from Joseph Conrad's Nostromo :

Charles Gould walked rapidly round the table, and, seizing her hands, 
bent down, pressing them both to his lips. Before he straightened himself 
up again to his full height she had disengaged one to smooth his cheek with 
a light touch, as if he were a little boy.

 
"Try to get some rest for a couple of hours," she murmured, with a glance 
at a hammock stretched in a distant part of the room. Her long train swished 
softly after her on the red tiles. At the door she looked back.

 
Two big lamps with unpolished glass globes bathed in a soft and abundant light 
the four white walls of the room, with a glass case of arms, the brass hilt of 
Henry Gould's cavalry sabre on its square of velvet, and the water-colour sketch 
of the San Tome gorge. And Mrs. Gould, gazing at the last in its black wooden 
frame, sighed out--

 
"Ah, if we had left it alone, Charley!"

 
"No," Charles Gould said, moodily; "it was impossible to leave it alone."

 
"Perhaps it was impossible," Mrs. Gould admitted, slowly. Her lips quivered a
 little, but she smiled with an air of dainty bravado. "We have disturbed a good
 many snakes in that Paradise, Charley, haven't we?"

sculpture is the art of muscle. what is explicit in dance is implicit in every sculpture.

that mangle of steel has a person inside it.

the sculptor is the opposite of the bomber (Conrad's "pest among men" - cf. Secret Agent).

"to be builders, not destroyers" [Cantos?]

Yet another Marlow, while we're at it.

OK Joe, finished the Hersh article. Interesting resonance between the business about Plato & Strauss ("the noble lie"), and your earlier remarks on Joseph Conrad. Plato didn't care much for democracy, did he?

But again, it seems to me that Hersh is sidestepping the factor of Saddam in this whole game. It's my guess that before they went to the UN, the Pentagon people & others in the Admin. had assessed a number of different outcomes very carefully. & the decision to overstate the WMD issue, the decision to seemingly deliberately waffle in their presentation to the UN of rationales for going to war (I'm saying it seemed almost deliberately weak, in shuffling from one justification to another) - these were messages designed not to persuade the US public in favor of war, so much as a disinformation strategy directed at Saddam himself. This was the trap they laid : allow the UN to fibrillate; present obviously weak & sloppy evidence (the British stuff drawn from magazine articles, etc.); waffle in your rationales; let Saddam think he was getting away with it, encourage him in his intransigence. It worked like a charm, both with the French & Germans & Russians, and with Saddam. As I say, he fell right into it. We have to remember there was something of a precedent for this, in the lead-up to the Gulf War. Whether or not the US ambassador was deliberately leading him on, in that fateful meeting just before the invasion of Kuwait, it was an obvious example of Saddam's tendency to read ambivalence or signs of weakness as a go-ahead to follow his own grandiose schemes.

Did they have to do it that way? Well, Saddam was given his chance. He could have come clean starting with the massive report on his weapons programs in December 2002, which Blix declared far from complete or accurate. But he remained in character. And it may be ironic, if my scenario here is accurate, that this psychotic master of deceit was himself finally brought down by a Venus fly-trap of diplomatic illusions.