iJamming.net

(This race took place a full week ago, Saturday Mar 22. I was waiting for the Pine Hill Arms Website to upload the photos before posting my account. Unfortunately, almost all the pictures are stored on a PhotoReflect site in thumbnail form, encouraging us to purchase them as souvenirs. That’s a shame; having already spent $50 on the admission fee, I’d prefer it if the Pine Hill Arms could do what it’s done in previous years, and just post a bunch of photos on its regular web site. Fortunately Belleayre Mountain has posted its own photos, and I’ve used some of those here. )

I skipped the Team Photo to get a couple of ski runs in; it was too beautiful a day not to do so.

Last year, I competed in the Pine Hill Arms ski-bike-run Triathlon at Belleayre Mountain despite a nasty leg injury picked up a month earlier on the ski slopes. End result? I had a real nasty time of it, and had to then take the next two months off all sports completely, embarking instead on a perilous path of X-rays/MRIs, proposed surgery and eventual therapy that brought me down emotionally as well as physically. This year I opted to compete again, but with a totally different attitude: Enjoy it first, worry about it later. Training on the bicycle on the local hills in late winter weather was still a bitch: there’s no other way to describe it, and there’s no way to prepare yourself for the race course’s nasty series of hills other than to get out there and do them. But the skiing and running promised some “fun.” And fun, indeed, was had. Despite…

1) Standing on top of Belleayre Mountain for thirty minutes, waiting for the race to start, in windy sub-freezing weather, wearing only Underarmor, a thin track top and running gloves. Hey, at least it was sunny. Let it go!

A few seconds after setting off from the mountain top… I’m somewhere at the back of the photo, on the right. It amazes me just how quickly some people can push off at the start line.

2) The skier next to me wearing cross-country skis that I swear were no more than two inches wide. How he got down the hill in them I don’t know, and couldn’t see: he shot off across the Belleayre ridge like a bullet, and I never saw him again. Let him go!

3) The casual weekend skiers who somehow found themselves on the race course despite Belleayre’s token effort to shut off access points to the route. It’s one thing going 30mph down a super-fast packed powder “blue” run with a bunch of other suicide skiers; it’s another thing entirely to be watching out for five year olds cruising casually back and forth across the course. I couldn’t help but feel like I was in a video game, except that if I hit someone here they’d get hurt for real. But hey, no one did get hit. Let it go!

At left, skiing past the Overlook Lodge at mid-station, where the mountain flattens out. You can just about make out a volunteer on the right trying to hold back the casual skiiers.

4) Having no one to help me crew, and taking a solid minute to switch from ski boots to running shoes. Some veterans with help from family assistants can do it in fifteen seconds. But it’s not like I’ll catch those people anyway. Let them go!

5) My bike gears slipping out of alignment just before the peak of the first savage hill, at the very moment I thought I had it beat. As I desaddle (is that a word?) and run my bike up to the crest of the hill, I’m disappointed that I’d trained so hard to ride these hills and now my equipment has let me down. But I don’t seem to be the only one running or walking my bike so just walk and run a little faster and …. Let it go!

6) My chain coming off entirely near the peak of the next hill. I take solace in the fact I’ve already passed another cyclist who had his bike upside down, desperately trying to reattach his own chain, and the fact that, all around me, I hear non-expert cyclists, mainly on mountain bikes or, like me, a hybrid, complaining of exactly the same problem. None of us really know how to bike this hard on our less-than-ideal equipment. Let it go!

Fortunately, no photo exists of me pushing my bike up the back hills with the chain loose! This one is taken from Route 28, coming back towards Belleayre Mountain from the village of Pine Hill before – as you can see from the runner who is ahead of me – turning back round and retracing our steps on foot.

7) Forgetting to take off my track suit top when I turn my bike in, losing more valuable seconds as I run back and throw it at a volunteer. And having to stop and do up my shoe lace just half a mile into the run. Valuable seconds lost if I thought I was going for anything more than beating last year’s time. But when I overtake another male runner tying up his own shoelaces two minutes later, I realize, “So this happens to the best of us.” He can just… let me go.

