15 November 2006

Major Sir John Leaker: "You Don't Wait"

Our own Maj. Leaker's second cousin from Airstrip One rarely drips anything that the western wing of invasion-language journalism is much interested in. "Special relationship," what's that? Who wants to hear about their secrets, or even their non-secrets? Try to figure out what the redcoats are doing overtly down in their slice of conquered Mesopotamia from the pages of the New York Times and see how far you get.

Yesterday was different, however, and so here is Sir John, far down in the story after other and more American things, but definitely present:

According to a British official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in keeping with civil service rules, Mr. Blair used his session [with B*k*r & Co.] to reiterate many points he made in a major foreign policy address on Monday night, when he said Western strategy in the Middle East must 'evolve,' possibly to include a 'partnership' with Iran. On Tuesday, the official said, the prime minister told the panel that the key to the region’s problems was a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, and that Western countries should press Iran and Syria to make a 'strategic choice' between cooperating in regional diplomacy or isolation. “You don’t wait,” the official said, recounting what he said were Mr. Blair’s remarks to the panel. 'You move forward, and you put it up to Iran and Syria: are they going to be part of the positive drive forward, or are they not?'

If the Prime Minister actually said that, perhaps it was a witticism as well as a Briticism. What, after all, do Messrs. B*k*r and H*m*lt*n and _et al._ exist for, except to keep the rest of us waiting for whatever ridiculus mus they shall eventually vouchsafe to reveal? We've been waiting so long already that some of us are even beginning to expect that the salvific revelation may not be especially ignotum nor especially magnificum when it finally does arrive. See for instance Mr. Michael Kinsley.

One might complain that Sir John himself has waited too long to leak, that the one thing we know for sure by now about the B-H Plan is that it will involve begging Damascus and Tehran for help in liquidating all those pesky "problems of success" that have unaccountably attended the Crawfordite aggression.of March 2003. (Even over at Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh they've heard rumors to that effect, and they do not seem very pleased, although it is hard to disentangle that one thread from general post-electoral malaise.)

The complaint would not be just, however, for there is a little bit of news here: Tony, at any rate, is in a hurry, and Tony, at any rate, has some idea what one might say to the evil-axisites as one implores their assistance. To put it crudely, one offers them "a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians" in exchange for coöperation in extricating the GOP geniues (and Mr. Blair) from their Peaceful Freedumbia. Before we pour cold water into that soup, notice that Tony is at least consistently invasionite: it would of course be a matter of Wunnerful Us imposin' such a settlement on Qadimans and Likudniks and Hamás and Fatáh, their could be no silly libertarian joshin' about "Freedom means settlement" after two generations of militant non-settlement on the locals' part. Only arm-twistin' would do the trick, more arm-twistin' than we have ever seen our way to yet for an objective that is not a matter of urgent national interest to us like petroleum or deliverance from Saddam's 45-minute terror-tipped specials. The Qommies and the Ba‘this are unlikely to find such an approach in violation of their own Gandhian principles, obviously, but one is a little surprised to learn that Mr. Blair thinks invasionism and impositionism are their own best cure. Perhaps he does not think of the question in general terms, however, and is only desperate to escape from the particular doo-doo of the moment.

The cold water consists in those two huge obstacles to Tony's plans, (1) Reality, and (2) George W. Bush. To begin with the latter, Little Brother is not in a hurry, and perhaps he could not be if he wished, not after 7 November 2006. He could, of course, make the necessary phone calls to Tehran and Damascus before noon this mornin' if he liked, but clearly there is not enough time between now and the Democrats to get everything settled unilaterally. Indeed, if he entirely concurred in Mr. Blair's schemes, it would be better to wait until January when there would be less wailin' and gnashin' of teeth from the Party neocomrades on Capitol Hill, if only because there will be somewhat fewer of them. Mr. Blair perhaps fails to appreciate that it is more difficult for Little Brother to impose himself upon the GOP geniuses and their base-and-vile that it has been for himself with New Labour. Or perhaps he appreciates it well enough, but doesn't think it statesmanlike to discuss such petty details?

