larry david

In 2004, David Roberts, a second-year clinical-psychology student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, had a summer job teaching social skills to a group of schizophrenic patients at a state hospital. He had a particularly unresponsive group (“Many patients are flattened by their meds,” he explained recently) and tried in vain to interest them in role-playing everyday social situations, offering the patients rewards of points and tokens in return for not giving in to their urges to wander around, respond to phantom voices, or otherwise become disruptive—a traditional system of behavioral therapy.
During a break one day, Roberts, watching television in the hospital’s lounge, noticed that a change had come over his patients, who generally seemed immune to basic social signals. “They were laughing at the ironic commercials,” he said. “They were laughing at ‘Friends.’ They were laughing at all the places I was laughing.” Many showed a fluency in the kinds of social communication that Roberts had been struggling to teach them in therapy. “We watched a scene from ‘Monk’ where Tony Shalhoub won’t shake hands with anyone for fear of germs, and walks away awkwardly. I asked a man who’d been an inpatient for ten years, and who was generally blank, what had happened, and he shook his head and gave me a wry grin. Unspoken communication is huge for someone like that.”
So Roberts began showing TV clips during therapy sessions. Soon he had narrowed his selections down to one show: television’s purest expression of social dysfunction, “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Roberts considers Larry David to be the perfect proxy for a schizophrenic person. “On his way into his dentist’s office, he holds the door open for a woman, and, as a result, she’s seen first,” he said. “He stews, he fumes, he explodes. He’s breaking the social rules that folks with schizophrenia often break.” He went on, “Or the one where Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen invite Larry and his wife to a concert: the night arrives, they don’t call, Larry assumes they don’t like him, then it turns out he got the date wrong. It’s a classic example of a major social cognitive error—jumping to conclusions—that schizophrenic patients are prone to.” As the patients watched David flub situation after situation, they laughed, and they willingly discussed with Roberts how they might behave in the same circumstances. “That bald man made a mountain out of a molehill!” one woman called out during a session.
Roberts and his U.N.C. adviser, David Penn, began to formalize these findings, mapping out a teachable technique called Social Cognition and Interaction Training. They tested SCIT in four preliminary studies, and in post-training evaluations patients showed significant improvement in deciphering social situations. The technique has attracted attention—practitioners in Germany, Portugal, and China are now watching TV with their patients—and this fall Penn and a third researcher are conducting a randomized control trial.
Larry David has been replaced, however. When no one at “Curb Your Enthusiasm” responded to a request for permission to use clips from the show, Roberts and Penn hired actors to film their own cringe-worthy situations. For instance, on a split screen, Suzanne calls her co-worker Heidi at home and invites her to dinner. “How did you get my number?” Heidi asks, and Suzanne, oblivious to Heidi’s discomfort, explains that it’s in the employee directory.
“Friday—I’m sorry, I already have plans,” Heidi says. There’s a long, horrible pause as Suzanne’s face falls, and she begins backing off from the invitation—just as Heidi reconsiders and says that she has some time free on Saturday.
“No, I’m sorry,” Suzanne says. “I didn’t mean to interrupt you.” Angry and embarrassed, she hangs up the phone. Roberts said that when his patients watched this bit they slapped their foreheads and winced. “They were, like, ‘Oh, man, I do that all the time!’ ”

october 22nd news

ANKARA, Turkey -- Turkish officials signaled Tuesday they are prepared to send the army into northern Iraq if U.S. and Iraqi forces do not take steps to combat Turkish Kurdish guerrillas there _ a move that could put Turkey on a collision course with the United States.

Turkey is facing increasing domestic pressure to act after 15 soldiers, police and guards were killed fighting the guerrillas in southeastern Turkey in the past week.

"The government is really in a bind," said Seyfi Tashan, director of the Foreign Policy Institute at Bilkent University in Ankara. "On the one hand, they don't want things to break down with the United States. On the other hand, the public is crying for action."

Diplomats and experts cautioned the increasingly aggressive Turkish statements were likely aimed at calming public anger and pressing the U.S. and Iraq to act against the Turkish Kurdish guerrillas. But they also said Turkish politicians and military officers could act if nothing is done.

















Thousands of Southern California homes could be at risk in coming days as powerful Santa Ana winds continue to stoke wildfires, fire officials said. Blazes on Sunday scorched thousands of acres from the Mexican border to Santa Barbara County, destroyed at least 39 homes and other buildings and killed at least one person.

Some of the worst devastation has been in and around Malibu, where the losses included two beloved landmarks; in San Diego, where at least one person died and 14 were injured; and in the communities of Agua Dulce and Canyon Country, midway between Santa Clarita and Palmdale. At least 25 buildings there were destroyed and 3,800 remained threatened by a rapidly moving blaze driven by winds gusting to 80 mph. At least four people were reported injured, one severely.

In Orange County, a late-developing fire that broke out in the area of Silverado Canyon and Santiago Canyon roads quickly swelled Sunday evening and moved toward the Portola Springs and Northwood communities. At 11 p.m., fire officials said they were asking residents to evacuate two of the most endangered neighborhoods






























LIMA, Peru: Millions of city-dwelling Peruvians have been ordered to stay home for eight hours this Sunday as government officials conduct the country's second national census in two years.

Businesses will be closed, public buses won't run, and cabs carrying foreign tourists will need a special permit, as all urban residents are forced to stay inside from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.

The census, which falls on one of the week's biggest shopping days, is expected to cost local merchants millions of dollars (euros).

"If we can't work, what are we going to do?" said Marta Legua, 63, who sells ice cream from a bicycle cart in Lima. She works seven days a week and expects to lose US$20 (€14.13) Sunday, a big chunk of her weekly earnings.

Police say those who break the daytime curfew won't be arrested, but patrolling officers — who'll be counted in advance along with doctors, firefighters and other emergency workers — will ask violators to go home.




The president and prime minister of Poland spot the diference!

TRIESTE

TRIESTE-JOYCE

10 days in Trieste.

20th October - 30th October 1904

Famously, Joyce’s relationship with Trieste began briefly and chaotically. He arrived with Nora by train on October 20th 1904. He was 22; he’d met Nora four months earlier, (June 16th).
On arrival, Joyce left Nora in the square by the station and went off in search of the school where he thought he had a job. Typical of Joyce, he then managed to get himself arrested by interfering in a drunken rumpus between some sailors and the police. Thinking he could impress and resolve the situation with his Italian only resulted in his own arrest. After an over night stay in jail leaving Nora stranded in the square, he was finally released and re united with Nora.
They found a hotel for the first 2 nights then a room to rent. But the job which he thought was his, was in fact not available. Thus their first Triestian encounter was over. They were advised to travel down the coast to Pola where there was another English school and a chance of employment.

10 years in Trieste – 1905 to 1915

Joyce would return in March 1905 and stay until the outbreak of WW1 in 1915. In this time he would leave it only briefly six times, three to Dublin one each to Pola, Rome and Zurich. Joyce fell in love with the city almost immediately and would call it home; he would also write the bulk of his major works here, most significantly Ulysses. It was from his first apartment overlooking the Canal Grande on the Ponterosso with its grand ships, that he first felt the impact of Trieste.
After two centuries of war against the nearby major power, the Republic of Venice, (who occupied it briefly from 1369 to 1372), the burghers of Trieste petitioned Leopold III von Habsburg, Duke of Austria to become part of his domains. The citizens, however, maintained a certain degree of autonomy well until the 17th century. Trieste grew into an important port and trade hub. It was constituted a free port within the Austrian domains by Emperor Charles VI and remained a free port from 1719 until July 1; 1891. The city was occupied by French troops three times during the Napoleonic Wars, in 1797, 1805 and 1809. In the latter occasion it was annexed to the Illyrian Provinces by Napoleon.
In the beginning of the 20th century, Trieste was a buzzing cosmopolitan city frequented by artists such as Italy Svevo and Umberto Saba. The city was part of the so-called Austrian Riviera and a very real part of Mitteleuropa. The particular Friulian dialect, called Tergestino, spoken until the beginning of the 19th century, had been gradually supplanted by Triestine (i.e. a Venetian dialect) and other tongues, including Italian, German and Slovenian. While Triestine was the language of the major part of the population, German was the language of the Austrian bureaucracy.
San Nicolo was soon to become the centre of Joyce’s world, it would not only be where he lived, but also where he worked at the English Berlitz School.
Trieste was the envy of most for its theatres and Joyce frequented them often. Amongst the productions he was to see were some of Ibsen’s work, of which he was a keen student. As an 18 year old in Dublin, Joyce had written a review of one of Ibsen’s plays which was published; that had both made him the envy of his peers and also added to his sense of being special. This was later added to, when Ibsen himself wrote to Joyce thanking him for his favourable review. Joyce would write again to Ibsen, but shortly after moving to Italy, (something Ibsen had done himself), Ibsen died in 1906. But an idea of a linear breach from Ibsen to Joyce is certainly within bounds of literary possibility.