8) The steep uphill in the midst of the running leg (introduced for the first time last year), which seems like cruelty piled on top of cruelty. Every part of this triathlon course is graded (i.e., not flat) to begin with: whose idea was it to send us up a quarter-mile perilously steep hill people can’t even walk at a decent pace? (Answer? Someone who doesn’t compete!) Ah, what the hell, just walk it at less than a decent pace. That’s what everyone else is doing. After this you’re almost there so… Let it go.

9) Getting a stitch on the last mile of running. Normally I could run a couple of hours without thinking much about it. But this has been solid down and uphill running, on the back of stomach-crunching up-and-down-hill bike riding, preceded by crouched-position downhill speed skiing. Nothing I can do about it; I just won’t be able to push on the last few hundred years. So breathe in deep and … Let it go.

10) Taking the last turn, off the last downhill on Route 28, up into Pine Hill and the finish line, looking around and seeing the other guy with the shoelace problem a good thirty yards behind me. Knowing I can’t catch the runner ahead of me, I let myself cruise towards the finish line. With only twenty yards to go, the guy who was behind me suddenly shoots past me go. I try and catch him but he’s got the momentum; he beats me by three seconds. More power to him; he found the spurt where I couldn’t. I’ll shake his hand as soon as I find him after the finish. But for now, best just… Let him go.

The finish line is two feet ahead of me, in red, on the ground. I look like I’m done already!

And when all is said and done and I look at my watch, it turns out I’ve gained five minutes on last year’s time. Half of that gain is attributable to the faster ski conditions. The other half appears to have come on the run. Last year I was in absolute agony when I got off the borrowed (former pro rider’s) road bike from all the thigh-crunching low gear work. This year, my cheap bike actually made pedaling uphill less painful, and sent me off in to the running section a lot looser – and, it would seem, faster. My zen approach has paid off. I’ve even learned from last year’s confusion about where to park, what bags to pack and where to leave them. I use one of the changing rooms at the Pine Hill Arms Hotel, to take a shower and change into warm clothes, and when I get back downstairs, the bus back to Belleayre is about to leave. My equipment has been safely stored at the lodge and I’m back in my car and heading to a kids birthday party in Woodstock barely an hour after finishing the race. I’ll be sore for a solid week to come: in fact, three days after the race, I take one of the slowest jogs I’ve ever engaged in as I attempt to loosen back out my leaden thighs. And the new Onteora Runners Grand Prix starts in just a few days. But I finished in the top half of the field once more, as much as I can hope for until I become a stronger cyclist, and I’ve lived to tell the tale. So, embrace the post-race high and as for all the sore muscles… Let it go!

R>E>M> aren’t the only group to come blazing back this week. The reformed James have just unleashed the first song from their new album Hey Ma. It’s called “Whiteboy” and by what I’m not sure is any kind of coincidence, it’s got that same sense of familiarly fuzzy urgency and murky momentum that renders Accelerate so magical. You can’t mistake “Whiteboy” for anybody but James (though, funnily enough, it opens with a “We’re back” guitar riff highly similar to Accelerate’s opener “Living Well Is The Best Revenge”), complete with horns reminiscent of the Seven era, crunchy guitar riffs that sound like Eno’s still at the helm, and Tim Booth’s typically memorable lyrics. In fact, as I’ve stated on these pages before, Tim Booth may be my favorite lyricist of the last twenty years – nobody has written about spirituality and sexuality with the same poetic skill – and I’ll back that up with anyone who has the time to buy me dinner in the Catskills for the effort.

More songs about mothers and guns…

So, Hey Ma is out next week. It seems to have sneaked up on me. Was it really over a year ago that the group reformed and I wondered about going to see them in London on my birthday in late April? I guess so. Have they been busy in the interim? Looks like it. Have I heard anything else from Hey Ma? No, man; I’ve been busy in my little corner of the world, waiting for new music to be piped over the Internet for me. Now I see James are playing the Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen next Monday night – a week to the day after R.E.M. played the Royal Albert Hall – and for a moment I wish I was again living in the Smoke and getting my VIP passes for all these concerts like I did back in the day. But then I’d be missing out on all those lovely school board meetings and the ski-bike-run triathlons and the supposed peace and quiet that allows me to finish a book. Am I rambling? Is it Friday? Cut me a break. Buy me a plane ticket. It’s my own ma’s birthday tomorrow and I wish I was there for her, especially as her friends are throwing her a surprise party that’s no longer a surprise ‘cos nobody can ever keep a secret in a northern English town. Hey ma, happy birthday! And my wife and toddler have both been sick with a flu-fever bug that’s brought down everyone in the Catskills but the skiers and snowboarders who build up resistance on those sub-freezing days on the mountains… (Hey, Campbell!)… Yesterday, Noel (Hey, Noel!) would not do anything but cling protectively to his mother’s chest, even when sleeping. This morning, I noticed that he was stinking. My wife talked about how his fever was shaking out the toxins. And then I just wondered off to my 2005 interview with Tim Booth and I find this:

