TheMillerCircle.org

Nobel prize winner Lord Edgar Adrian (1932) talked about the great advantage of distance receptors, referring to our receptivity for sight and sound and emphasizing their sensory advantages over other senses like touch and pain, to give us advanced warning and knowledge of the objects around us; of course vision is the supreme receptor system in this regard, not only because light is fast and gives us visual information about objects far away, but also because our remarkable visual system can detect things under extreme conditions of light and dark allowing us to have at least some visual capacity for the environmental light excursions cyclically present on the surface of the earth. But vision has another meaning which we use regularly, when we say someone had enough vision to put these principals into our constitution. The vision we refer to describes our perceptive skills and obviously reflects not just our intrinsic visual skills, but our capacity to reason, plan and execute, a kind of longitudinal vision or a special line of sight. Just as our survival from a predator requires quick and immediate action and depends on our distance receptors, our vision and perception of issues and circumstances are no less important for survival of our culutre, no less predictive of our future as a society, yet it demands from us a more contemplative approach, a different kind of vision. But vision, capturing quanta, here too plays a role, but more as visual memory, an indelible part of our brain architecture that forces on us a construct of the world, one with a visual, identifiable component. Half our brain cells can be activated by light, so our memory is rich in visual context. When we say we are visual animals, in reality we mean that we have more than just the powers of detecting light. We do more than see, we can foresee too.

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In the Middle East there seems to be a new truth emerging to explain recent political elections. The person who identifies with Bush and receives the support of the Bush administration loses. The most recent example of this was when Amin Gemayel, former president of Lebanon, who was running for the seat vacated by his assassinated son. He lost a close election to an unknown who supports Hezbollah. It is now recognized that anyone identifying with the American government will lose an election in the Middle East because the American interest is now perceived for what our invasion of Iraq really intended….American hegemony. Bush’s policies are pushing Lebanon and the Palestinians closer to Hezbollah, and this trend is also taking place in Egypt. Any candidate who claims support from the Americans faces an uphill battle because of the reputation of the Bush administration and the now widely accepted perception about U.S. intentions. Many in the Middle East are telling U.S. policy makers to support the government of Lebanon and Palestinian elections, not a party. Bush’s policies are promoting the growth of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East. What a great ally he has been for al-Qaeda, yet Ben Laden and Bush are joined at the hip. One prospers from the other.

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When you want to know whether a strategy, such as the “surge” is working in Iraq, probably no one would trust George Bush for his impression. But, is there anyone in the Bush administration that you would trust? Probably not. Yet, it has been the hype of our government to try and give a positive message for loyal Bushies to take home over the summer recess so they can tell their constituents how things have really turned around. And, according to some polls, there has been an improvement in poll numbers suggesting some political gains for the warlords. But that’s all it is, hype! We have heard the number of deaths are going down, but as Juan Cole points out, the phrase “only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun” was part of a Noel Coward song written in 1923 and he was referring specifically to Baghdad. In other words, violence goes down in July because insurgents don’t want to carry explosives around when it is 120 degrees F in the shade. So the comparisons to make are between July months from one year to the next and that comparison goes like this for the American deaths:

July 2003: 48
July 2004: 54
July 2005: 54
July 2006: 43
July 2007: 80

Do you see any hint of a surge turnaround here?

But the situation with the Maliki government has never been worse. The Saudi’s have refused him a visit, members of his cabinet have left the government and it appears to be on serious life support. Worse yet is the death toll for the Iraqis… “Meanwhile, the statistics for the hapless Iraqis themselves are no less discouraging. According to icasualties.org, the Iraqi civilian and military death toll from political violence in July 2007 was 1,690, a 25 percent increase from the July 2006 number, 1,280. (There was also a 25 percent increase in Iraqi casualties in July 2007 over June 2007, meaning the trend was going in the wrong direction any way you look at it.) These statistics — bad enough as they are — are typically understated by a substantial margin because passive tallying by media outlets misses many deaths.”

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