palate belongs to Szechuan food, and this weekend, after the leftovers were gone, I returned to a quest I have sporadically pursued for years now. I have been seeking to duplicate, in my home, the experience of the perfect Kung Pao Chicken — a dish I have occasionally, but less and less frequently, enjoyed in restaurants.

The dish I seek is a simple-looking but complex-tasting stir fry of small cubes of dark-meat chicken lightly dressed in a thick but scant dark-brown sauce that clings to it — without forming a soupy, goopy pool on the plate, as so often emerges from inferior Chinese restaurant kitchens. Mixed in with the chicken are some quarter-inch scallion rounds from the thicker (white) end of the plant, and, of course, crunchy peanuts. The sauce has flecks of ginger, a touch of sweetness, a hint of sesame richness and a slight vinegar pucker. A half-dozen or so blackened whole red chilis complete the picture, or rather, set it aflame. This, to me, is Kung Pao Chicken — gongbao ji ding, also sometimes called Szechuan Chicken with Peanuts.

A recent article in the New York Times by Howard French provided some interesting background to the dish from a restaurant in the city of Guiyang. In Guiyang, unlike in the neighboring province of Szechuan, it seems they do not believe in adding peanuts to the dish at all, nor do they use dried peppers. I certainly have no idea which regional variation deserves the “most authentic” label, and I don’t doubt that the restaurant French profiled might be worth the visit. But I can tell you that the recipe the Times provided — gooped up with way too much arrowroot starch, and relying on chili paste rather than whole peppers for the bite — offered nothing like the experience I seek.

I have made the recipe from my favorite source of Chinese cuisine knowhow, Mrs. Chiang’s Szechwan Cookbook, and it is tastier, for sure; it provides the essential tip that you should buy raw peanuts and fry them in the wok (so many restaurants simply toss in a handful of cold dry-roasted Planters nuts at the very end of cooking — feh!). But even Mrs. Chiang’s offering ends up a bit gloppy, not quite right.

I recognize that my run-of-the-mill home range simply doesn’t provide the level of heat that a high-powered restaurant-kitchen wok can use to flash-fry ingredients, seal in flavors and produce the right consistency in a sauce. But I’m still convinced there is a good recipe out there for what I’m seeking, and I’m going to continue hunting for it, and experimenting with adapting the recipes I have, until I achieve kung pao perfection. At such a time I will share my findings.

Paint It Black

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In the handful of years since the term came into currency it has always seemed bizarre to me that the day after Thanksgiving might be called “Black Friday.” Supposedly the term arose from grateful shopkeepers and bookkeepers who saw their accounts flow from the red into the black thanks to binge-buying consumers fueled by L-tryptophan hangovers, pre-Christmas compulsivity and the involuntary wallet-opening following from viral bargain rumors. But it has always sounded to me more like the name of an awful disaster movie in which hooded thugs plot to blow up a department store, or something. I mean, what is Black Friday after sundown, anyway? Black Sabbath! (For us Old Testamentarians.)

Anyway, I won’t be shopping on Friday, and I doubt the Republic will collapse if you don’t either. The folks at Adbusters suggest we view the post-turkey moment as Buy Nothing Day, and that sounds pretty sensible to me.