Some days I think we’re divine, transcendent, and then other days I think we’re some kind of virus that is fucking up the planet and the earth will shake us off, have an eruption. Like when you get ill, your body will try and throw off this virus. What might that be that the planet throws off this virus that is destroying us?

As Booth sang on his solo song, “Monkey Bone,” Everything’s connected.

Tim Booth fronting James in 1993, at the peak of their popularity. “There’s one intention: you make the best record you can possibly make in that time, at that time, with the people who are around you. And that’s it.”

Truth be told, though I’ve seen James in concert many a time – even Campbell saw them twice before he was four years old! – the stage has never been their forte, as far as I’m concerned. But their best records just endure and endure and endure; I still often select Millionaires on the iPod when I’m heading out for a fast run and want the inspiration. And if you’re not sure of what I’m raving, visit their myspace page: following straight on from the new single “Whiteboy” is Millionaire’s opening song “Crash.” The rest of that album is/was equally excellent; as with Accelerate, you keep waiting for the bum track and it never arrives.Unfortunately, at the time Millionaires was released, James were no longer fashionable. Too prolific, too consistent, yet too experimental and not bothered enough with trends, they had reached the “planned obsolescence” point of the career arc. After another album, they recognized as much and broke up.

So, why not let sleeping bands lie? Why be excited that Booth got back with Larry, Saul, Jim and the others? Let’s look at it a different way. We’ve all endured R.E.M.’s artistic slide over the last decade, though few of us – certainly not myself – have come out and suggested they call it a day. And at the end of it all, it looks like, with Accelerate, they may have redeemed themselves. James took the opposite tack. Five years after breaking up because of all the usual issues that plague middle-aged bands, they realized that maybe all they had needed was a break. In the meantime, Tim Booth released a solo album, Bone, that was every bit as good as most of James’ work. It may have sold diddly squat, but it’s a better album than Around The Sun… My point being that, if a band takes a breather, then maybe it at least prevents them from releasing a bummer. I’m down with that.

The best James album most people never heard.

…In the meantime, I’ve been re-listening to Seven, while re-reading that interview with Tim Booth I conducted from early 2005, after the release of Bone. The interview has served to remind me that Hey Ma! is – but of course! – a continuation of umpteen previous James/Booth titles, like the album Gold Mother and the Bone solo song “Eh, Mamma,” which suggests that Booth is still writing about the same subject matter, for better or for worse. Hopefully for better: as he says in the interview,

As an artist I would love to not be writing in some of the areas that I’ve obviously gone back to, but I can’t escape my own biology. And clearly those are the things with which I’m still wrestling. I look at a lyric and if a lyric has got energy, and if the energy is a truth … you can feel when a lyric’s dead and when a lyric’s alive. So if I’m still writing about the same thing but I look at a lyric and say, ‘it’s still alive,’ I can’t then go off and start again and try and write a completely different lyric for the song. It just doesn’t work like that for me.

Not blowing James’ trumpets of Jericho, but I think this interview with Tim Booth is probably the most intellectual, philosophical and ultimately rewarding conversation I may ever have conducted with someone who makes his living in the “entertainment industry” – and all the more remarkable for the fact that we conducted it by phone. If you have some time, make a cup of tea, listen to some James, and read along. Spare yourself the time. It’s Friday. And if you’ve got a copy of Hey Ma, please yousendit to me.

Listen to “Whiteboy” at myspace
WeareJames web site
Tim Booth interview at iJamming!
Review of Tim Booth’s Bone at iJamming!

