The whole thing is worth it.

God I’d love to meet Glenn Beck in person and give him something to cry about.

Walt recounts how a friend who grew up in the American South during the 1960s was still taught an anti-union ditty (”Three hundred thousand Yankees lie stiff in Southern dust/ We got three hundred thousand, before they conquered us”) as a way of underscoring how deeply anti-occupation sentiment can persist. But then he draws a straight-line connection to Lynrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” using the verse that responds to Neil Young’s diss track “Southern Man.” Walt writes:

This is what defeat in war and prolonged occupation does to a society: it generates hatred and resentment that can last a century or more.

Yes! Yes that’s true. But “Sweet Home Alabama” is an example of something more subtle.

The crucial verse in “Sweet Home Alabama” is the third one, where Skynyrd sing, “In Birmingham they love the governor,” a reference to George Wallace, and then chant out, “Boo! Boo! Boo!” before asking if the conscience of Alabama is untroubled by Wallace’s racism. That’s as direct a confrontation of southern white racism as you could expect for a song glorifying the south, and it’s a credit to Skynyrd for taking the subject on. But the reason why they went after Neil Young is simple: “Southern Man” treats all southerners as Wallace. As a result, it risked marginalizing anti-racist white southerners who needed all the authenticity-cred they could get it into Wallace supporters’ heads that they shouldn’t back the demagogue. Lyrnrd Skynyrd, in other words, represented an Alabama Awakening. But Neil, in his zeal, treated reconcilable elements as irreconcilable. Skynyrd took him on as a step of taking back the south for their mutual and admirable goal.

I’m not saying Walt is wrong and “Sweet Home Alabama” isn’t a reflection of “what defeat in war and prolonged occupation does to a society.” It reflects a distinctly southern perspective, forged in what Walt describes. But it’s much more subversive than Walt gives it credit. Anti-occupation sentiments can be claimed and reclaimed for all kinds of worthy goals. As much as occupation warps the perspectives of those who bear its force, we’re not locked in a hopeless dialectic between occupation and demagoguery.

What the articles on the subject all seem to omit is that there will be no TV cameras in the courtroom for this trial. Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s rants will be available only by transcript. Americans, to the extent they aren’t bored to tears, will get to experience KSM’s pontificating on the evening news through the age-old craft of voice-overs placed over tastefully edited court drawings made mildly more exciting by creative use of keyframes. There’s a reason why you can’t get Zacarias Moussaoui’s greatest hits on Blu-ray.

Serwer, you smug liberal! I have a Zacarias Moussaoui LaserDisc! Shows what you know.

Now, I tend to think a KSM rant would redound, overall, to the U.S.’s benefit, so I’m somewhat disappointed by this news. But no one should report that there’s going to be some kind of game-changing harangue from KSM when it’s not even going to be televised. Even beyond that, think about it for a second. Usama bin Laden has issued over 10 years’ worth of videoed anti-American rants. The man has a fucking back catalogue. Yet al-Qaeda remains a potent-but-marginal phenomenon in the Muslim world. There is nothing, at all, that KSM could say in court that could change that fact. And still this demagogic and ignorant point is taken seriously in the media.

The Jewish alliance with Christian Zionism… I mean, it’s just a cynical form of self-hatred. These are people who will do everything necessary to ensure Israeli behavior reaches the full balance of destabilizing counterproductivity, all in order to achieve an millenarian outcome in which we Jews either die or cease to be Jews. I appreciate the need for Israel to not be rejecting allies at a time of international diplomatic isolation. But it’s surely healthier not to seek out anyone whose council would entrench that isolation. Anyone with experience dealing with addiction comes to understand the difference between helping and enabling. Or they die.

“Soon they will be heating the ovens in Auschwitz, but the Jews of Germany didn’t let the facts reach them. Typical Jewish stubbornness, just like in J-Street (…). They published letters and made it clear that the fear of eradication is merely propaganda. With about the same words J-Street uses when Iran is discussed.”

That’s via the Promised Land, which goes on to report that the offending column, penned by Gonen Ginat, compares J Street to “a a Jew named Yaakov Trachtenberg who published in April 33′ a statement in support of Nazi Germany.” Ginat:

“Not that many years after (the holocaust), J-Street don’t get what’s wrong with hosting anti-Semites and cheering for holocaust deniers (…). Maybe they are right, maybe. On the other hand, when J-street find it difficult to figure who is right in the confrontation between Israel and Hamas, from the Middle East it is difficult, real difficult, to tell the difference between Trachtenberg and J-Street.”

It’s stunning to me that our right-wing co-Shtetlists believe that this type of comparison is ever appropriate. Were I not the calm and serene individual I am, I’d consider noting that maybe Jews who favor irredentism, military conquest and indefinite domination of other peoples in the name of expansive security and prosperity ought to be extremely fucking cautious about not calling their progressive co-religionists Nazi sympathizers.