Be that as it may, Little Brother would not wish to be in a hurry due to other causes as well. He's been micawberizin' about his mess in neo-Iraq for so long that it would be utterly out of character for him to succumb to a sense of urgency now. The chance of anythin' good for Crawford turnin' up spontaneously in the next two months is very slight, but the event is not logically impossible, after all. When the Democratic Congress does come in, Little Brother will find a way to keep on micawberizin' still, as I anticipate: the trick should not be impossible, or even very difficult, in light of the actual state of my party. He might begin by pointin' out that Neocomrade Gates really ought to be allowed a few months to get up to speed, for instance. Considering the margins in both chambers, Democrats would need almost a perfect Kirkegaardian purity of heart, all of them mean exactly one and the same thing about Peaceful Freedumbia, to put any serious pressure on the laddie. Their prospects of successful pressure are scarcely better than Tony Blair's, i.e., indistinguishable from zero.

Secondly, Little Brother does not in the slightest want to talk to Qommies or Ba‘this, for that would only encourage them. In the very last ditch, if the holy formula "Freedom Means Peace" is not saved by Jesus or Micawber or some other _deus ex machina_, Little Brother might well prefer a unilateral withdrawal to anythin' of the Blair or B-H sort -- perhaps he can't have success and victory, but there is no obvious reason why he can't go down bein' as unilateral and preëmptive as ever. Mr. Blair, of course, could not decently take that stand, having signed on with somebody else's vigilante expedition at the outset. He may be entirely as impositionist and invasionite as his big buddy, but he must logically be a multilateral imposer and invader. I daresay he thinks Airstrip One has done the Crawfordites a favour by making the posse look a bit less unilateral, but that will not be a favour much appreciated down at the ranch, should they even think of it at all, as I expect they do not. Notice that Blair thinks the Qommies and Ba‘this share his own aversion to unilateralism: "Western countries should press Iran and Syria to make a 'strategic choice' between cooperating in regional diplomacy or isolation," a nostrum that would be absurd if the bad guys don't actually mind being left out in the cold. Unfortunately the mad mullahs, at least, take rather a Rancho Crawford view of the matter and don't seem to mind isolation very badly at all.

There's a sort of triangle here, since the B-H crew (and Reality) do not share Little Brother's lone cowboy romanticism, being all for multilateral impositions and Allied invasions, yet they also fail to share Mr. Blair's romanticism about multilateralism simply as such or about the ease of solving the Palestine puzzle. The B-H sages are, after all, "realists," are they not, immune against all starry-eyed romanticisms whatsoever? -- our own Major Leaker has vouched for that secret truth about half a million times so far.

Probably what they'd say to Ba‘this and Qommies is not "Don't you want to stop being so isolated? Isn't it chilly out there? Don't you want to help everybody solve Palestine?" but something much sterner and more steel-trap-minded like "Do you want Little Brother to come invasionize you, gentlemen, and change your regimes out from under you? Surely not! So let's make a deal, you agree to help the GOP save its face in neo-Iraq, and we agree that what happened to Saddam won't happen to you. How about it?" Like Mr. Blair, they would perhaps be in the somewhat logic-challenged position of making invasion and imposition the cure as well as the disease, but at least they would offer their customers a product that the customers really want

The B-H panacea of tomorrow is not itself today's subject, except as it contrasts with those of Tony Blair and Little Brother, but briefly, the two weaknesses of such a scenario are (1) they cannot make promises that Little Brother and Uncle Sam are bound to keep, and (2) if their bluff should be called, won't it turn out to be only a bluff, after the Republican bungle in Iraq and the Qadiman botch in Lebanon? The risk is high that the evil-axisites will figure that Wunnerful US simply won't have the stomach for more such adventures any time soon. They may even figure that if Peaceful Freedumbia remains a bleeding ulcer, that will ensure their temporary safety better than the proposed deal would.

But God knows best. Bomby days.

08 November 2006

Not To Get All Unhinged About It


Bush's question in 2003 was, can we go back to the early 20th century and have a sort of Philippines-like colony with a major military investment? The answer is, 'no.' Iraqis are too politically and socially mobilized to be easily dominated in the way the old empires dominated isolated, illiterate peasants. The outcome of the Israel-Hizbullah war this summer further signalled that the peasants now have sharper staves that even penetrate state of the art tanks. The US can still easily win any wars it needs to win. It cannot any longer win long military occupations. The man who knew this most surely in the Bush administration, Donald Rumsfeld, most egregiously gave in to the occupation route, and will end up the fall guy as the public mood turns increasingly ugly in both countries.