There’s been barely but one album on my CD player these last three weeks: Accelerate. I’ve been falling in love with R.E.M. all over again.

I wasn’t sure this would happen. My relationship with R.E.M.’s music for at least a decade, maybe fifteen years, has felt like a stalled marriage: still friends, still fond of each other, but with no excitement, no magic. There comes a point where you have to wonder if you’ll ever rediscover that magic – or whether you should just file for divorce and find a new lover.

The issue of when things went downhill for R.E.M. is one of mostly subjective opinion, depending, to a large degree on where and when you came to the party. As someone who got on board when the train first pulled into the European station, I firmly believe that four of the first five albums were classics, that Out Of Time and Automatic for The People fully deserved their multi-platinum success, and that things have never been quite the same since they went back out on tour with Monster, trying to get their heads around the fact that their little band from Athens had become one of the biggest groups in the world. (Those who only got on board in the 1990s are entitled to a different view.) The departure of Bill Berry – the under-rated, understated heart and soul of the band – after New Adventures in Hi-Fi sounded the death knell in so many ways, but the remaining trio nonetheless persisted, largely at Berry’s insistence. Their first album without him, Up, was a brave experiment that I thoroughly admired, but though the mid-tempo ballads set Reveal was a phenomenal success almost everywhere but America, where it tanked, I struggled to enjoy more than its singles, and those only in isolation; and as for 2004’s Around The Sun, other than the first two perfectly pleasant but by now formulaic mid-tempo ballads, even the band now agrees it was tedious.

“Honestly, I had problems with that album the day we finished it.”

said Michael Stipe in a recent on-line interview. (Sorry: I’ve lost the link!)

“We had gotten into some bad work habits, taking forever and not trusting our instincts. I felt it isn’t who we are as a band and as people. We were working in a way that didn’t play to our strengths.”

In other words, they recognized that they’d grown (collectively, if not individually) fat and lazy. They’d reached the point where they could tour, lucratively – and convincingly – on the back of their magnificent catalogue, forever. But along the way, they’d come to coast in the studio. Well, sometimes you have to hit rock bottom to climb back up.

Accelerate: Fall in love all over again.

You could tell there was a new sense of urgency about R.E.M., a realization that they had lost almost all their American record-buying fans and were on the verge of losing the European ones too, many months ago. Perhaps you felt it when they decided to host rehearsal “sessions” in Dublin in front of an audience. Or when they made available online footage and tapes of those shows. When they released a live album/DVD. (A very disappointing live album/DVD, I hate to hasten to mention, but an attempt to engage the fans nonetheless.) Perhaps you only caught wind that R.E.M. had returned to their raucous and rough-edged power-pop around the point that the new album’s title, Accelerate, was announced. Or when the track-listing was revealed: eleven songs in under 35 minutes. (Reveal and Around The Sun, by comparison, spread their 12 and 13 songs respectively across an almost interminably equal 54 minutes.) Or when you heard first single “Supernatural, Superserious” and thought, Yes, that’s more like the band I remember, back when they were young and trim and sexy. Or when you visited Accelerate’s standalone web site and heard a couple more songs that suggested that clichéd (for a reason) phrase, “return to form.” Or when you realized that R.E.M. – a stadium act in Europe, and still, though you wouldn’t know it from recent album sales, an arena act in America – were playing a club at South By South West this year: yes, R.E.M., the group that just about damn well started that whole alternative indie college rock phenomenon, had come to realize that they needed the hipsters and the press at America’s pre-eminent music convention, much more than the hipsters and the press needed them. Maybe you only caught on to the new, old R.E.M. vibe this past week when you heard a stream of that SXSW show archived on NPR, or the concert a few days later at London’s Albert Hall, still available on Radio 2. Or when R.E.M. pulled the final punch of their extended pre-release comeback bout by streaming the entire album online, until March 31st, on ilike. Or maybe you haven’t caught wind of any of this and have all but given up on your expectations. Don’t. R.E.M. have returned with their most euphoric album since 1986’s Lifes Rich Pageant.