Only a few weeks earlier, hundreds of foreign reporters had been allowed into the country in the run-up to the election. Among them was Jason Jones, a “correspondent” for Stewart’s satirical news program. Jason interviewed me in a Tehran coffee shop, pretending to be a thick-skulled American. He dressed like some character out of a B movie about mercenaries in the Middle East—with a checkered Palestinian kaffiyeh around his neck and dark sunglasses. The “interview” was very short. Jason asked me why Iran was evil. I answered that Iran was not evil. I added that, as a matter of fact, Iran and America shared many enemies and interests in common. But the interrogators weren’t interested in what I was saying. They were fixated on Jason.

“Why is this American dressed like a spy, Mr. Bahari?” asked the new man.

Meanwhile, the Iranian regime is using the death penalty as a political tool to intimidate the Greens.

Kingsley & Tchoppi, mesmerized by a BlackBerry camera

And the results are up on her excellent radio show’s internetpage. We’re talking about Afghanistan. I suggest listening to this while looking at the accompanying picture of my beloved dog Kingsley and his pal Tchoppi the camera-hog, hanging out in Baltimore and nursing Sikki Nixx back to health after she shattered her leg playing rollerderby.

I got the same feeling reading this transcript:

DAVID GREGORY: Senator Lieberman– (UNINTEL) is the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee supports General McChrystal’s– policy of– of additional forces. He said this about the end game. The exit strategy. When the area has been stabilized, then it’s time to go home. Is that the obligation for the United States? That Afghanistan must be stabilized before we leave?

SENATOR LIEBERMAN: Yeah, that’s our goal. And– and it’s our goal– for good reason. As Senator Durbin just said, (CLEARS THROAT) we were attacked on 9/11 from Afghanistan. (CLEARS THROAT) If we leave Afghanistan with less than success, as– as a country that can govern itself and protect itself, it’s gonna have a terrible destabilizing effect on the rest of the region.

So, I don’t like it when people say we have no long term interest in Afghanistan. Or we’re lookin’ for an exit strategy. We– we– we have– we don’t want to have a long term interest in having our military there long term. But we have real long term interest in– this place being stabilized. And–

It should be clear that these are a set of bullet points strung together, with no narrative or argumentative sinew connecting them. I won’t front. If we had to divide the debate into For and Against the Afghanistan war, Lieberman and I are going to be standing on the same side of the room, an unfortunate fact that I’m not happy about. But even if we’re going to entertain the fiction that Lieberman is actually motivated by more than pique, the guy isn’t actually making a case to anyone on television who might be wavering or persuadable.

That case sound look more like: the surest way we can actually bring the broader Afghanistan-Pakistan theater of war to a conclusion that satisfies U.S. interests against the people who attacked us on 9/11 is to address the reasons in Afghanistan why the insurgency takes root. Because that rootedness provides what’s known as ’strategic depth’ for al-Qaeda, even though al-Qaeda are pretty much absent from Afghanistan: material support, money, breathing room, dudes to potentially do stuff against us and our allies; I’m not saying Afghan villagers are going to fly planes into the Sears Tower, but you get the idea. Now, if we pay attention to why Afghans give active or passive support for the insurgency, it’s not because they like the Taliban; they hate it. But the Taliban provides better methods of adjudicating disputes and a kind of security-through-fear. If we cut through those methods, militarily and economically and governance-wise, and address those root causes, then we constrict the breathing room for al-Qaeda massively, and along with the Pakistanis staying in Waziristan, that tightens the noose further. And then we keep the pressure on in Waziristan and al-Qaeda Senior Leadership — with its allies in the Haqqani network, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and the Mehsud Tribe-led Pakistani Taliban — is fucked. We constrict and contain them, harass them militarily when we can, and they’re done in a couple of years, because the Muslims they seek to exploit and radicalize will see their impotence. We help build up the Pakistani economy and rule of law and the Afghan security forces, and then we’re done. Done! And “Done” here means “we have a close and long term diplomatic and economic relationship with Afghanistan and Pakistan but our troops come home” just to make sure that neither country backslides. But I mean it — this isn’t and shouldn’t be a “Forever War.” We can end it, and end it on our terms. I think this is in our interests. What do you think?

But that would require Lieberman to, you know, think this stuff through, and that’s haaaaaaaaaard.

You know that old Ghost lyric, “I shoulda stayed in job corps“? Some of that, combined with the interrogation debriefs from the LET operatives who pulled off Mumbai — shown in a great new HBO documentary; a kid is basically crying because he realizes that LET lied and manipulated him into becoming a mass murderer — would go a long way. The unfortunate fact is that Kerry-Lugar-Berman proved that the Pakistani popular antipathy to the U.S. is so overwhelming that even when we put together a $7.5 billion aid package for funding all the things that the Lawyers Revolt said we should invest in if we were sincere just gets twisted as a plan for creeping U.S. domination. (And it doesn’t matter for the sake of this point that the military did the manipulating. There was a receptive audience for the manipulation. The “demand” side is what matters here.) So maybe what we ought to do is open trade talks instead of sending money this time. Or, better yet, make use of NATO or ASEAN or G-20 or U.N. fora for expanding Pakistani economic opportunity, to underscore that the entire world has an interest in the internal stability of a nuclear-armed country.