Not only did Joyce admire Ibsen’s work, he was greatly influenced by it. The self exile of both writers is an obvious connection; but also the striving for social realism in drama and the diving into the human unconscious are both very vital and vibrant aspects of both their works.

Joyce was surrounded by theatre. He was also surrounded by music, Trieste was a mini Vienna in terms of its musical culture, Toscanini, Martuci, and Nikish all conducted there, as well as Mahler. Caruso also sang there and its opera was first class, indeed Verdi was a son of Trieste.

Famously, Trieste had its own unique dialect. This “hotch potch” language appealed to Joyce, he himself could speak 18 languages so he was drawn to Triestean dialect. He would later use much of it in his language of Finnegan’s Wake,

“The borborayellers, blohablasting tegolhuts up to tetties and ruching sleetsoff the coppeehouses”

This is a mix of Joycean and Triestean to form a perfect alliteration and a bringing to life what the locals called “The Bora”, a wind that raged through Trieste in the winter.

Another feature of Trieste that Joyce hungered for was the food. Its Austrian confectionary was something he always missed if he was away. There was a particular confectioners and café he favoured in the square, by the Piccolo offices where he would have many articles published. He also had an apartment near the newspaper and delivered several lectures on Hamlet from a nearby lecture hall. The hospital where his son was born was also close by.

Joyce was a citizen of the British Empire and Irishman living in the Austrian empire, a foreigner in a foreign land. His breakfast of the inner organs was standard fare in Trieste, a meal famous for its consumption by Bloom in Ulysses.

The official symbol of the city was the melon-

“He kissed the plump mellow yellow mellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonious hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow which obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation”

There are three churches that form a neat triangle around San Nicolo where Joyce had lived and worked, a Serb orthodox, a Greek orthodox, and a Catholic church. All are grande and were often frequented by Joyce.

Trieste was often referred to at this time as an immoral city with its red light areas and prostitution. Some say it was worse than Moscow and Berlin; Joyce certainly frequented these areas and used them often in his writing.

“ not to wander be working around jerumsalemdo ( Jerusalem ) at small hours about the murketpots ( fruitmarkets ) smelling okey( sweet smelling) bony, this little ( vagina) figgy and arraky( how nice they are) belloky this littltle pink(little finger) into porker but, porkodirto, to let the gentlemen pedestarollies(pederasts)) out of monabella(beautiful vagina) culculpuration(nice arses)”
Joyce may have wandered the churches by day, but by night you would find him in the various bars. Whisky, wine and absinthe were his favourite tipples.

“Jim went out at night until two or three in the morning ranging from one Smokey pot house to another and then came in falling about the place”

Sometimes his brother would find him in a gutter and carry him home.

“A good puzzle would be to cross Dublin without passing a pub”

Most of the bars that Joyce frequented are now sadly gone.

“Joyce was never a belligerent drunk but rather a floppy public one. As he weighed so little he was often carried home and put to bed by friends. When he awoke he would complain about his eyes or whatever but was never surly”

“One day while teaching he slumped to the ground without a word the family from an impeccable middle class urgently sent for a doctor in panic, he diagnosed alcohol poisoning complicated by malnutrition”

“We will give our superfluous wealth to the poor,” was a Venetian statement of the times, brilliantly used by local Triestian socialists and one Joyce would certainly have known. He would have had ample chance to mix with and debate with socialists at this time and indeed saw himself as one. He certainly would have been more taken to it than the nationalism of his own country. Later of course during WW1 whilst in Zurich, Joyce would meet Lenin. What they thought about each other is the theme of a Tom Stoppard play.

“A nation?” says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place”

Lack of money gave Joyce a constant state of stress in this ten year period as, although he finished writing Dubliners here as well as Portraight….. and the bulk of Ulysses, it wasn’t until 1915 that he had anything published. So his teaching at the school and some private tuition brought in some income, as did the writing for the newspaper and 12 lectures he gave, but he depended ever more on benefactors.

For the period July 1906 to March 1907 money was tight, so he moved Nora and Giorgio to Rome where he worked in a bank as a way of earning extra money while Stanilaus stayed behind in Trieste. This failed however and they returned to Trieste as poor as ever. They were back on San Nicolo. Joyce was happy to be back to what he called ‘home’, having not taken to Rome at all.

“I cannot begin to give you the flavour of the old auster and hungrig empire it was a ramshackle affair but it was charming and gay I experienced more kindness in Trieste than ever before or since in my life times past cannot return but I wish they were back they called the Austrian empire a ramshackle empire I wish there were more such empires.”

“The Irishman O’Connell was made a freeman of the Trieste when he sucked the king’s wound clean after he was stabbed in the neck with a dagger which was feared poisoned “

Despite the lectures for the university and the articles for the newspaper, Joyce still really relied on his part-time teaching salary for income, so 1907 proved another financial struggle. More so now they were four, with the birth of Joyce’s second child, his daughter Lucia.

To add to his troubles, he caught rheumatic fever in July as a result of drunken nights in the gutter. He was in hospital for a month and convalescing for a further 3 months.

When Nora was released from hospital with little Lucia, they were so poor that they were actually given money from the hospital poor box.

That summer was perhaps the lowest point. Nora was very ill and took to bed after the birth of Lucia and Joyce was still convalescing. They were totally poverty stricken, and still there wasn’t any of Joyce’s work being published.

Increasingly Nora was bad tempered and she made little secret of her hatred of their poverty stricken state and Jim’s drinking. Their arguing got to extreme states at times. Their relationship was to stay strained through 1908 into 1909 but they still enjoyed a very active sexual life, as can be seen by the so called “dirty” letters.
Joyce regards with equanimity every possible sexual act that is freely chosen; but he does not stop there. His interest in the body is also a moral stance, taken up against the orthodox Christian hostility to “mere” flesh. It is by woman’s flesh, and especially her secret inner parts, that a world fallen into negation can be redeemed. At the same time, Joyce is fascinated by woman’s double nature, combining the carnal with the transcendent. His sexual epiphanies are moments when the woman displays both qualities intensely and simultaneously. The whore in Portrait, for example, is a priestess of the body. A real priest would raise the host up to heaven then bring it down into the mouth of the communicant, who kneels below him. But the whore puts something even more potent into Stephen’s mouth: her own tongue, in a direct communion of flesh with flesh.
In the vision of the bird-girl, and in the erotic letters to Nora, Joyce excites himself with a sacred love-object who displays for him her profane functions of excretion; the most intense sexual experience is one that mingles, sacrilegiously, the most exalted with the most vulgar. Yet Joyce’s sexuality remains Catholic, in the sense of universal: it includes every possible means of communion between men and women, whether high or low. His letter to Nora of 2 December 1909 is a classic expression of his need to reconcile sacred and profane love: “side by side and inside this spiritual love I have for you there is also a wild beast-like craving for every inch of your body, for every secret and shameful part of it, for every odour and act of it.”
July 1909 he left for Dublin with Giorgio. The principal reason for the trip was to attempt to get Dubliners published; but he would also visit his father and Nora’s parents in Galway, who had not seen Giorgio. He would part fund the trip by pretending he was a journalist for the Piccolo newspaper and blagging a free train journey.

The three years between 1909 and 1912 were the most frustrating of Joyce’s life. He had a constant struggle to have his work published and journeyed to Dublin three times fruitlessly. In these journeys he was to discover that Trieste was now home.

“Oh how I shall enjoy the journey back! Every station will be bringing me nearer to my soul’s peace. O how I shall feel when I see the castle of Miramar among the trees and the yellow quays of Trieste! Why is it I am destined to look so many times in my life with my eyes of longing on Trieste”

Also, in that first trip back to Ireland, he encountered Cosgrave who informed Joyce, “he had gone on long walks in the darkness along the river bank with Nora”. Joyce immediately wrote a number of nasty accessory letters to Nora even asking whether Giorgio was in fact his son. Nora took her own good time in replying and when she did she made no attempt to deny or apologise. This fall out between them was mended and from it came the famous dirty letters.
By now Trieste and Nora merged as one in his mind. Trieste was the city that had offered him and his family a home; Nora was the woman who continued to have faith in him and stood by him. Together they represented home.
Cinema had arrived in Trieste in 1905 and soon they had several flourishing around the city. Joyce saw it as an art form to be welcomed and Nora often spent an afternoon at the matinee. It is quite clear that if he’d lived in the latter half of the 20th century, Joyce would have written for the movies, as his work would have been a sure fire hit on the movie screen. As it was, Joyce felt Dublin, with a half a million people was a ready made cinema audience, so in 1909 he went into business to open the first cinema in Dublin. It was a success, but somehow Joyce failed to make any of the money it created and his partnership was dissolved. It would seem Joyce was cheated in some way.

