BuzzMachine... by Jeff Jarvis

April 28, 2003

Me Tarzan, You Norm
: Norman Mailer says the real reason we went to war was to boost the ego of white American males:

The key question remains — why did we go to war? It is not yet answered. In the end, it is likely that a host of responses will produce a cognitive stew, which does, at least, open the way to offering one’s own notion. We went to war, I could say, because we very much needed a war. The US economy was sinking, the market was gloomy and down, and some classic bastions of the erstwhile American faith (corporate integrity, the FBI, and the Catholic Church, to cite but three) had each suffered a separate and grievous loss of face. Since our Administration was probably not ready to solve any one of the serious problems before it, it was natural to feel the impulse to move into larger ventures, thrusts into the empyrean-war!...
As a matter of collective ego, the good white American male had had very little to nourish his morale since the job market had gone bad, unless he happened to be in the Armed Forces.

And when did you stop beating your wife, you cigar-chomping he-man, you?

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The prince and the pundit
: Prince Charles on nanotechnology:

The prince has raised the spectre of the "grey goo" catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.

I eagerly await Glenn Reynolds' response.

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Persian v. Arab weblogs
: Nima Arian (a commenter, below) points me to a post by Salam Pax expressing his jealousy over Iranian/Persian weblogs:

I am really jealous.
The First Persian Top Weblogs Competition
this blog won the second prize for blog design it has a a picture of an oriental tea glass. istikan chai dear?
when are we arabs going to have something like that? and why have persians taken to blogging so easily than arabs? why isn't there a single arabic weblog? why?why?why?

Salam's own will, I hope, be the first of many.
And Kurds and Turks and Jordanians and Palestinians and Saudis and on and on...

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The World Trade Center Memorial
: The competition for design of the World Trade Center Memorial has opened. Find the rules here.
Designers must summarize their entire concept for the 4.7-acre site on one 30-by-40-inch presentation board, meaning that only high-concept (read: starkly simple) ideas can possibly win.
I am working on mine.

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Rebirth: Iraq v. Japan
: Astigma, a Persian blog, sees parallels between Japan post WWII and Iraq post Gulf II. Japan developed technological prowess fast not by reinventing wheels but by reverse engineering existing technology. So, says Astigma, should Iraq reverse engineer democracy elsewhere in the world to succeed quickly. That is exactly the kind of help we need to give Iraq. To use another modern bizbuzzword, we need to implement best practices.

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The arrest of Sina Motallebi, Day 8
: Hoder has an update on the arrest of the Iranian blogger -- a post that demonstrates the great complexity of life and politics in Iran.

Sina said to Iranian Students News Aganecy (ISNA) he was hopeful that the court was going to accept his explanations and even woudn't take him to the court. He was worried that some people's support, might make new problems and new questions for him in the interogation process. He sounded confident and calm, but as I said, worried. He talked to ISNA while he appeared in a court in Mehrabad Airport (!) for the first time after a week of being in costudy.
This is what makes it complicated in Iran, nobody really knows if his/her support would help the detainee or hurt him/her more.

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More on the Baghdad Blog Daily
: Glenn Reynolds points us to a piece of Slate's David Plotz on the seven habits of highly effective democracy building in Iraq and one of them hammers the point I've been making lately about using the web -- specifically weblogs -- to foster free speech and a free press in Iraq:

5. Use new technology and media to instill the habits of democracy. Democracy is a learned behavior. The experiences of the former Soviet Union and Cambodia are evidence that democracy stumbles if citizens don’t know how to act like citizens. In a totalitarian state, people are trained to shut up and avoid trouble. They don’t understand the new behavior that democracy demands. They even fear it. This is a disaster since democracy can’t flourish with a timid citizenry.
Iraqis can’t learn these habits overnight, but new technology and media can help speed up the process. As National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman and others point out, the Internet is a superb tool for bringing people together and prompting them to organize. E-mail and the Web help far-flung people ally over shared religious or political or economic interests — sometimes for ill, as with al-Qaida, but often for good. In Kosovo, for example, an NGO has posted an online training course for political activists, a free guide for anyone who is trying to figure out how to start a political party.
The Internet — an endless bazaar of clashing ideas — also demonstrates the virtues of free speech to people who don’t know them, says Sheryl Brown, who co-directs the Virtual Diplomacy Initiative at U.S. Institute of Peace. (A number of readers, in fact, have suggested scattering Internet kiosks across Iraq to seed free speech.)

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Who rules
: This from the Reuters pool report on the meeting on the future of Iraq going on now:

There are clear differences among Iraqis on what role the United States should play, delegates say.
Some (mostly non-exiiles) want the Americans to have a direct role in the interim period to prepare for elections, because they don't trust each other.
Others (mainly exiles) say only Iraqis should rule Iraq and the US should have less influence in the interim period.
Mustapha Qazwin, who lives in the United States, a sheikh and a doctor, said: "We are having healthy discussions between people inside Iraq and who were outside Iraq. This is a democratic process and we are still debating the best route forward."
Suheil al-Suheil, a Baghdad lawyer, said: "There are differences over the role of the Americans. We here prefer the Americans to rule us in the interim period."
Asked why, he said: "We are not ready to handle this yet. Saddam's orphans are still alive."

The nonexiles are the ones who are living the reality of Iraq.

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Roses are dead, violence is you...
: Michelle is holding a Saddam Birthday Poetry Contest.

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Iranian humor
: Hoder, the trailblazing Iranian/Canadian blogger I've quoted often lately, maintains both an English-language blog and a Persian blog but even there, he's nice enough to show us his English headlines, including this:

Joke: Saddam wrote a will before the Americans attacked. His wish was, "When I die, give my hand to Khamenei, my moustache to Rafsanjani and my balls to Khatami."

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Iraqi democracy
: Alt.Muslim wonders about the form of democracy that can grow in Iraq.

When al-Qaida links couldn't be found and the search for weapons of mass destruction didn't move our allies into action, bringing democracy to the suffering people to Iraq became the new raison d'etre for "Operation Iraqi Freedom." But what does democracy mean to a people who have never practiced it? How do you bring a society from tribal identifications with ethnic or religious groups into an arena where respect for the will of the majority forms the foundation of the state?

The writer debates the role of Islam -- the Turkish model or (unspoken) the Iranian model? I didn't make clear in my post on Iraqi democracy below that religion can be involved in a democracy, of course but it can't replace democracy. England, Italy, Israel, Ireland and many other countries have official state religions. Yes, my American DNA brings with it a strong belief in separation of church and state to insure the freedom of both. But it need not be an absolute. Still, I do see a clear line: Do the people get to choose their leaders and their laws or does a religious leadership choose both for them? One is democracy, the other is religious dictatorship.

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What he says
: Thomas Friedman:

As far as I'm concerned, we do not need to find any weapons of mass destruction to justify this war. That skull, and the thousands more that will be unearthed, are enough for me. Mr. Bush doesn't owe the world any explanation for missing chemical weapons (even if it turns out that the White House hyped this issue). It is clear that in ending Saddam's tyranny, a huge human engine for mass destruction has been broken....
Whether you were for or against this war, whether you preferred that the war be done with the U.N.'s approval or without it, you have to feel good that right has triumphed over wrong. America did the right thing here. It toppled one of the most evil regimes on the face of the earth, and I don't think we know even a fraction of how deep that evil went. Fair-minded people have to acknowledge that. Who cares if we now find some buried barrels of poison? Do they carry more moral weight than those buried skulls? No way.
So why isn't everyone celebrating this triumph?

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