
The Baby and the Baath Water - jgraeme
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/THE-BABY-AND-THE-BAATH-WATER
======
grey-area
The original story has a bit more to it, this is just a relink to the older
blog entry which is here:

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/the_baby_and_the...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/the_baby_and_the_baath_water)

------
gruseom
Miles Copeland, the CIA officer whose book Curtis relies heavily on in the
article, was an interesting character. I've been meaning to look up that book
for a while. Has anybody here read it?

(He was also the father of Stewart Copeland, the drummer for the Police, not
that that matters.)

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D9u
How about the USA clean up it's own act at home before trying to intervene in
another nation which poses zero credible threat to the USA.

Look at how Korea, Vietnam, Libya, etc, have ended up after US intervention.

Such a horrendous track record should preclude repeat performances of a
similar nature.

~~~
natrius
The stated goal of military action in Syria isn't regime change. It's creating
a powerful disincentive against the use of chemical weapons, agents of mass
murder that kill indiscriminately. I didn't completely understand the need for
action, so I did some Wikipedia reading on the history of chemical weapons,
and now I'm more conflicted about it. I highly suggest doing the same.

~~~
powertower
When the government comes out and says -

"The evidence and proof that Bashar was the one that ordered chemical weapons
use _is so obvious and unquestionable_ that you don't really need to see or
ask for it... Because doing so would be irrational!"

Start worrying.

In a few weeks or months when it comes out that the chemical attack was really
done by one of the 57 or so US and Al-Qaeda backed + funded insurgent groups
operating in Syria, I really hope that Obama keeps his word on punishing those
responsible (for crossing the red line).

Though the best info I could get is saying right now that the rebel group that
launched the attack didn't know what they had, and thought they were launching
conventional rockets. So I'm not sure you can blame them the same way you
could blame Bashar.

The funny thing about all this is that if the US just came out and said we are
doing this to secure the next 50-100 years of US energy needs and geo-
political strategy - I'd be all for these middle-eastern wars because I
understand the need for it. But I'm not sure the general public could shed its
moral supremacy desires, nor understand complicated issues or how the world
really turns.

~~~
pipy
Or, as another poster summed up [1]:

 _Syria sits right in between the oilfields in the Middle East and the oil
consumers in Europe, so when a pipeline is built connecting the two, Syria has
a vote for or against its completion. Since oil pipelines are both necessary
and quite profitable, this can lead to very large disputes. Al Jazeera covered
this last year here [2] where it was suggested that the West would be inclined
to usurp Assad for someone more favorable to the West 's long term energy
interests. It seems their prediction was correct as the US (along with Britain
and Turkey) is escalating relations with Syria, using chemical attacks and
civil rights violations as justification._

 _The Guardian also has a great summary of the issue here._ [3]

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6313628](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6313628)

[2]
[http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/08/20128513344...](http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/08/20128513344..).

[3] [http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-
insight/2013/au...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-
insight/2013/au..).

------
leokun
The picture of the American military recreation room around the tomb of the
founder of the Baath movement is pretty intense. Did they not know it was a
tomb?

~~~
sudomal
I would hazard a guess that those military personnel aren't well read on Iraqi
and Syrian history.

~~~
bcoates
Why would you think that? Looks like they went out of their way to be
disrespectful to the tomb of one of the intellectual leaders of their enemy.
This is consistent with the US military policy of treating the various
artifacts Saddam's government (up to and including the actual bodies of Saddam
and his family) as illegitimate and not worthy of respect.

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alexeisadeski3
God, is everything America's fault?

How convenient that the author focuses on one American intervention, as if
they were the first. Nothing of the Turks, the French? They conquered and
ruled the area for (combined) centuries, but no - it's the Evil American
Capitalists and their one short intervention to blame.

And who's to say that Za'im wouldn't have launched a coup in absence of
American suggestion?

~~~
speeder
I am yet to see a US intervention that did not.resulted in disaster...

~~~
riggins
WWII

~~~
cstross
... Which was pretty much won by the USSR.

~~~
Apocryphon
WWI, then?

~~~
alexeisadeski3
Won by the Jews.

/s

------
curlyquote
Everything Adam Curtis does is amazing. The ending to this article sums up
western perspectives on the middle east very well, in my opinion.

~~~
saljam
While I normally dislike Adam Curtis's work, I totally agree with you about
the ending on that article. That's certainly the sentiment I sense, as an Arab
currently in the UK.