Again money problems rolled into 1910. Giorgio stopped Stanislaus in the street at one point, declaring:

“We had no dinner today. Keep that in your head”

Joyce was now also suffering greatly with his eyes. His spending habits continued to be absurd. In March he bought a piano costing the equivalent of three months rent. He and his brother nearly came to blows over that one.

“The familiar shortage of money did not stop Nora from dressing as well as their credit with tailors and dressmakers would allow”

In 1910, Joyce’s sisters Eva and Eileen came over from Ireland to help Nora with the children. They were both devout Catholics and put enormous pressure on Joyce to be married for the sake of the children. Also, at this time they took on a live-in servant, Maria Kirn, which, considering their financial plight and that there were already three women living in the house, seemed a strange decision.

“Joyce would come up to Stanislaus smiling, cigar sticking out of the corner of his mouth and ask him for money, “ not a penny more” then Joyce would begin talking about his book and his writing and Stannie would come through “just don’t ask me for money for a year and I’ll be able to pay for the publication myself!”

When he did get money from something such as an article published, he spent it at the opera!

After his last fruitless trip to Dublin to try to get the Dubliners published and failing, he would leave Ireland in October 1912 and never return.

Joyce gave 12 lectures between November and February 1913 on Monday nights at the university.

A friend of Joyce’s, Prezioso, was to cause problems for Joyce and Nora when he declared his love for Nora, “the sun has risen for you”.
Nora instantly rebuked his advances and told Joyce who sought him out and gave him a public dressing down. Whereupon Prezioso burst into tears! There has been some suggestion that Prezioso’s real intent was Joyce himself.

“The bodily possession of Nora would bring into almost carnal contact the two men to be united without dissatisfaction and degradation –to be united man to man as man to woman”

Giacomo is Italian for James. A 16 page hand written novelette written by Joyce between 1911 and 1914 and left behind in Trieste when he moved to Paris was called Giacomo Joyce. Although never meant for publication, it is an extraordinary piece of artistic creative work written in both Italian and English.

The young ladies that Joyce tutored in English were highly educated and independent, with a range of qualities not always common in woman of their age. They were emancipated young woman who showed little interest in religion and who were aware of their intellectual and sexual attraction. Two who undoubtedly made an impact on Joyce were Emma Cuzzi and Amelia Popper.

“I was anything but a diligent student and so Jam Joyce who as my teacher was far from traditional was my favourite”

Meanwhile Giorgio and Lucia, both now bespectacled, attended the local school and were very successful students, as well as being popular with other children in throughout. They did suffer from the fact that their father’s interest in them was fleeting, given his total absorption in his writing. Nora also, while she loved her children, was not a particularly attentive mother and a lot of their upbringing fell to Joyce’s sister, Eileen.

With Joyce’s income increasing though the private tuition they should have been more comfortable, but all he did was increase his spending. James and Nora were dreadful housekeepers and had no intention to change. They spent excessively on luxuries, meals out, theatre, cinema, opera and were fond of buying on credit.

In 1913, Joyce would finally find a benefactor and admirer of his work resulting in his work finally receiving its true recognition.

This man was Ezra Pound. He told Joyce that Yeats had been speaking to him about his writing and that he could serialise Dubliners in an American magazine. When Joyce followed this up with Portrait of an Artist, Pound declared it, “damn fine stuff”

Finally, after a struggle that would have killed off most writers he was published in June 1914. With Dubliners being published, Joyce was finally able to put the two books of his youth behind him. And begin the epic of his life Ulysses.

In 1920 Joyce said of Ulysses:

“The epic of two races Israel and Ireland”

Trieste itself played a key role in informing Joyce’s sense of Jewishness. The city’s Jewish population, its synagogue, shops and businesses were the very fabric from which he wove Bloom.

How saddened would Joyce have been then, when in 1942 after Italy switched their allegiance in WW2 to the allies and the Nazis annexed Trieste for the 3rd Reich and set up the only concentration camp in Italy.

After the landing of the Allies in southern Italy in July 1943 and the Italian surrender on 8 September, the southern parts of the country were liberated, but northern Italy remained under German control. The majority of the Jews who had decided against leaving the country, lived here. The Italian army disbanded and German forces ruled the new fascist satellite "Republica Sociale Italiana". The Germans established some of the coastal areas of the Adriatic Sea.
One of the Italian concentration camps was the Risiera di San Sabba, a former rice mill on the outskirts of Trieste. The buildings were constructed in 1913 and had already been empty for years, when the Germans confiscated them. The facility was first used as a prison. In October 1943, it was converted into a Polizeihaftlager (police concentration camp). The premises were well suited for such a camp. Three high buildings (3, 4 and 6 storeys) included cells, storage rooms, dressmaking and shoe-making shops and SS quarters. The high old chimney, in combination with the enlarged old oven, was used for cremating thousands of victims. The crematory installations were planned and built under the supervision of Erwin Lambert, the "flying architect" of T4. He had already built the gas chambers at the six euthanasia centres in Germany and Austria and the three extermination camps of Aktion Reinhard in Poland. The crematory was tested on 4 April 1944 by the burning of 70 corpses. From 20 October 1943 until early 1945 around 25,000 partisans and Jews were interrogated and tortured within the camp. 3,000-5,000 of them were killed, either by shooting, beating or in gas vans.
Globocnik's staff mainly consisted of mainly Germans. From October 1943 until May 1944 SS-Obersturmbannführer Christian Wirth was camp commander. As he was killed by partisans on 26 May 1944, SS-Obersturmbannführer Dietrich Allers became commandant until the dissolution of the camp in April 1945.

In late April 1945 Yugoslav partisans prepared to conquer Trieste. As a consequence, on 29 April the Germans blew up the chimney and the crematory in order to cover up the traces of their crimes. The staff went into hiding. Some of them were sentenced in absence but never faced justice in a "San Sabba Trial".

Jews first arrived in Trieste in 1236. They were always welcomed and made to feel part of the city, “they are creatures of God”

“The alleged purity of the Jewish race is visionary and not substantiated by scientific observation there are just as many differences amongst the Jews as there are among the various races and peoples of the European continent”

Joyce created, “his Jew from a blend of sources and origins combining Gaelic Jew and Greek”.

“In Joyce’s Trieste Freud’s work and psycho-analytical theory was discussed animatedly. Whilst in Italy Freud’s ideas met with considerable opposition in Trieste they took root with relative ease “

Later in Zurich his daughter Lucia would be treated by Freud’s great pupil Jung

Another major writer of influence at this time was the Jew Weininger who wrote:

“just as the woman is the negative force of every human being so is the Jew, he was so unable to escape his idea of jewishness as the mark o a diseased individual that he committed suicide in the same room that Beethoven had died in”

Bloom resolves these unconscious battles and finds an acceptance of self through imaginative action. His triumph is to accept the other dark side of himself which in its own way is both psychoanalytical and Freudian as well as giving us a link to Ibsen’s work.

Trieste was also the forefront of Italian Zionism. It was known as the port of Zion for the numbers passing through on their way to the USA and Palestine.

“The Jew hates the Jew inside him”

Joyce pointed to the fact that Gaelic was oriental in origin and therefore similar to Jewish language. Also their religions were very similar and ultimately both were disposed from their homelands.

The assignation of Archduke Ferdinand by the Bosnian student Princip in Sarajevo June 28th 1914 was to change everything. By September the school was closed and most of his private students had left Trieste. Joyce’s source of income was drying up rapidly, but Joyce hung on without income into 1915. In January, Stanislaus was interned by the Austrian authorities and he would remain imprisoned for the duration of the war. In May 1915 Eileen married a banker at San Gusto. A week later, Italy entered the war and Trieste was plunged into chaos. Riots broke out across the city between Italian and Austrian factions.

Joyce seemed almost oblivious to the chaos, continuing to work on Ulysses into June. By July, almost everyone he knew had left and there was little alternative to do the same.

He left with Nora and the two children on a train to Zurich on June 27th 1915.
They would return after the war in October 1919, but by now Trieste had changed into an Italian city and had been badly damaged by the conflict. The heart had been ripped from Trieste for Joyce and he never settled again.
He left again by train with Nora and the children in July 1920, heading for Paris. In leaving Trieste, Joyce was moving from a city were he had “found the rock of Ithaca and on the sea the sail of Ulysses”


James Joyce born Feb 1882

Meets Nora Barnacle in Dublin in June 1904 aged 22

Goes to Italy in October 10904

Initially stays in Trieste for 10 days, returning in March 1905 and stays there until June 1915

He lived in Trieste from the age of 23 to 33.

In this time he lived and worked mainly around the Via Nicolo where he also frequented the cafes such as Tomassan and Stella Picola.

He wrote several articles for the Trieste newspaper, the Piccolo

He gave 12 lectures at the University on Hamlet

In 1905 Giorgio was born - Via Nicolo and in 1907 Lucia was born - the hospital

He wrote Dubliners and had it published while in Trieste

He also wrote a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

And began the bulk of Ulysses

He also used the unique Triestian dialect to form the language for Finnegan’s Wake.