Yet the fact that Accelerate represents a return to the electric guitars and short songs of old does not reflect negatively on the brilliant ballads of the early 1990s; rather, it reflects positively that a group of musicians all around the 50-year age have somehow rediscovered the energy and vitality of their youth. Or to put it another way: on Accelerate, R.E.M. prove no less energetic than the teenagers in Arctic Monkeys.

The video for “Supernatural Superserious.”

I knew Accelerate was “on” from the moment my advance copy hit the CD deck, but I had to leave it there to fully fall in love with it – R.E.M. songs, even their most commercial, take time to sink in, to fully realize their potential. Having listened to little else these last few weeks, Accelerate’s songs have gradually became so embedded in my psyche that they’ve actually started haunting my dreams. I wake up in the middle of the night to hear my subconscious happily singing “Everybody here comes from somewhere” (“Supernatural Superserious”), “Galveston sounds like that song that I love” (‘Houston’), “I am not that easy, I am not that horse to water,” (“Horse To Water”), and “Death is pretty final, I’m collecting vinyl, I’m gonna DJ at the end of the world” (“I’m Gonna DJ”). One by one, every short song has declared itself distinct, and Goddamnit, there’s not a weak one in the set. There’s not even a wacked-out weirdo “New Orleans Instrumental #1.” This is an album of eleven singles. Every fucking song sounds like a hit and yet not one of them sounds like a sell-out.

Here, then, are eleven reasons to fall in love all over again:

1) Peter Buck’s “we’re back” electric guitar riff that opens “Living Well Is The Best Revenge” and with it, the album.
2) The sense of internal purpose that’s audible in the performance of “Houston.” Listen closely and hear the drive behind every pronounced note.
3) The double-tracked vocals and fuzzy guitar on “Mr. Richards.”
4) Mike Mills’ shouted backing vocal that’s allowed to overextend “Man-Sized Wreath”s conclusion.
5) The reference to prior songs “Electron Blue” and “Feeling Gravitys Pull” on “Sing For The Submarine.”
6) The harmonies on the chorus of “Supernatural Superserious” set off by Buck’s descendant guitar chords: R.E.M.’s trademark sound, still fresh after all these years.
7) “Hollow Man”s deceptively slow start, before “accelerating” into the album’s purest pop song of all.
8) The line “Where is the cartoon escape hatch for me?” on “Accelerate.” Michael Stipe has rediscovered his penchant for the instantly quotable lyric on this album and in the process, has reinvigorated his still richly unique voice.
9) The regal chorus to “Until the Day Is Done,” a song that is surely political in theme but which I’m happy to hear, like the rest of the album, as music first, meaning later. It’s also the nearest Accelerate comes to something we’ve all heard before – the archetypal R.E.M. mid-tempo ballad – yet it’s the only one in the set. And how much better does it sound for that?
10) The sense of youthful abandon that permeates throughout “Horse To Water.” This more than any other reminds of Lifes Rich Pageant. Crank it up.
11) The finale that is “I’m Gonna DJ.” By my own reckoning – pun intended – this and “Horse To Water” are the most raucous of the eleven song set. When did any group in this attention-deficit digital disorder age last decide to put their best numbers at the end of an album? Everything you ever loved about R.E.M. of the 1980s is encapsulated in “I’m Gonna DJ”’s 125 seconds. And yet it sounds as contemporary as if they’d just bounced out of a Brooklyn loft with Pitchfork’s endorsement on their shoulder. And with that perfect final line: “Music will provide the light you cannot resist, you can not resist, you can not resist. Yeah!”

“There aren’t many people that are as good at this as we are,”

says Stipe.

“I don’t know how people sell records nowadays. That’s not my concern. My concern is to make a record that revitalizes the band. I have to think that whoever has liked us over the years will hear it and be excited.”

They will. I, for one, can not resist. Yeah!

R.E.M.’s online trailer for Accelerate

Remarks Remade at iJamming!
More R.E.M. at iJamming!

