The Fetid Mind of Max Boot

Max Boot is pushing hard for entry in the pantheon of American mandarins. He is on the right track though, leaving nothing to chance. Even his name, which I am absolutely positive is a stage handle, evokes vague impressions of imperial violence. Boot is a neoconservative who writes a regular column for the Los Angeles Times, which is odd because you would think that after the predictions of their violence laden theories have spectacularly failed to hold up in their real world experiments, any self identified neocon would be driven deep underground by the rest of us, forced to transmit their insanity through pirate radio waves on old equipment purchased from the now defunct Sandinista Radio Venceremos. Wingnuts and assorted crazies living among us would get their hate-fix late at night, in the privacy of their cars, listening attentively to a Kristol-Krauthammer-Kagan roundtable on why we need to nuke Mexico or some other third word country – it doesn’t really matter as long as most of their people are brown and their military relatively defenseless - and tapping the fillings in their teeth when the signal gets static-y. They could pump their fists and fantasize about the efficacy of showing the rest of the world how much business we mean and our utter refusal to take guff from third world swine before nodding off, using old newspapers as makeshift blankets and pillows.

But no, that is not how things work in our world. One can get away with virtually anything and land a gig at a major media outlet pushing just about any crazy idea as long as it is in the service of State power; the bloodier and more violent the better.

Here is Max Boot, at this late date of February 7, 2007 almost four years after the U.S. invaded Iraq, writing another Iraq advice column that somehow doesn’t begin with some variation of,

“Due to circumstances unforeseen and developments most unfortunate, I am compelled to move to an undisclosed underground bunker in short order. I must be quick as I fear there is not much time. Even as I write this, the unmistakable sounds of a vituperative mob filtered through a locked door fill my chamber. Their entry is currently barred by a hard bound copy of Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History” that I wedged into the door jam, who knows how long that will hold. But enough on that, it is time to talk about Iraq. I have in my possession a 10 point plan to win if only President Bush would listen to me. …”

Boot establishes credibility by citing a scholarly sounding treatise on how to pound the brown people written by a French officer who witnessed the dying gasps of French Empire in Algeria, among other places. Boot trades heavily on this man’s borrowed expertise about how to stop insurgencies, which may be all well and good but misses a fundamental point: this is a book about tactical maneuvers in the service of a cause that the vast majority of the world believes is fundamentally criminal.

Boot offers sage counsel, chestnuts such as, “Our top priority must be to establish a modicum of security. Only then can reconstruction go forward.” Hey, he is right! I don’t think that has occurred to anyone else yet. Are President Bush and the Joints Chiefs of staff reading Max’s column?

Elsewhere Boot, almost by instinct, reaches for the comforting embrace of martial law and state violence, “Iraq will not become safer until more militants are behind bars, but they will never be convicted under peacetime rules of evidence.” Exactly, dude! That’s why we need massive dragnet operations in Iraqi neighborhoods, arrest large numbers of people – of which our own military might later estimate 70-90% of them are innocent of any criminal action - and detain them for months or years in a prison where the U.S. military guards have their way with them. That should solve the security problem. Rule of law is the last thing we need.

It gets worse though. Another of Max Boot’s keys is a recommendation to get our lazy ass troops out of the Green Zone compound and into the streets “where they can interact with locals, gather intelligence and provide security.” My only quibble is that for the last four years whenever U.S. soldiers have interacted with the locals it has only led to worse security. But that is the neoconservative M.O., empirical reality simply does not matter. I don’t want to spend too much time on this one; partly because it is so self-evidently false but mostly because I am anxious to get to the last proposal. The full weight of its absurdity can only be appreciated when taken in all at once in Boot’s own words,

“Amazingly enough, the Iraqi and American governments have not issued biometric ID cards — something like our driver's licenses, with a fingerprint included — to the populace and have not equipped security forces with portable computer terminals linked to a central database.

The lack of such a setup — employed by pretty much every U.S. police department — makes it difficult to tell whether someone stopped at a checkpoint is a wanted terrorist.”

That is amazing. Just imagine! If we had ID cards in Iraq with portable computer terminals operating on WIFI connections then no terrorist would ever slip through a roadside checkpoint ever again! That is brilliant! Or it would be if the police wouldn’t sell the terminals for money as they do their weapons. Or if the police wouldn’t make and sell fake ID cards, helping to engender a black market for phony IDs that would almost certainly arise in war torn Iraq. Or if the police forces weren’t infiltrated with active insurgents as they are. Or if in a country where we can’t even get the electricity to work for more than a few hours a day the logistical impossibility of implementing this for roughly 20+ million people was not be absurd on its face. Or if we hadn’t tried something similar to this already three years ago in a few Iraqi towns – minus the unworkable technology Boot prescribes but with extra barbed wire – and it was to no avail. Or if Iraq wasn’t Iraq, but some fantasy construct that exists in the collective neoconservative mind where an appropriate application of violence and aggression solves any problem, this just might work! I have a better idea, we should require every Iraqi to get a tattoo on their forehead that says "terrorist" or "not a terrorist." Much simpler.