He left Trieste when Italy entered WW1 and went to Zurich where amongst others he met Lenin. He returned briefly to Trieste in 1909 but it wasn’t the place he’d grown to call home, and Paris was becoming the centre of the European literary world; so he left for Paris in 1920 were he stayed until the outbreak of WW2 when again he went to Zurich in 1939 where he died in 1940.

Trieste was at this time 80% Italian although ruled by Austria.

From 1918-1943 it was Italian

From 1943 to 1945 it was controlled by the Nazis
From 1945 when it was 1st liberated by the Yugoslavs’ it passed into allied hands and was administered by the Americans until 1955 when it went back into Italy.

If you include the time when it was taken by Napoleon it has been ruled by the French, Italians, Germans, Yugoslavs, Americans, Austrians, & Nazis

It is currently Italian.

It now borders Slovenia which is only 8 miles away.

IRAQ EXIT

Part 10
Last October, I was invited to sit in on a “war game” at the Brookings Institution, for which Pollack and Byman assembled a group of former Republican and Democratic officials to simulate the endgame in Iraq. As civil war drove American troops to the borders, the officials’ policy debates zeroed in on the short-term winner, Iran. Some officials wanted to arm Sunni groups, with the backing of other Arab states, to wage an insurgency against Iran and its proxies in Iraq. Since that war game, the “Sunni awakening” of tribes in western Iraq and the American decision to sell arms to Saudi Arabia, a Sunni country, have nudged the U.S. closer to the Sunni side. It may very well become American policy to keep Iraq’s Sunni Arabs strong enough to create a stalemate in the civil war and contain Iranian influence in the region. But, given that the war began in 2003 with the goal of bringing Iraq’s Shiite majority to power as the leading edge of a democratic transformation in the Middle East, this return to balance-of-power Realpolitik, with the Saudis as America’s most important allies, would represent the ultimate failure of the President’s project.
The war was born in the original sins of deceptive salesmanship, divisive politics, and wishful thinking about the aftermath. The bitterness of that history continues to undermine American interests in Iraq and the Middle East today. President Bush will have his victory at any cost, with one eye on his next Churchillian speech and the other on his place in history, leaving the implementation of his war policy to an Administration that works at cross purposes with itself, promising freedom and delivering rubble. The opposition is plainly eager to hang a defeat around his neck and move on from what it always regarded as Bush’s war. Before the U.S. can persuade the world to unite around a shared responsibility for Iraq, Americans will have to do it first. The problems created by the war will require solutions that don’t belong to a single political party or President: the rise of Iranian power, the emergence of Al Qaeda in Iraq, the radicalization of populations, the huge refugee crisis, the damage to a new generation of Iraqis who are growing up amid the unimaginable. Whenever this country decides that the bloody experience in Iraq requires the departure of American troops, complete disengagement will be neither desirable nor possible. We might want to be rid of Iraq, but Iraq won’t let it happen. ♦

IRAQ EXIT

Part 9
Since Iraq is going to remain in pieces for years, different strategies must be pursued for different regions. Provincial reconstruction teams can provide support to local officials who share the vision of a less sectarian, more democratic Iraq, and they can serve as American eyes and ears. (Without American brigades nearby, these teams will have to depend on the extremely uncertain ability of Iraqi security forces to maintain enough order for them to operate.) This political and intelligence work wouldn’t necessarily end if the teams have to be withdrawn, because they would have cultivated Iraqi allies in each province. Around the country, there are thousands of Iraqis who, in the past four years, have put themselves forward as candidates for local councils, city halls, government departments, and the Iraqi security forces. Many more Iraqis have formed organizations in support of issues like women’s rights, created labor unions, set up educational programs, and established one of the Arab world’s freest (and most endangered) presses.
Too many of these civic-minded citizens, though, have been killed by insurgents and militias who have led a brutal campaign to suppress the stirrings of civil society in Iraq. Lately, it has become virtually impossible for Americans to work with such Iraqis directly. The National Democratic Institute, a Washington-based democracy-promotion group affiliated with the Democratic Party, moved its operations and much of its Iraqi staff out of Baghdad after an American worker was killed in an ambush, last January. But several Iraqi staff members stayed behind to do similar work as a local, all-Iraqi organization, and the N.D.I. is providing technical help and money to get the new group up and running. The U.S. government and private groups should find ways to support Iraqi efforts like these, and, when possible, go back in to work directly with them. The years ahead will be exceedingly difficult for Iraqi democrats, but many of them will tell you that they have learned a great deal in the tumult of the past four years.
If, after a large-scale American withdrawal, Iraq becomes unlivable for such people, then it would be in America’s interest to evacuate those who request it, and contingency plans for mass airlifts and expatriation should be made before a crisis comes. This evacuation should go well beyond the current, sluggish process of resettling Iraqis here who worked directly for the U.S. in Iraq. It should be a much more ambitious effort to save the core of what perhaps someday could become a more decent society in Iraq, including military officers, local politicians, and the many thousands of other Iraqis (and their families) who have worked closely and well with Americans. U.S. officials and officers should begin making lists for evacuation. Most Iraqis would be settled in neighboring countries, but as many as a hundred thousand should be brought here, especially if Iraq begins to resemble Cambodia in 1975 or Rwanda in 1994. Beyond the humanitarian imperative, the United States would be salvaging what’s left of its enormous investment in Iraq and preserving the seeds of a better future.
When I asked Ahmed, the resident of Saidiya, how he saw Iraq’s and his own future beyond the occupation, he wrote back from an Internet café, because his home connection wasn’t working. “There might be something good in the future, but only after two decades,” he wrote. “It was really a dream to get rid of Saddam, but nowadays the most difficult and unachievable dream, or to put it in other words, the dream that will not come true within the next twenty years, is to have a secular government that separates between religion and politics. I think this long process will outlive us. . . . And, yes, there will be a life for me in another country, in the U.S. specifically. I can be a link that will play a relatively small but effective role in the whole process of creating modern Iraq. I have more to say about that, but I am hearing just now far shooting . . . it is better for me to leave.”
There are already at least two million Iraqi refugees in the Middle East. For a long time, the Administration’s policy was to pretend that they didn’t exist. When officials began to acknowledge the refugees, earlier this year, their statements gave the impression that these Iraqis were waiting out a bad spell and were ready to go back any day. Only recently has the Administration begun seriously to address what’s become one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. On August 28th, the State Department announced that thirty million dollars in aid will be given to help educate Iraqi refugee children in schools around the Middle East. This is a late and small start, but American policy on the refugees remains ad hoc and wishful: in the words of Ellen Sauerbrey, the Assistant Secretary of State for refugees, the answer to this immense and immediate problem is simple—“creating a safe and stable Iraq.” A major American-led effort to help provide education, health care, and jobs to Iraqi refugees probably would require us to give aid to the governments that are hosting them—even, through intermediaries, to Syria. Unless the U.S. recognizes that Iraqis won’t return home for years and are living precarious lives in Arab countries that are barely tolerating them, these refugees will become yet another radicalized population of homeless people in the Middle East, and one more strategic problem for the United States.
Radicalization is one of the dangers considered in “Things Fall Apart,” a short book by Daniel Byman and Kenneth Pollack, published earlier this year by the Brookings Institution. (Pollack more recently co-wrote a controversial Times Op-Ed, called “A War We Just Might Win,” which declared definitively that the surge was a military success.) “Things Fall Apart” examines the history of recent civil wars around the world and concludes that they usually last a long time, spill over into other countries, and end only through the military victory of one side, or through massive external intervention. Pollack and Byman outline a strategy for containing an “all-out civil war” within Iraq’s borders. Their policy proposals include avoiding taking sides, keeping American troops out of urban warfare, and providing economic support and promoting political reform in the region to prevent it from being destabilized. Perhaps most questionably, they recommend setting up bases for American patrols along Iraq’s borders with its Arab neighbors and Kurdistan (but not Iran), to prevent foreign fighters from getting in and refugees from pouring out. American brigades and regiments would protect refugee collection points called “catch basins” on the borders. Since these would likely become miserable camps infiltrated by sectarian militias, with Americans as vulnerable camp guards, this proposal is notably risky, and has garnered scant support. But at least the authors didn’t simply wish the worst-case scenario.