The 60s’ Most Outrageously Irreverent Magazine, boasts the by-line to the Best of the Realist, a book I currently have out on loan from the Mid-Hudson Library. That byline does its subject a dis-service: The Realist was outrageous, certainly, and irreverent, for sure, but it was something much more than that. Founded by Paul Krassner while living at home in 1958, published all the way through the 60s and not giving up the ghost until 1974, the Realist combined biting political satire with hard-edged political and social commentary: inbetween its regular baiting of the Catholic Church, the FBI, the dead Kennedys and the many live ones, it also ran features by the likes of Lenny Bruce, Henry Morgan, and Kurt Vonnegut. Better yet, it interviewed many such icons under its monthly “Impolite Interview” – conducted, in each case as far as I can tell, by Krassner himself, who also gave the Yippies their name. (Oh yes, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were also occasional contributors, especially in 1968 as the Yippies launched their suicide mission to Chicago.)

The Impolite Interviews – conversations of such erudition that I occasionally wondered if the subjects hadn’t been given the opportunity to go back and edit their comments – make for revealing reading; they’re like a window into the anything-is-up-for-discussion whirlpool that was the sixties. I had fun reading them. And in the spirit of the Realist’s own sense of adventure, I thought I’d pull out a few choice quotes and see if you, the iJamming! readers, can figure out who said what. No prizes that I can think of, just use the comment section below and we’ll let it run for a while.

You will notice that all the interviewees are white males – the only exception in the book was Dick Gregory and there was no quote by him that wouldn’t give his skin color away – and you may have particular reason to wonder about the man behind the final quote. But such were the sixties. The civil rights battles (for non-whites, women, gays and others) were being fought, one could argue, but they had not yet been won. And so…

The quotes:

1) “I’m a terrible coward. When I have a complaint against a department store, I try to avoid using the phone – I’d much rather put it on paper and avoid all danger of any personal combat.”

2) “Very few artists I know are happy. The kind of artist who writes a poem about peace is the kind of guy I flee.”

3) “In London, you can get laid for thirty shillings – what’s that, about four bucks? Well, I mean you wonder how is it possible to see a stranger, interesting-looking chick, know you can make it with her for thirty shillings, and then just walk on by? Christ, you’d think a guy with money would simply lay one chick after another right straight through the day. Right? Well, not a bit of it, old chap! The reason is they’re used to it by now.”

4) “No amount of analysis is going to let me go into a store and ask for contraceptives.”

5) “Abortions are a terrible karmic bummer, and to support them – expect in cases where it is a bona-fide toss-up between the child and the mother’s life – is to harbor a worm of discrepancy.”

6) “Over a 200-year period, women are really going to emerge as human beings. But in between, a lot of people are going to have miserable lives, because they don’t have skills, they’ve become dependent in all the wrong areas; because they’re competitive when it comes to cocktail hour and having a big mouth, but they’re not really competitive – they don’t want to be girls, but they don’t have the courage to be men.”

The interviewees:

a) Woody Allen
b) Joseph Heller
c) Ken Kesey
d) Norman Mailer
e) Mort Sahl
f) Terry Southern

Who said what?

The 5th Anniversary of the Invasion of Iraq has caused many editors in American media to commission op-ed “re-views.” The New York Times published nine short pieces last Sunday from “experts on military and foreign affairs” on “the one aspect of the war that most surprised them or that they wished they had consider in the prewar debate.” In a sadly historic example of revisionist understatement, L. Paul Bremer, the hand-picked “envoy” to a post-invasion Iraq, admits that “I should have pushed sooner for a more effective military strategy,” while Richard Perle, well-known neo-con, argues that while “the right decision was made,” “we blundered into an ill-conceived occupation that would facilitate a deadly insurgency from which we, and the Iraqis, are only now emerging.”

The on-line Slate magazine this week published a much more interesting series of essays; returning to those of what it calls its “Liberal Hawk” columnists who had supported some kind of intervention in the first place, it asked them to answer the question, “How did I get it wrong?” The answers make for mostly sobering reading; they won’t bring back any of the 4,000 dead American soldiers or the tens and hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, but they offer more self-examination than you see coming from the Bush Administration. It’s worth noting that none of them (almost all of whom are white males) seem to fully admit that the removal of Saddam himself was part of getting it wrong, nor, in fact, that war itself is a necessarily avoidable goal. William Saletan is particularly prominent here. He offers up a highly self-critical list of personal mistakes, yet keeps his eye on another target:

8. Consider the opportunity cost. The problem with dumb war isn’t that it’s war. The problem is that it costs you the military, economic, and political resources to fight a smart war. Everything Bush wrongly attributed to Iraq turns out to be true of Iran. But we can’t confront Iran with the force it probably requires, because we wasted our resources in Iraq. Americans, having been suckered in Iraq, won’t accept evidence of Iran’s nuclear program. Countries that might have supported us in a strike on Iran won’t do so now, since we led them astray. Our coffers have been emptied to pay for the Iraq occupation. Our troops are physically and spiritually exhausted. In the name of strength, Bush has made us weak.