~~~
gruseom
I'm curious. What do you dislike about Adam Curtis' work?

He has a considerable gift for digging up and presenting historical material.
For example, the stuff about Bernays and Freud at the beginning of _Century of
the Self_ is riveting. But some of the narratives into which he frames that
material seem questionable.

The one time I knew something independently about what he was presenting, I
was surprised at how distorted it was. That was in his documentary about the
Rand Corporation and game theory, when he included the radical Scottish
psychiatrist R.D. Laing as an example of psychologists who worked to expand
state control. To anyone who knows anything about Laing—a fascinating figure
in his own right—that doesn't pass the laugh test.

~~~
RodericDay
Can you explain why it "doesn't pass the laugh test"?

~~~
gruseom
Laing was an anti-institutionalist who became famous for challenging the
inhumane practices of psychiatry (his profession) and helping to set up safe
houses where people having psychotic episodes could undergo them with
emotional support from others without the intervention of medical or social
authority. He became associated with a model of psychotic experience as a kind
of inner process that some people go through. He was a charismatic guy and
became a star of the 1960s counterculture, a bit like a Timothy Leary or Allen
Ginsburg--an older mentor and kindred spirit to the hippies. He was also
involved in the radical liberation politics of the time.

Laing's work was about giving support to non-conformist experience and
building a conceptual model in which it could exist on its own terms, speak in
its own voice and so on, instead of immediately being reduced to mental
illness, a brain disorder, delinquency, or what have you. This was a popular
view in the late 1960s. The idea that at the same time he would have been
consulting for the Rand Corporation on how to apply psychological principles
to reinforce a docile consumerist society doesn't pass the laugh test. It
would have been far out of character for him.

If I recall correctly, Curtis brought up Laing in the context of game theory
and how it was being (mis-)applied psychologically. There had been a massive
bestseller called "Games People Play" in the mid 60s that applied some of
these ideas to ordinary life. Many people became interested in the power
dynamics of everyday relationships. This tied in to some of Laing's earlier
work (especially about the power dynamics of family systems), so it was
natural for him to use this language in his later work. My memory is that
Curtis picked up on that and linked it to the mathematical game theorists of
the Rand Corporation--and some of their more Strangelovian politics--in an
entirely specious way. He simply juxtaposed them and said they were working on
the same thing, with scary background music. No doubt it was very convincing,
except to anyone who ever read Laing. He might as well have put J. Edgar
Hoover together with the Beatles.

I hope it's clear that my point isn't about R.D. Laing. It's rather that I
randomly happened to have read him and so could instantly see that Curtis
wasn't just a little off there, he was totally full of shit. So I can't help
but wonder where else he might be.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_People_Play_(book)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_People_Play_\(book\))

~~~
RodericDay
I think you're projecting a bit. You're talking about Curtis' _The Trap_.
According to the wiki summary:

 _A separate strand in the documentary is the work of R.D. Laing, whose work
in psychiatry led him to model familial interactions using game theory. His
conclusion was that humans are inherently selfish, shrewd, and spontaneously
generate stratagems during everyday interactions. Laing 's theories became
more developed when he concluded that some forms of mental illness were merely
artificial labels, used by the state to suppress individual suffering. This
belief became a staple tenet of counterculture during the 1960s._ [1]

I don't remember Laing being particularly lambasted in the documentary as you
do, and I don't recall Curtis simplifying things so much. If so, the above
summary is being really charitable.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_%28television_document...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_%28television_documentary_series%29)

~~~
gruseom
That's possible, because I don't remember the details. But I distinctly
remember the feeling that Curtis' portrayal of Laing was badly distorted, and
I recall that a commenter who had known Laing personally said the same thing.
If I have time later, I'll try to take another look.

~~~
RodericDay
If you go on YouTube and search for the doc (The Trap), and speed up to 36:50,
they start on Laing.

Quote from the doc: _He was about to use his growing power to attack one of
the most powerful professions in America: The Medical and Psychiatric
establishment. The result would be dramatic, but the outcome would be very
different from what Laing intended. His ideas would undermine the old
controlling medical elite, but far from liberating people, what would actually
emerge would be a revolutionary new system of order and control, driven by the
objective power of numbers._

He doesn't portray Laing as in cahoots with some evil plutocrats, although he
does talk about the Rosenheim (sp?) experiment separately.