EXIT IRAQ

Part 8
Toby Dodge admitted that anyone arguing against immediate withdrawal has to face the “killer question: Why should American troops continue to die when the chances for success are so low?” He offered his answer “with an honest recognition that it doesn’t sound very plausible.” Dodge’s approach would bring the maximum pressure to bear on Iraqi politicians by persuading the region and the world—Iraq’s neighbors, the European Union, the United Nations—to come into the Green Zone, not as tools of American policy but as equal partners in an effort to force a political deal, not unlike the U.N.’s role in creating a government in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. This would imply an American confession of failure. Instead of pursuing more ambitious goals for democracy in the region, the U.S. would offer security guarantees to Iran and Syria in exchange for coöperation. “We then turn to the Iraqi government,” Dodge went on, “and say, ‘You’ve got to reform your government, make it more inclusive, less corrupt, more coherent, less sectarian.’ So the Iraqi government is reconstituted within a multilateral framework where the E.U., the U.N., and the U.S. are all singing from the same hymnbook.”
Ambassador Khalilzad recently set this proposal in motion when he introduced a resolution calling for the U.N. to return to Iraq. He told his colleagues that Iraq will be the world’s problem for a long time. Khalilzad was part of the neoconservative group, led by Paul Wolfowitz, but after years of working on Iraq he sounds chastened. “We’ve made mistakes,” he said at his New York office. “I have personally made mistakes. I grant you all that. Now, however, let’s look at Iraq, at the future of the region.” Until now, he said, the U.S. has “been like a five-hundred-pound gorilla, sucking the air out of getting any kind of coöperation, rather than giving others a chance.” It is late in the day to try to “internationalize” Iraq, and other countries could be forgiven for doubting America’s sincerity. But Khalilzad seemed to recognize that there’s no longer any choice, and the new government of French President Nicolas Sarkozy has recently suggested that it is ready to play a significant role.
For Dodge, the only reason to give this long-shot strategy a chance is the awfulness of the alternative. “I wouldn’t bet the house on it succeeding,” he said. “But I would bet my hopes and fears for Iraq on it.”
In the likely event that the Iraqi state continues to collapse and the withdrawal of American forces leads to further fragmentation and violence, the U.S. will have to adopt something like what the former Administration official called “a venture-capital strategy”: using the available resources to invest in numerous small-scale efforts around Iraq, with the knowledge that many, if not most, of them will fail. “We have to shift from the Grand Plan to many initiatives,” he said. “We’ve had enough of the grand strategy.” Most of these initiatives will not be able to depend on backing by military force, as so much of American policy in Iraq has until now.
As the U.S. plans for the gradual withdrawal of forces, it should start preparing now for what it can realistically leave behind. The focus of most discussion is on the military side, but America’s long-term influence in Iraq will more likely be political. In 2004, when the Coalition Provisional Authority transferred sovereignty to an Iraqi government, it shut down its offices in the provinces and opened four “regional embassy offices” around the country, effectively putting the U.S. out of the business of local development, even as Iraq became fragmented under the pressure of civil war and a collapsed central government. One of the less noticed aspects of the surge has been a belated effort to return American officials to the more obscure corners of the country in the form of “provincial reconstruction teams”: joint civil-military efforts that funnel technical help and money from the American and Iraqi governments into the provinces, where political and economic development seems more feasible and responsive to the local population. The recent formation of local police forces and town councils in Anbar Province has had nothing to do with the central government and has been far more successful than previous attempts. These teams should be expanded during the life of the surge, so that they reach the self-sustaining, self-protecting size of a hundred and fifty people; this approach roughly follows the model of Afghanistan, where provincial reconstruction teams first developed several years ago have been an important, if insufficient, tool for extending development to the countryside.

TWO DAYS IN POLARDINS WORLD

On October 10th-October12th

a trilogy in two days!

Two west end shows and the british museum

IRAQ EXIT

Part 7

Predictions that a departure will actually strengthen America’s position are not so different from the wishful thinking of the Bush Administration. They see only the benefits of withdrawal; they refuse to face the brutal trade-offs that either staying or leaving would impose. A more honest argument says that it’s simply not a core American interest to prevent Iraqis from being massacred: the result of a withdrawal may be a humanitarian tragedy but a strategic footnote. (Obama’s statement implied as much.) This viewpoint has recently brought together hard-nosed realists, antiwar progressives, and isolationist conservatives. Even in narrow strategic terms, though, American interests would be harmed by large-scale slaughter in Iraq. The spectacle, televised around the world, would deepen the feeling that America is indifferent to human, especially Muslim, life. It would brand the U.S. as untrustworthy to potential allies and feckless to potential enemies. And it would destroy what’s left of American prestige. Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert at Queen Mary College of the University of London, who also served on the strategic-assessment team, told me, “What has defeated America in Iraq, apart from the failure of the state and its own incompetence, are a bunch of radicals with nothing more sophisticated than reëngineered artillery shells and rocket-propelled grenades. That is a loss of cataclysmic proportions.”
Dodge comes out of the British left and vehemently opposed the war. But this summer, when we met at his London office, he spoke of withdrawal as a prelude to catastrophe. “What are the U.S. troops going to leave?” he said. “They’re going to leave behind a free-for-all where everyone will be fighting everyone else—a civil war that no one actor or organization will be strong enough to win. So that war will go on and on. What will result in the end is the solidification of pockets of geographical coherence. So if you and I were mad enough to jump in a car in Basra—pick a date, 2015—and we tried to drive to Mosul, what we’d be doing is hopping through islands of comparative stability dominated by warlords who, through their own organizational brilliance, or more likely through external support, have managed to set up fiefdoms. Those fiefdoms will be surrounded by ongoing violence and chaos. That looks a lot to me like Afghanistan before the rise of the Taliban. Or Somalia. That’s where Iraq goes when Americans pull out.”
Dodge’s grim vision does not make an irrefutable case for staying in Iraq. But it’s a reminder that the illusions and naïve hopes with which America started the war shouldn’t accompany its end.
The dream of creating a democratic Iraq and transforming the Middle East lies in ruins. Any change in Iraq policy has to begin with the understanding that the original one failed, and that America’s remaining power can only be used to limit the damage. But Iraq still matters to the United States, whoever is in the White House, and it will for years to come.
One way in which Iraq and Vietnam—two wars doomed to be endlessly compared—are not the same is in the implications of America’s departure. Contrary to Bush’s recent claim, the American exit from Vietnam didn’t lead to the Cambodian genocide (U.S. actions during the war did), and, for all the bloodiness of the aftermath in Vietnam, it was not a strategic disaster. America’s prestige was damaged, but the dominoes did not fall, and the civil wars in Southeast Asia did not affect the larger history of the Cold War. But Iraq, sitting in the geographical heart of the Middle East, on top of all that oil and radicalism, is unlikely to become marginal. In 1966, Senator George Aiken gave Lyndon Johnson some memorable advice about what to do in Vietnam: Declare victory and get out. In contemplating a change in American policy on Iraq, one former Bush Administration official turned the advice around: “Declare defeat and stay in.”
This doesn’t mean keeping large numbers of troops in Iraq indefinitely; that has become impossible. David Kilcullen argued that next summer, when the surge is scheduled to end, American forces could be reduced to a level—say, eighty thousand—that might allow most of the core interests to be protected. Such a move would involve difficult calculations: as American commanders pull back from more stable areas—starting in the northwest, the west, and the south, where there are fewer sectarian divisions—they will risk a return to higher levels of violence. On the phone from Baghdad, General Petraeus said, “There’s an issue of what you might call ‘battlefield geometry.’ Where do you thin out and how do you do it? It’s not as simple as ‘Put in five brigades, one each month, take out five brigades, one each month.’ You might want to thin out in one place and not another. As you do that, you do want to modify your mission.” He added that “you may still be emphasizing protecting the population in one area,” while in more secure areas American forces might take on a role of supporting and advising Iraqi Army units. The changes in mission will come sector by sector and incrementally, with commanders hoping that today’s local ceasefire or the formation of a friendly Sunni militia in one town somehow holds and leads to long-term stability.

But, when the surge ends, there will have to be a strategic turn, away from Americans in the lead. An indefinite war in Iraq “costs us moral authority across the world,” Kilcullen said. The occupation of Iraq remains hugely unpopular with America’s democratic allies and throughout the Arab and Muslim world. “We need that moral authority as ammunition in the fight against Al Qaeda,” he added. “If we’re not down to fifty thousand troops in three to five years, we’ve lost the war on terror.”
At the same time, America will need a political strategy that consists of more than simply reiterating support for the Iraqi government or maneuvering to replace it with another. The political deadlock in Baghdad, which has brought the government of Nuri al-Maliki close to collapse, is often seen by Americans as a perverse failure on the part of Iraqi leaders to do the right thing. Senator Levin, explaining why his amendment insisted on a timetable, said, “As long as the Iraqi leaders believe that their future is in our hands instead of theirs, they will continue to dawdle while their country is torn by bloodshed.” This view fails to acknowledge the American role in empowering sectarian leaders, and it misunderstands the sources of Iraq’s divisions, which run deeper than individual stubbornness, to a fundamental clash of visions and interests.