I wish I’d absorbed these lessons before the war. The best I can do now is remember them before the next one.

Same too, with Josef Joffe, who admits to a casual “why not?” attitude beforehand, and then a subsequent fury with the inept administration.

Alas, democracy in one country is not the antidote to the enormous political pathologies of the Middle East, nor should anybody have expected such a miraculous transformation. Even less so, given the cavalier approach of the Bushies and their Pollyanna-ish belief in the ease of regime transformation: We’ll topple Saddam, hand over power to a friendly like Ahmad Chalabi, and leave. This is not how West Germany and Japan, where U.S. troops are present to this day, were democratized.

The lesson is stark: If you don’t will the means, don’t will the end. To this Kantianism, let us add pure homily: Look before you leap. The tragedy of American power in the Middle East, the most critical arena of world politics, is that the United States ended up working as the handmaiden of Iranian ambitions.

The justification: mass graves unearthed outside Abu Ghraib prison, April 2003.

Several writers maintain the human rights justification. Richard Cohen writes as follows:

Saddam Hussein… had messed around with anthrax; he had twice started wars in the region (Iran and Kuwait); he had massacred the Kurds and the Shiites; used chemical weapons (no doubt about that); had had a nuclear weapons program (also no doubt about that); and was violating U.N. resolution after resolution (absolutely no doubt about that, either). Saddam was a sociopath, a uniformed button man, Luca Brasi of Arabia. He was a nasty little fascist, and he needed to be dealt with.
I favored the war not for oil or empire (what silliness!) or Israel but for all the reasons that made me regret Bosnia, Rwanda, and every other time when innocents were being killed and nothing was done to stop it.

Jeffrey Goldberg takes a similar line, in what I thought to be the most well-reasoned of all self-analyses.

I wanted very much for the liberation of Iraq to succeed, for many reasons. I wasn’t sure there was an alternative to Saddam’s removal, in part because the sanctions regime was collapsing. I believed that Saddam’s nuclear ambitions posed an almost immediate threat to national security. I believed that Saddam was a supporter of terrorism. The report on Saddam’s terrorist ties released last week by the Joint Forces Command confirms this (not that you would know it from the scant press coverage of the study)…

Mainly, I believed in the human-rights case for armed intervention. I had spent a good deal of time with Saddam’s victims before the war—the Kurds especially—and I had been radicalized by what I learned about the crimes committed against them. I have always sympathized with (New York Times’ writer) John Burns’ position: He argued, at the outset of the war, that Saddam’s regime of torture, rape, and genocide gave cause enough for intervention, without confusing the case with arguments about weapons of mass destruction and terrorism.
…
This is why I find it impossible to denounce a war that led to the removal of a genocidal dictator. To borrow from Samantha Power, the phrase “never again” has in recent years come to mean “Never again will we allow the Germans to kill the Jews in the 1940s.” The Holocaust proved that the world is a brutal place for small peoples, and it defines for me the nonnegotiable requirements of a moral civilization: to be absolutely intolerant of dictators who have committed documented genocides. The tragedy of this war—one of its tragedies—is that its immorally incompetent execution has, for the foreseeable future, undermined this idea. I believe, for instance, that Darfur demands our armed intervention, but we are now paralyzed because of the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq occupation.

The unjustification: American abuses inside Abu Ghraib prison, spring 2004. Both photos accompany the superb, on-the-ground writer John Burn’s five-year review in the New York Times.

Finally, and perhaps we should have expected this, Christopher Hitchens refuses to admit he ever got it wrong, then or now. Drawing a line back to the CIA’s involvement in the 1968 coup rather than 2003, he insists (as a British expat) that America was always “involved” in Iraq, stating,

“We were never, if we are honest with ourselves, “lied into war.” We became steadily more aware that the option was continued collusion with Saddam Hussein or a decision to have done with him.”