==

((sigh))

If that is the Invasion Party's great question, they have certainly managed to keep it a secret from their own supporters, not to speak of neutral or mainstream Americans. Back when The Party was riding high, their Mr. Rove used to kid us losers that 2000 was a replay of 1896, but he probably was not remembering the "Maine" when he said that, let alone remembering Aguinaldo and Douglas MacArthur the First. The invasionites of Crawford have offered explanation after explanation of why March 2003 was the greatest thing since sliced bread, but never yet have they appealed to America's well-known craving to possess Phillipines-like colonies with major military investments. They are not likely to start doing so now, not after last night. When the perps were plotting together behind closed doors before their perpetration, did they ask one another, "Gentlemen, why shouldn't we go back to the early 20th century and have a sort of Philippines-like colony with a major military investment?" It seems most unlikely, especially considering how they treated General Shinseki for wanting too much military investment, and how they welcomed dubious assurances from Mr. Adelman and Dr. Chalabi that it would be Operation Cakewalk.

The Phillipines of 1902 were not particularly "Phillipines-like," for that matter. It is to the national credit that the Republicans' Spanish-American caper produced a firmly moral anti-imperalistic movement with such stars as William Jennings Bryan and Mr. James of Harvard and Mark Twain, but that movement did not claim that The Party had already converted Uncle Sam into a major military investor, a "Prussian militarist" as it was called back then, and most assuredly they never claimed that Americans in general wanted to become Prussian militarists, or even dreamed that they might want such an exotic thing. The anti-imperialism of 1902 only warned that we could drift gradually and unwittingly into behaving just like the other (wicked) Great Powers if we didn't watch out. Of course by 1902 European standards, the GOP's "major military investment" in fighting the Dons and neo-liberating their colonies was derisory. Also by General Grant's 1864 standards closer to home. Dragging in the word "investment" at all suggests that one is really in Ike's World about the year 1960, in the vicinity of the "military-industrial-academic complex," and nowhere near 1902 Manila.

It would be good clean partisan fun to declare that The Party never met a cakewalk it didn't like, and therefore in 2002-3 the Crawfordites were beautifully set up to be deceived by Adelmans and Chelabis well aware that the shortest way to a Republican heart is to appeal to its traditional taste for shooting fish in a barrel overseas. One might even point out how they seem not so very eager to tangle with North Korea, puny weakling though it is. I don't think that is what happened, or not more than a small percentage of it, but it might be tolerably plausible if written up well.

On the flip side we find "Iraqis are too politically and socially mobilized to be easily dominated in the way the old empires dominated isolated, illiterate peasants. The outcome of the Israel-Hizbullah war this summer further signalled that the peasants now have sharper staves that even penetrate state-of-the-art tanks." If you gaze at that passage from the right direction with the lighting carefully arranged, perhaps it will mostly do. Except that the Crawfordites do not appear to have been trying at any point to "dominate" their neo-Iraqi subjects, and they make a very poor showing indeed as compared with the Indian Civil Service down to 1948. Crawfordites relish invading and conquering, obviously, and perhaps they don't even mind occupying too badly, but they have never had any intention of administering their conquered provinces. Perish the thought!, for it would lead them in the direction of Clintonian "nation-building," which, being Clintonian, must eo ipso be 100% wrong-headed and damnable. Warren Hastings and Cecil Rhodes and Lord Cromer never behaved the least bit like that, they did not hang around Government House twiddling their thumbs in the constant expectation that tomorrow or the day after the natives would see the light and do for themselves spontaneously exactly what their colonisers wanted them to do. That peculiar _modus operandi_ seems to be a recent innovation of the "Freedom Means Peace!" Crawfordites, perhaps in their role as the Party of "creative destruction," and I seriously doubt it would work with isolated, illiterate peasants any better than it has worked in Mesopotamia. On the other hand, it does make a big difference that our neo-Iraqi subjects have access to al-Jazeera, etc., and in that sense are not illiterate or isolated as Cromer's Egyptian subjects used to be. Quem deus vult perdere, prius dementat: the Crawfordites have even flooded their colony will cellular telephones, which they boast as one of their great reconstructive accomplishments, evidently not noticing how convenient it is for the terrorists/insurgents/guerrillas also.