EXIT IRAQ

Part 6
While serving on the assessment team, Kilcullen drew up a list of core American interests in Iraq, which he later gave to senior officials at the White House and the State Department. In order of priority, the list contained the following items: maintain the flow of oil and gas in the region; prevent the establishment of an Al Qaeda safe haven in Iraq; contain Iranian influence; prevent a regional war; prevent a humanitarian catastrophe on the scale of Rwanda; and restore American credibility in the region and in the world (which Kilcullen called “the master interest,” and which doing all the others would go a long way toward achieving). Some interests, he acknowledged to me, might be incompatible: for example, undermining both Sunni-led Al Qaeda and Shiite Iran.
Most proposals for withdrawal emphasize at least three of the interests on Kilcullen’s list. One is counterterrorism. The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, released a plan in June that calls for ending support for Iraq’s national-level security forces and removing all U.S. troops by the end of next year. It sets firm deadlines and abandons the effort to create a stronger central government and Army. This plan claims that it will actually be easier to fight Al Qaeda if American forces aren’t pinned down in Iraq—a recruiting poster for jihadists around the world. “Redeploying U.S. troops would make Iraq a quagmire for our terrorist enemies and rivals in the region,” the authors of the plan confidently assert. Pakistan, not Iraq, will likely remain the headquarters of international jihad, but the idea that a fragmented Iraq will be a hard place for terrorists to thrive willfully ignores the recent examples of Somalia, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Pakistan. And, without large numbers of American troops in Iraq, counterterrorism efforts will be limited to U.S. electronic surveillance and intelligence from Iraqi sources, with operations carried out by the Iraqis, whose interests and agendas constantly shift.
A second strategic interest is preventing a regional war. Every plan for withdrawal puts a strong emphasis on diplomacy in the Middle East. Talking to other countries in the region, including America’s enemies, is a lot more appealing than being targeted by them inside Iraq. Ambassador Crocker met his Iranian counterpart in Baghdad several times over the summer, but the talks thus far have been fruitless, with the Americans demanding an end to Iranian subversion in Iraq and the Iranians denying the charges. Unless the talks take place at the level of the Secretary of State, and broach the full range of antagonisms between the U.S. and Iran—nuclear weapons, regional security, Lebanon, Afghanistan—they stand little chance of succeeding.
The notion that Iraq and the Middle East will be more stable without an American occupation, as the Center for American Progress claims, misunderstands the role that America has come to play in Iraq: as a brake on the violent forces let loose by the war. America’s diplomatic leverage will be weakened by a withdrawal, and Iraq’s predatory neighbors will take advantage of the power vacuum to pursue their own interests. Even if regional interference doesn’t take the form of Saudi troops crossing the border to defend their Sunni brothers, Iranian Revolutionary Guards infiltrating Iraq to secure Shiite power, and Turkish forces entering Kurdistan to prevent it from becoming independent, the combined effect of proxy fights, irregular incursions, and increased refugee flows will likely roil the Middle East for years. Stephen Biddle, of the Council on Foreign Relations, told me, “The likelihood is that it doesn’t become a regional war, but there’s a roughly thirty-to-forty-per-cent chance that it’ll spread. During the Cold War, we spent trillions worrying about infinitesimally small risks. Thirty-to-forty-per-cent chance of a real, honest-to-goodness catastrophe is something that ought to factor into our policymaking now.”
Zalmay Khalilzad, the Ambassador to the United Nations, who spent almost two years as the U.S. Ambassador in Baghdad, trying in vain to bring about a political compact, sketched the possible fallout in stark terms. Without Americans present, he asked, “could it intensify into a terrible situation in which you get massacres, and that not only leads to escalation in Iraq but affects others? The losing side may ask for help from its brethren next door. We cannot stand aside and let these terrible things go on.”
Then there is the prospect of mass slaughter. Bush recently raised the spectre of genocide, in a speech suggesting that a withdrawal from Iraq could lead to killing on the level of Cambodia after the Vietnam War. Many Democrats were skeptical. On the campaign trail, Barack Obama said, “If that’s the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have three hundred thousand troops in the Congo right now—where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife—which we haven’t done. We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven’t done.” The argument is shallow: by Obama’s reasoning, America doesn’t have an obligation to prevent large-scale massacres in a country it invaded and occupied, but it does have an obligation not to be hypocritical about it.
“Genocide,” defined as an attempt to destroy a whole people on the basis of identity, has taken on the quality of a sacred category. It’s more useful to talk about slaughter, which doesn’t prompt the same amount of posturing. “Iraq’s violence is already quite deadly,” the Center for American Progress report says. “No single force will be able to truly gain an upper hand in the country.” The first proposition is true, the second arguably true. Together, they amount to a neat self-exculpation in the wake of an American departure: violence is already widespread, and it can’t get that much worse. Given the examples of Falluja and Baghdad—not to mention the unfortunate fates of Yazidis, Christians, Mandeans, and Gypsies in villages that America never occupied—the burden of proof lies on anyone who claims that Iraqis without Americans around won’t be substantially worse off, and might even fare better. Even Iraqis who want American troops out immediately acknowledge that the result will be more bloodshed. If America decides to leave Iraqis to their fate, they should at least be spared the parting thought that it’s for their own good.

EXIT IRAQ

Part 5
Some leaders in Washington, such as Senator Biden, believe that the divisions between Iraq’s ethnic groups are so intractable that the only solution is to divide Iraq into three autonomous regions: Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish. But the idea of partition can’t be imposed by outsiders and, so far, has no support from Iraqis. The past few years have made Iraqis deathly afraid of one another, but, apart from the Kurds, the war has not made most of them want to stop being Iraqis. A recent poll by academic researchers in Michigan found that the percentage of Baghdad residents identifying themselves as “Iraqis above all” more than doubled, across all groups, between 2004 and 2006. Civil war and sectarian rule have tarnished the prestige of religious parties and increased the appeal of a non-sectarian government. In August, the Shiite governors of two provinces in the south—a region that is almost entirely Shiite—were murdered, presumably by rival Shiite factions. This suggests that a partitioned Iraq would not be a peaceful or stable Iraq. Smaller civil wars would keep igniting, and the mixed cities would remain bloody, even if a way could be found to separate their populations. Nor is partition a formula for a quick American exit: to make it work, large numbers of troops would have to remain in Iraq, dividing and protecting the various factions and, in some cases, transporting people across sectarian lines. This, too, could go wrong in seven thousand ways. American troops could end up in a role similar to that of peacekeepers during the Bosnian civil war, supposedly guaranteeing safe passage to unarmed civilians who are targeted by their enemies for slaughter.
It’s easy to fall under the illusion that a perfectly framed ten-point proposal could allow for a painless withdrawal. But what if there is no such thing as a “responsible exit” from Iraq? This is the view of Stephen Biddle, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who spent the spring in Iraq, as part of a strategic-assessment team of military and civilian experts. He said, “When you look at the spectrum of policy approaches in Iraq right now, the extremes”—maintaining the largest force possible or pulling out immediately—“make more sense than the middle.” The “middle-ground policies,” he argued, “tend to dramatically reduce our ability to control the environment militarily, because they all involve withdrawing about half of the troops. It’s our combat activity that’s currently capping violence around the country, and almost everybody would cut that out—which means the violence is only going to increase. And yet they leave tens of thousands of Americans in the country, to act as targets. Continued U.S. casualties, continued deterioration of the situation all around them: within two or three years, that’s going to generate powerful pressure to go all the way to the zero option. Why not do it sooner, and save the seven to eight hundred lives you’re going to lose to walk through this drill in the meantime?”
A military officer with extensive experience in Iraq was less polite. “I just think it’s dishonest when people say we could go to advisory, get to fifty thousand troops, focus on training, still do the counterterrorism thing but not counter-insurgency,” he said. The reality of Iraq is bound to defeat the fantasies of Washington, the officer suggested. “What about the enemy, man?” he said. “Are we going to ask them to conform to our plan?”
David Kilcullen, an Australian counter-insurgency adviser who served on Petraeus’s staff in the first half of the year, said, “The real question is not withdrawal dates or troop numbers. The real question is: What do we want Iraq to look like once we don’t have a hundred and sixty thousand troops there? And is what we want achievable?” This spring, Kilcullen also served on the strategic-assessment team, which was led by Colonel H. R. McMaster, of the U.S. Army; David Pearce, of the State Department; and Colonel James Richardson, of the British Army. The assessment implicitly contradicted the Administration’s rhetoric by declaring the violence in Iraq to be driven by a communal power struggle in which the Iraqi government was one of the main actors. The goal that it set for the next two years was not a democratic Iraq but “sustainable security,” with Iraqis in the lead. One participant told me that a majority of the team believed that it was too late to achieve this goal.
In Kilcullen’s view, allowing the surge to run its course into next spring, while doing as much damage as possible to Al Qaeda in Iraq in the meantime, would make it likelier that a gradual withdrawal of troops would not leave behind the chaos of previous drawdowns—from Falluja and Mosul in 2004, from Tal Afar and Baquba in 2005, and from Baghdad in 2006. He said, “The longer you stay there doing police and counter-intelligence work, the more long-term stability there is once you leave.” He compared the surge to a course of antibiotics: “You keep taking it as long as possible, even after the symptoms are gone, to kill the underlying infection.”