I love Hitchens for his independence, his intellect and his almost joyful contrarianism: there should always be someone willing to argue with conventional wisdom. But I find it hard to excerpt anything else from his column that I can fully agree with: his list of achievements in Iraq sound suspiciously like the President’s (albeit, of course, more eloquently stated).

But it serves to bring me back to my own column on the eve of the war 5 years ago. I don’t have anything like the readership of these columnists up above, but after 9/11, I used the new forum of iJamming! for regular excursions into political debate, and on the eve of the invasion, I offered up a typically and necessarily lengthy list of reasons for and against invasion, then debated them amongst myself, and finally titled my piece, “Why I Am Opposed To The War. For Now.” (As if, once it started, I might be able to change my mind.) I read it back this morning and was slightly reassured. I knew I had harbored a lot of anger back then, not just towards a murderous dictator like Saddam, but to European and American “old leftists,” as I will call them, who seemed willing to leave him in power. Fortunately, I saw enough of the inherent dangers of removing him near-unilaterally as to strongly believe that to do so would be a mistake.

What should Bush and Blair do?,

I wrote towards the end of my self-debate.

Recall the troops and admit political defeat? Absolutely not. I would recommend keeping the troops firmly in place, in effect tightening a noose around Saddam’s neck. I would insist that the United Nations foot a large part of the bill for this army, the only thing that has ever scared Saddam into retreat or disarmament (and don’t suggest a UN force: Bosnia revealed all too tragically how ineffective United Nations peacekeepers can be), while letting the French, Germans, Russians and Chinese have their day to send in thousands of inspectors. I would then share all possible intelligence that would enable the Inspectors to uncover the chemical, biological and intended nuclear weaponry that Saddam surely has and which would vindicate Bush and Blair for their unflinching stance.

I would use these interim months to wage an effective PR campaign, clarifying that this is not about oil or imperialism, and to highlight Saddam’s horrors which are, by any standard, abhorrent. I would further that PR campaign to educate the world as to American beneficence and sacrifice over the years and, perhaps subtly, to let the world know that the Middle East mess can be traced back to former European empires and greedy European businesses just as easily as it can to a current American “empire” or current American commercial interests. All the major players are responsible for this, and all the major players need to work together to get us all out of it.

All along, I would tone down the confrontational rhetoric which has done so much to aggravate European democracies, continue the currently successful hunt for al-Qaeda leaders, demonstrate that ‘nation-building’ in Afghanistan remains a priority, and request that the United Nations itself take the lead on the crisis with North Korea. At the end of the year, we would see whether Saddam had been disarmed, and whether international relations had been improved by the cooling off process. And if not? We’d be in exactly the same place unfortunately. But we would not have fought a monumentally unpopular war.

Cue large sight of relief. There are, however, two sentences in that lengthy column that I wish I could retract. (I don’t say I wish I could “erase” it because actually, I could erase them if I wanted; the modern blogger can be positively Stalin-like to his own past writings.) If you read the column, they will jump out at you for exactly what they were: an error of judgment brought on by an apparent desire for Hitchens-like contrarianism. Most emphatically crazy was this comment on President Bush:

I think he’s a lot smarter than his critics give him credit for.

Ouch! What was I thinking? He was just as dumb as his critics believed and I was stupid to think otherwise. I offered reasons for my own dislike of him elsewhere in the same paragraph, and made perfectly clear I would never vote for him, but still, I had allowed his simple understanding of the equation “Saddam=evil” to intimate some hidden intellect. Wrong wrong wrong.

But we can all be wrong about things in life. And those of who are wrong in print get to live with our mistakes much more than those who are simply wrong after several pints of beer in the local pub. The purpose of the Times and, especially, the Slate re-views, is surely to enable writers to confront their bold statements of the past. Admitting to errors in judgment (and in print) hopefully helps us all avoid repeating the same mistake. To which end, one of the Slate columnists deflects the commission entirely. Timothy Noah responds:

“How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? Wrong question. How did … Barack Obama get Iraq right?”