regime change? the discourses of “freedom” and “democracy on the march” get a little cloudy, little farcical in connection to the nuclear question in iran. u.s. civilian and military administrators could not care less about the form of government, plight of the public, lack of publics, alternate publics etc.. the question is whether or not contractors and conglomerates can get in or if the iranian state must be opposed.

the u.s. administration, still in a cold war stupor, requires another partner to complete its nuclear dance of deterrence. self-described critic of the art of technology paul virilo (“i detect tendencies”) has said that understanding u.s. intentions becomes easier if one recognizes that the nuclear relation between the u.s. and the soviet union during the cold war (or more accurately, series of small proxy hot wars in the colonial backwaters) as a coupling, a partnership rather than an opposition. i proceed in broad strokes. the coupling was multidirectional: the soviets adapted the logistical and productive strategies of u.s. economy in the post-war era to develop their military to no end, building a military modeled on a fascination with u.s. capability; to do this, the soviets suppressed civilian funding and development entirely, turning the society into a non-civilian territory, i.e., no civil society, no institutional framework with expressive democratic potential, no public sphere. certainly, people found ways to side-step and subvert these arrangements, but the point is that one was selected rather than the other. recall that there was a mutual learning ongoing. the u.s. for their part learned this second part: namely, how to invent a civil society that disappeared, that itself became non-civilian. relative to the world, things tend to be peachy here in north america; yet, rollbacks in the u.s.a. (freedom of information act, patriot act, homeland security, the guantanamo gulag) tend in this direction. all this to say that the u.s.a. is nostalgic; it needs a partner. otherwise, its a roving cultural vacuum strong on the frontier but rotting from the inside. it’s a vector with no object to reach, to manipulate or even contact. terrorism is too amorphous, plus, what do you do with the submarine fleet? the technical infrastructure has been put to good use (satellites searching mountains in paksitan for osama bin laden) but i suspect most of it is still tweaked for nuclear readiness. there’s no possibility for pitched battles and concerted campaigns in locations smaller than “the global”. iran is a nice foil, an object to justify preparedness and infinite preparation for war (what virilio calls “pure war”). (nuclear north korea? nuclear china? not sure where they went…something we should consider.)

as for the latest regime change here in canada, there seems to be little official u.s. opposition to ontario’s proposed manufacture of a new generation of (20? 24?) nuclear reactors, especially when the energy capacity is something that may be tapped by our southerly neighbours. no problems with nuclear power here. everything’s rosy and as long as the federal government makes no claims to effect of wiping quebec off the map, things should be fine.

i assume foggy is a fellow. shame on me? anyway, the big monkey wrench, stranggly, is less the intentionality of use and the actual introduction of energy and the potential weapons themselves; it’s the problem of re-orienting the pathways of deterence and nuclear checks to accomodate the new bulge in the nuclear system.

certainly, we could become bound in discussions of intent, ideological disposition, moments of discursive closure – subject this text to close semiotic analysis to flush out a lion in the grass. iany close analysis can dismantle things, which is to say that any composition subjected to scrutiny would indeed take itself apart, aporias and all. it seems clear the author is familiar and tied (somewhat) intimately to things in regard to some process-specific ground-level. power-knowledge? you bet. of course he has a vested interest, though “the next few months should be interesting” sounds like someone gearing up for football match…further, we could pursue “open-source” as an option for allowing for some communicative event tto flourish and mutate…not sure how that would go as yet but i guess that part of the reality of open source is that it can be a possibility so long as we can imagine it one.
big task.

perhaps, for some cursory but productive commentary, a comparative analysis could be made between the refusal to allow of nuclear proliferation/development in one particular geography (i.e., in Iran) and the simultaneous enactment and enablement – by those same agents of refusal (i.e., the U.S. administration and military – far from a coherent bloc) – of another nuclear program in a relatively proximate but strategically dissimilar territory (i.e., India). The July 2005 US-India treaty signed by the two states spells strategic trouble for China and India’s race to the top of the nuclear heap – as modernity, as technical progress, as a touchstone for “civilized” international participation and right of state – may provide useful symmetrical and asymmetrical associations.

just an ideer.
n

“Ed1: I have made a number of little changes here and there; they were aimed at correcting minor errors, ameliorating flow, and rendering patent potentially esoteric abbreviations.