IRAQ EXIT

Part 4
In June, a new center-left think tank, the Center for a New American Security, issued a report called “Phased Transition.” It envisions a gradual shift from the current strategy of taking the lead in counter-insurgency operations to a “support” role in Iraq. The report goes into more detail about this transition than the Iraq Study Group did, and it proposes a timeline. Troop levels would be reduced to sixty thousand by January, 2009, with a third of those remaining involved in a greatly expanded advisory effort—U.S. soldiers would embed with Iraqi forces, help them plan and conduct operations, and act as intelligence sources, identifying capable, corrupt, and sectarian Iraqi leaders. This process would continue for several years before a complete withdrawal would begin, around 2012. At the moment, there are only some six thousand Americans training and advising Iraqis; after four years of war, the Pentagon has not committed the resources to broaden this effort, even though counter-insurgency warfare depends on the emergence of a capable indigenous Army. (A military spokesman disputed this, saying, “The Pentagon is going above and beyond the requirements it has been tasked to fill.”)

Colin Kahl, a professor of security studies at Georgetown, contributed to the “Phased Transition” report. He warned that, in order for the plan to work, preparations would have to begin very soon. Advisory teams take considerable time to build. Officers and senior sergeants, culled from the limited number still available, would have to be assembled and trained months in advance of deployment; and skimming the cream of the Army and the Marine Corps for an advisory effort would reduce the efficacy of combat brigades. In other words, Kahl argued, President Bush needs to be forced to compromise now, or else the war will end in a precipitate, chaotic flight. Kahl told me, “If Bush keeps the pedal on the surge until the end of his Presidency, we will rocket off the cliff, and it guarantees that the next President will get elected on a pledge to get us out of Iraq now.”
American officials, including Bush, talk a lot these days about decentralizing the military’s efforts in Iraq—about building up local government and security forces, and pushing resources out of Baghdad. In the absence of a functioning national government, it’s the only way to begin stabilizing parts of the country. America has achieved some successes in the past few months—alliances have been made with tribal and municipal leaders in Anbar and other Sunni areas—but these are only temporary fixes. And, without a functioning state in Iraq, U.S. support of these Sunni forces could easily lead to renewed violence and warlordism. It isn’t clear that the tribal leaders behind the so-called “Sunni awakening,” which emerged in opposition to the brutality of Al Qaeda in Iraq, see their present allegiances as anything other than tactical steps toward an eventual showdown with the ultimate enemy: the Shiite-led government, and its Iranian backers. Recently, there has been talk among American officers of applying a similar formula in the south of Iraq, by allying with Shiite tribes that have begun to resist the extremist religious militias. But supporting sectarian factions without fuelling an even larger conflagration would require a deftness that the American military has seldom displayed thus far. “This could go wrong in seven thousand ways,” Kahl said of the new policy. “It’s the ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’ effect—we unleash forces we can’t control.”

IRAQ EXIT

Part 3
Several years ago, at the beginning of the insurgency, then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld decided that additional forces were not needed in Iraq, and he refused calls for a long-term expansion of the Army and the Marine Corps. With Rumsfeld gone and command in Iraq given to Petraeus—an innovative military thinker who oversaw the writing of the new counter-insurgency field manual—the Administration at last has a real strategy; but, having wasted four years, it now lacks the forces needed to sustain the gains made by the surge. According to a Pentagon consultant, a strategic-planning cell of colonels serving under the Army chief of staff, General George Casey, has estimated that the number of soldiers and marines who can be kept in Iraq into 2009 will be, at maximum, a hundred and thirty thousand. On Labor Day, at an airbase in western Iraq, Bush said, “If the kind of success we are now seeing here continues, it will be possible to maintain the same level of security with fewer American forces.” What he didn’t say was that some withdrawals will almost certainly have to come next year, regardless of the military’s “success.”
In the view of most Democrats, the inevitability of reduced troop numbers, the political stalemate in Baghdad, and the dwindling of public support in America require that a withdrawal begin soon. All the Democratic candidates for President have declared that they will end the war. And many Republicans in Congress have embraced the report issued last December by the Iraq Study Group, which called for regional diplomacy and for American combat units to be withdrawn; residual troops, likely numbering fifty to sixty thousand, would be limited to training and advising, counterterrorism, and force protection. The report did not impose a timeline, but others have tried to do so. In the Senate, two Democrats—Jack Reed, of Rhode Island, and Carl Levin, of Michigan—have introduced an amendment to a defense-appropriations bill which would require troop withdrawals to begin within four months of the bill’s passage, leaving behind only a “limited presence.” Among its co-sponsors are three Republican senators and three Democratic Presidential candidates: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joseph Biden. In August, Senator John Warner, the Virginia Republican, called for some troop withdrawals to begin before Christmas
The Democratic congressional leadership has refused to bring up for a vote bipartisan compromise proposals that lack a timeline for withdrawal. Senator Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, co-sponsored one such bill, which is based on the Iraq Study Group report; he said that, if the Democratic leadership allowed his proposal to come to the floor, it could get enough votes to compel the President’s support. “You have the President being inflexible and the Democrats playing politics,” Alexander said. If the legislative deadlock continues until the end of Bush’s Presidency, the White House, by default, will get what it wants.
In Washington, the debate over the war is dominated by questions about troop numbers and timelines—that is, by immediate American political realities. The country seems trapped in an eternal present, paralyzed by its past mistakes. There is little or no discussion, on either side, of what America’s Iraq policy should be during the next five or ten years, or of what will be possible as resources dwindle and priorities shift. If there is any contingency planning in the government, it’s being done at such a secretive, or obscure, level that a repetition of the institutional disarray with which America entered Iraq seems bound to mark our departure.
Preparing a judicious withdrawal from Iraq will demand the integrated effort of the whole government, not just under this President but under the next one as well. “You just cannot pretend that the Iraq war never happened and everything can go back to how it was before,” the former Embassy official told me. “The status quo before 2003 no longer exists. We have introduced fundamental new disequilibriums into one of the most sensitive parts of the globe. How do you contain it?” He added, “People have to start thinking about these things—small study groups with military, State, and intelligence people sketching out what are the core interests on a regional level, and working back from that to discuss some options. If that’s been done, I don’t know about it.”

IRAQ EXIT

Part 2
The media have largely followed the Administration’s myopic approach to the war, and there is likely to be intense coverage of the congressional testimony. But the inadequacy of the surge is already clear, if one honestly assesses the daily lives of Iraqis. Though the streets of Baghdad are marginally less lethal than they were during 2006, sixty thousand Iraqis a month continue to leave their homes, according to the International Organization for Migration, joining the two million who have become refugees and the two million others displaced inside Iraq. The militias, which have become less conspicuous as they wait out the surge, are nevertheless growing in strength, as they extend their control over neighborhoods like Ahmed’s. In the backstreets, the local markets, the university classrooms, and other realms beyond the reach of American observers or American troops, there is no rule of law, only the rule of the gun. The lives of most Iraqis are dominated by a complex array of militias and criminal gangs that are ruthlessly competing with one another, and whose motives for killing are more often economic or personal than religious or ideological. A recent report by the International Crisis Group urged the American and British governments to acknowledge that their “so-called Iraqi partners, far from building a new state, are tirelessly working to tear it down.”
After the string of bad decisions made by American leaders in the early years of the occupation, officials in Baghdad have made various technical corrections: training the new Iraqi Army in a more professional way, funding reconstruction projects that show faster results, and applying the methods of counter-insurgency to the war. But these improved approaches came much too late, and didn’t quell the profound sectarian hatreds that emerged after Saddam’s removal. A former Baghdad Embassy official told me, “If Iraqi leaders, in their own heart of hearts, don’t share a vision, there’s just not much you can do about it. I don’t think accommodation is going to happen.”
This political failure can’t be attributed to the Iraqis alone. Iraq’s leadership was originally installed, along sectarian lines, by the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority, and the chaos that followed the invasion drove Iraqis to seek safety in armed groups based on identity. The inability of Iraq’s communities to reconcile doesn’t absolve the United States of responsibility. Instead, it raises a new set of moral and strategic questions that are, in their way, more painful than at any other phase of the war. Facing these questions requires American leaders to do what they have not yet done—to look beyond the next three or six months, to the next two or three years. When America prepares, inevitably, to leave, what can we do to limit the damage that will follow our departure, not just for Iraq’s sake but for our own?
White House officials are determined to present the surge as a dramatic turn in the war—as if the war could still be won. In interviews with me, they blamed the public’s dissatisfaction on the Democrats, for “playing politics” with the war; on journalists, for being impervious to good news; and on the public, for having a short attention span. Peter Wehner, a former adviser to President George W. Bush who left the White House last month, acknowledged that the Administration had made many mistakes in Iraq. But he insisted that victory was still possible. Bush, he said, “has the stiffest spine in the Administration,” and he described Petraeus as a man who could enter the military pantheon next to Grant, if only the American people would give him the chance. “What happens if, at the eleventh hour, we’re witnessing one of the most remarkable feats in American history on the part of a general?” he said. “If that’s the case, why do you want to give up now?”
Bush will likely use Petraeus’s testimony, and his military prestige, to claim authority for sustaining the largest possible American presence in Iraq through the end of his Presidency. But how large could that presence realistically be? Currently, there are a hundred and sixty thousand troops in Iraq. The natural life of the surge will end in 2008, when the brigades sent earlier this year will finish their fifteen-month tours and return home. After that, it will become virtually impossible to maintain current troop levels—at least, for an Administration that has shown no willingness to disturb the lives of large numbers of Americans in order to wage the war. Young officers are leaving the Army at alarming rates, and, if the deployments of troops who have already served two or three tours are extended from fifteen to eighteen months, the Pentagon fears that the ensuing attrition might wreck the Army for a generation. Activating the National Guard or the reserves for longer periods could cause the bottom to fall out of public support for the war. Beyond these measures, there are simply no more troops available.

