This book isn't really about either George Bush, and there is no listing in the index for Babylon, which seems to have a meaning long established for Bible readers who have not become so fundamentalist that they imagine it was simply a city with an empire. This book was written a year ago, but there has been so little change in what Bush stands for in the last year that the message seems to be substantiated by every insurrectionary incident in the interim. The author has a point of view that should be familiar to anyone who has been paying attention to peace movements since World War Two and atomic diplomacy burst upon the scene in the 20th century. History is much older than the people who are now alive, and Tariq Ali seems to be dropping way back to 1823 to quote a letter by Heinrich Heine about `the hard times that are sure to come.' (p. 18). Some great poets have been concerned about their rulers, and the primary case is Osip Mandelstam, whose poem about Stalin before World War Two has still not been forgotten. The third footnote in this book relates how Stalin called the poet Boris Pasternak on the phone to ask about Osip, and suggests that Pasternak only survived because long before "he had praised one of the Georgian poets -- Joseph Djugashvili (Stalin's real name) -- as showing considerable promise. Another example, perhaps, of the premonitory power that exists in great poets." (p. 20, n. 3).
That might seem creepy to some readers, and I might seem unfair in using the word *creepy* mainly in my reviews of some works of Andy Warhol, but this book has a lot more quirks that might by described as such. If you try to look up *Mandelstam* in the index, under Makiya, Kanaan it just has "Osip 20" as if this book already knew which great poet should appear before Marcos, Ferdinand. Trying to read the entry for "Bush, George Sr. 135-7" is not all about the book, A WORLD TRANSFORMED by George Bush and Brent Scowcroft. The book is only in footnote 79 found at the bottom of pages 135 and 137, while page 136 has a picture at the top and 14 lines from Tony Harrison's poem:
I saw the charred Iraqi lean
towards me from bomb-blasted screen,
his windscreen wiper like a pen
ready to write down thoughts for men,
his windscreen wiper like a quill
he's reaching for to make his will.
This poem was printed in the `Guardian' and was posted on the internet when I checked this afternoon, and it is considerably longer than what is posted here or printed in this book. Though footnote 79 is about the first President Bush's book, Tariq Ali suggested reading that as an `account of how old friendships and clan loyalties determine top appointments in the United States, confirming Hanna Batatu's remark that the Syrian Ba'athists would not be out of place in US politics.' Footnote 80 on the same page about Blair `meeting with four senior journalists from the Guardian after the 2003 war' might be considered worse than creepy if you can figure out what it means.
I always find things that I can't say more exciting than whatever you might have expected to hear in church, so looking at the cities on the maps in Iraq inside the front cover, and also in Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan inside the back cover, I noticed that none of them was called a holy city on these maps. I see articles from several newspapers on the internet, and would not want to blame any particular paper, but it seems to me I just read some account of someone "in the holy city of Karbala." On the map in this book, Karbala and Hillah are closer to Babylon than Ramadi, Fallujah, Baghdad, Najah, or Tikrit, but I was at a loss on how any American paper knows a holy city from any other place that far from home. I did not expect to find any mention of holy cities in early accounts of the war, as this is something which I only started to worry about recently, but I did find some evidence that this author might have a clue or two about that. At the beginning of Chapter 3, An Oligarchy of Racketeers, holy cities are first mentioned in an account of the domination of the Arab world by the Ottoman empire.
` . . . the victory of the Turkish artillery and muskets over the badly equipped and poorly led army of the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt, following which the holy cities of Mecca and Medina became part of the Empire . . . The preachers were the first to change sides and record their loyalty to the new order. The week after the city fell, the Friday prayers in all of Cairo's mosques began thus:
"O Lord! Uphold the Sultan, son of the sultan, ruler over both lands and the two seas, conqueror of both hosts, monarch of the two Iraqs, minister of the two Holy Cities, the victorious Sultan Selim Shah. . . ." ' (p. 43).
The only listing for jackals in the Index is for a poem, `the jackals' wedding' 34-36, which establishes what the author means when he uses the term throughout the book. In case you aren't clear on that, the picture on page 37 has the caption:
`The jackals' wedding: members of Iraq's so-called Governing Council, central Baghdad, 13 July 2003.'
I definitely agree with what this book says about sanctions, even if it might overstate `a water purification crisis and increase the country's death rate. This was openly discussed within the Clinton administration and approved.' (p. 140). Water in Sadr City is probably worse now than what is described in this book.
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