that said, i believe we the editors of open have, because of this piece, an important question to consider: how open is open? and how should open be open? i broach this because this new correspondent at times sounds like an american general who so very imbricated in her/(but most probably:)his military institution that iran can unquestioningly be taken as the avatar of evil. if you read foggy’s editorial, you’ll see that it operates along a logic of: ‘iran is completely evil and knowing that—consider the following…’

i have tristarred areas that are particularly uncritical of iran as a nation and collectivity that far exceeds its slanderous statements and diplomatic uncooperativeness. this seems to be beyond our friend foggy… but should it be beyond us as an editorial staff? i think we need to consider this collectively.

one of the detrimental operative tools that blights this intriguing international assessment of iran and nuclear diplomacy is the author’s contextual rootedness. this author clearly speaks from a particular context (her/his piece gives that away). however, s/he also makes the mistake of evaluating a number things particular to iran and other cultures from that same (and of course manifestly different) context—and not from the context particular to their culture and society. this leads to a fairly problematic kind of representation. thus a question of representation such as this puts our role in question. are we going to publish any contribution that shows some form of human thought? even if certain forms of representation could do a disservice to those who have been represented, on our site? or, will we enact certain standards of human thought? will we push our participants to aim for a certain level of criticality? i really think we need to think about this collectively (i don’t think that this is the worst variant of uncriticality but it has got me thinking about considerations that we need to suss out to be—and do the work of—an editorial board)”

Ed2:

“Jeez, what a great piece. Since I have trouble keeping up with a strands of news over extended periods of time, this is a highly useful.

So two quick comments. FB’s certainly got a slant. But I don’t think it’s quite an extreme American-military perspective. It sounds a bit more eggheady than a NYTimes piece (like http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/international/middleeast/15tehran.html?hp&ex=1137301200&en=cf067abfb005eb31&ei=5094&partner=homepage)
with it’s game theory and diplomatic strategies, but I don’t this makes it a piece written from an extreme or uncritical place. It’s kind of in the middle in my judgement, though I can see it coming off as a little right of middle to others.

Second, I do agree though that the comment (“the medieval stoning of criminals, repression of women, and suppression of democracy notwithstanding”) should be cut. It’s not relevant and is a whole other can of worms on it’s own to be spoken under the breath in a parenthetical.”

so where is Foggy located? left or right? is his perspective distorted by his context? is he rascist? probably only time and behavior could really tell us, and probably not all of these questions matter. but still. any thoughts?

here’s my plan (you know, in case you were curious). it follows from some of the arguments made in Rebell Yell by authors Andrew Potter and Joseph Heath. (2 cool philosophy and ethics scholars)
here goes:
Let’s say that this breakdown in communication is a system failure. System failures do not mean that the system should be jettisoned in favor of rebel action. Rebel action taken by one side is easily and logically used to justify rebel action from the opposing side, and the “fabric of diplomacy” gets ripped and both sides soon find themselves in a version of the prisonner’s dilemma, making choices (to bomb) that are mutually destructive. System failures should tell us that the system needs to be made better, which is why i ask what mechanisms of diplomacy have been tried.

(What do diplomats usually try I wonder ? I imagine it’s a lot of phone calls, and serious sit downs, and messages and information passing back and forth through intermediaries. )

Let’s say (crazy talkin here) you could get a policy writer pro nominated from each side to agree to sit and down and work towards a mutually acceptable nuclear policy until they came to agreement.

For it to be releveant, you’d need to get the nation’s leaders to agree to wait and see what they came up with. This is not shocking, presumably this is what diplomats are trying to do all the time….

so what could you do that would be different? well, for one things you could try and open source it. (here’s where i diverge from rebell sell)
I don’t mean open source in the sense of decentralized, hope-for-the best planning. This is not really open source. (despite what the new yorker thinks).

I mean open source in the sense of having a project with a single or small group of leaders with proven capabilities, vision and a lot of time and dedication, where the collaborators all accept to work in the open, using tools that allow others to find them, comment on their work, propose contributions, and use the work in policy documents of their own. I think it would be great to see diplomats writing policy licenced under something like the MIT license for software.

that’d be my idea, i know there have been various attempts made governments to do things that are kind of open source, but i don’t think anything quite like this has been tried. (i could be wrong)

aside from that, i’d like to say that it’s a pretty cool thing to have access to the ear and information of someone in a position of power and authority. welcome, foggy bottom.