EXIT IRAQ PART ONE

An Iraqi whom I will call Ahmed lives in Saidiya, an area in south Baghdad where, in the nineteen-eighties, the regime of Saddam Hussein built large houses for well-connected Army officers, most of them Sunnis. After the American invasion, in 2003, Saidiya became a base of Sunni resistance, but since last year vicious sectarian fighting has divided its streets between Sunni and Shia, with front lines crisscrossing the district; the highway separating Saidiya from the Shiite area of Bayya, to the northwest, now marks an impassable boundary. “It’s just like the Great Wall of China,” Ahmed said, during a recent phone conversation. A graduate of Baghdad University, with a degree in English literature, he worked before the war as a news translator for Iraqi state television.
Saidiya has one of the highest rates of sectarian killings in the city. Eighty-four unidentified corpses were found there between mid-June and mid-July, according to Zeyad Kasim, a researcher at IraqSlogger.com, a news-gathering Web site. Ahmed said that the number actually represents an improvement—earlier this year, he saw bodies lying in the streets even more frequently. The U.S. military “surge” launched this spring, in which thirty thousand additional American forces arrived in Baghdad, has helped to stabilize Saidiya’s sectarian borders. The Americans don’t often patrol Ahmed’s neighborhood, but, when Iraqi Army forces call in air support, Apache attack helicopters can reach Saidiya within minutes.
Ahmed has little faith in the Iraqi Army itself. He said that the soldiers behave unprofessionally, don’t respect the chain of command, and seem more concerned with their salaries than with their responsibilities. “Ninety per cent of my neighborhood think the Iraqi Army is hopeless,” he said.
There is no functioning government in Saidiya. The power supply has dropped to less than two hours a day, and for a month Ahmed—a thirty-seven-year-old father of two who suffers from diabetes and a heart condition—could obtain water only from a hole that he dug in his back yard. His neighborhood is under the control of a Shiite militia claiming allegiance to Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical scion of a powerful clerical family, who has emerged as perhaps the most important political figure in Iraq. The militia employs the crippled and the poor to collect protection money, controls a black market for fuel, and forcibly recruits young men into its ranks as lookouts against the Americans. Its local “security” force consists of teen-agers brandishing AK-47s.
Ahmed, who has a Shiite father and a Sunni mother, considers himself a secular Shiite, and, in his view, the religious militias want to force people like him out of Baghdad. “Americans are the safe house for the whole situation in Iraq,” he said. “Once they say they are going to withdraw, the whole country will become a hell.” He went on, “I imagine that no Sunnis will be in Baghdad at all. Baghdad will be only for the Shiite man with the long beard and black imama—the turban. The Americans are representing the taboos, just like ‘Lord of the Flies.’ I imagine the Shiites will be just like that if the Americans have to withdraw. Who can fight will fight, who must leave will leave.” He added, “Those who are weak, who are trying to avoid the savagery, those who are at the edge of being eaten by the Shiite specifically—that will be the end point, that will be their doomsday. The plan, as we hear it, is to make Baghdad empty of Sunnis.”

This week, Ryan Crocker, the U.S. Ambassador in Baghdad, and General David Petraeus, the commander of the multinational forces in Iraq, will give their assessment of the surge to Congress—an event that, in Washington, has taken on the aura of a make-or-break moment for the Administration’s policy. But their testimony is likely to be unremarkable. Administration officials, military officers, and members of Congress described their expectations of it in strikingly similar terms, and a few said that they could write it in advance: military progress, a political stalemate among Iraqis, more time needed.
The Petraeus-Crocker testimony is the kind of short-lived event on which the Administration has relied to shore up support for the war: the “Mission Accomplished” declaration, the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein, Saddam’s capture, the transfer of sovereignty, the three rounds of voting, the Plan for Victory, the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Every new milestone, however illusory, allows the Administration to avoid thinking ahead, to the years when the mistakes of Iraq will continue to haunt the U.S.

Belguim Pointless?

A RECENT glance at the Low Countries revealed that, nearly three months after its latest general election, Belgium was still without a new government. It may have acquired one by now. But, if so, will anyone notice? And, if not, will anyone mind? Even the Belgians appear indifferent. And what they think of the government they may well think of the country. If Belgium did not already exist, would anyone nowadays take the trouble to invent it?

Such questions could be asked of many countries. Belgium's problem, if such it is, is that they are being asked by the inhabitants themselves. True, in opinion polls most Belgians say they want to keep the show on the road. But when they vote, as they did on June 10th, they do so along linguistic lines, the French-speaking Walloons in the south for French-speaking parties, the Dutch-speaking Flemings in the north for Dutch-speaking parties. The two groups do not get on—hence the inability to form a government. They lead parallel lives, largely in ignorance of each other. They do, however, think they know themselves: when a French-language television programme was interrupted last December with a spoof news flash announcing that the Flemish parliament had declared independence, the king had fled and Belgium had dissolved, it was widely believed.


No wonder. The prime minister designate thinks Belgians have nothing in common except “the king, the football team, some beers”, and he describes their country as an “accident of history”. In truth, it isn't. When it was created in 1831, it served more than one purpose. It relieved its people of various discriminatory practices imposed on them by their Dutch rulers. And it suited Britain and France to have a new, neutral state rather than a source of instability that might, so soon after the Napoleonic wars, set off more turbulence in Europe.

The upshot was neither an unmitigated success nor an unmitigated failure. Belgium industrialised fast; grabbed a large part of Africa and ruled it particularly rapaciously; was itself invaded and occupied by Germany, not once but twice; and then cleverly secured the headquarters of what is now the European Union. Along the way it produced Magritte, Simenon, Tintin, the saxophone and a lot of chocolate. Also frites. No doubt more good things can come out of the swathe of territory once occupied by a tribe known to the Romans as the Belgae. For that, though, they do not need Belgium: they can emerge just as readily from two or three new mini-states, or perhaps from an enlarged France and Netherlands.

Brussels can devote itself to becoming the bureaucratic capital of Europe. It no longer enjoys the heady atmosphere of liberty that swirled outside its opera house in 1830, intoxicating the demonstrators whose protests set the Belgians on the road to independence. The air today is more fetid. With freedom now taken for granted, the old animosities are ill suppressed. Rancour is ever-present and the country has become a freak of nature, a state in which power is so devolved that government is an abhorred vacuum. In short, Belgium has served its purpose. A praline divorce is in order.

INCA

Grim evidence of how the Incas “fattened up” children before sacrificing them to their gods has emerged from a new analysis of hair from two 500-year-old mummies preserved near the summit of a volcano.
The remains of the 15-year-old girl known as the “Llullaillaco Maiden” and the seven-year-old “Llullaillaco Boy” revealed that their diets changed markedly in the 12 months up to their deaths, shedding new light on the rituals of the ancient Andean civilisation.
The research, by a British-led team, suggests that the children were fed a ceremonial diet before being marched to a shrine 82ft (25 metres) from the top of the 22,110ft (6,739 metres) volcano Llullaillaco, where they were suffocated or left to die from exposure.
Before being chosen as sacrificial victims, the boy and girl had followed a typical peasant diet. This raises the possibility that they were chosen from among the Incas’ conquered subjects and killed not only to pacify the mountain gods, but also to instil terror and respect for an imperial power. “It looks to us as though the children were led up to the summit shrine in the culmination of a year-long rite, drugged and then left to succumb to exposure,” said Timothy Taylor of the University of Bradford, one of the lead researchers.
“Although some may wish to view these grim deaths within the context of indigenous belief systems, we should not forget that the Inca were imperialists too and the treatment of such peasant children may have served to instil fear and facilitate social control over remote mountain areas.”