As to strictly military technology, the "stakes" of the "peasants," I should draw a broader moral than Prof. Cole cares to. Nowadays everybody can be strong, provided that she stays very strictly on the defensive. The Lebanese God Party did brilliantly in protecting their own turf, but shooting off all those rockets to annoy the Israelis was absurd and ineffectual. Conversely, now that the Tel Aviv régime has surrounded itself with the Bar Maginot Line, it does not get into serious difficulties until it undertakes aggressive adventures out beyond it. Similarly, al-Qá‘ida is extremely hard to find and pin down, but also extremely unlikely to pull off another Pentagon/WTC attack. The converse of that one is that even the Crawford régime would be safe enough, could it abstain from actively looking for trouble. The "peasants" of the world have no monopoly on this new product, it is available to pretty well everybody.

I only say "safe enough," notice, because if some party foolishly takes to the offensive, it can always do a certain amount of harm. Not as much harm as it suffers in the process, and not enough harm to accomplish anything of decisive strategic value, yet not zero harm either. As to the implications of this unanticipated new world order for the USA, consult your life and casualty insurers for full details. (You might also wonder why the Republicans never seem to suspect that the best bottom line on "global terrorism" might be located on their own favorite sort of literal bottom line. What did those gentry learn at HBS, then?)

Last and least, Secretary of War Rumsfeld. Allow me to bet Prof. Cole a quarter that he is not going to fall at all, or rather, that his boss is not going to throw Rummy off the Party sled to the wolves no matter how ugly the public mood turns. America grievously disappointed the Invasion Party yesterday, and their response will be to circle the same old wagons even more closely together. They devoutly believe that the Executive Branch has every right to be as unilateral and preëmptive inside the USA as the USA ought, in their opinion, to be in the world. Defending that position against all comers -- Supreme Court, Congress, media, "public mood," the opinion of mankind -- is where the invasionites will dig in and try to hold the line, come what may. Developments in Iraq, bad or worse (or even good), will have hardly any bearing on the question at all. Iraq is no more than a single instance of the general principle that the Crawfordite faction are resolved to vindicate. In the very last ditch, they'll explicitly defend their right to screw everything up totally in foreign and aggression policy rather than make any concessions to any of the parties mentioned, to anybody else whatsoever. Therefore Rumsfeld stays and I risk my quarter.

But God knows best. Happy days.

01 November 2006

Baghdad Under Siege?

The most recent bulletin from GHQ at Ann Arbor includes the following commendation of a subordinate commander:

"Patrick Cockburn suggests that such actions are not random violence, but rather are part of a Sunni Arab strategy of surrounding and cutting off Baghdad.

"Cockburn is correct. The Sunni Arab guerilla movements have been attempting to cut off Baghdad for some time, and have at times successfully imposed a fuel blockade on it. So far the blockade has been staccato and not very successful. But if they really could blockade the capital, they could deprive the Iraqi police and army of fuel for their vehicles, and then execute them. This step could only come, of course, once the US begins withdrawing. Once that process starts, the Shiites had better start negotiating with the Sunni guerrilla groups, or else it wouldn't be long before the Green Zone fell."


Rear-Colonel Cockburn out in the field will be happy to know that the Gods of the General Staff consider that he provides a "correct" account of the strategic situation, which account runs as follows:


Baghdad is under siege / by Patrick Cockburn in Arbil, Northern Iraq


Sunni insurgents have cut the roads linking the city to the rest of Iraq. The country is being partitioned as militiamen fight bloody battles for control of towns and villages north and south of the capital.

As American and British political leaders argue over responsibility for the crisis in Iraq, the country has taken another lurch towards disintegration.

Well-armed Sunni tribes now largely surround Baghdad and are fighting Shia militias to complete the encirclement.

The Sunni insurgents seem to be following a plan to control all the approaches to Baghdad. They have long held the highway leading west to the Jordanian border and east into Diyala province. Now they seem to be systematically taking over routes leading north and south.

Dusty truck-stop and market towns such as Mahmoudiyah, Balad and Baquba all lie on important roads out of Baghdad. In each case Sunni fighters are driving out the Shia and tightening their grip on the capital. Shias may be in a strong position within Baghdad but they risk their lives when they take to the roads. Some 30 Shias were dragged off a bus yesterday after being stopped at a fake checkpoint south of Balad.

In some isolated neighbourhoods in Baghdad, food shortages are becoming severe. Shops are open for only a few hours a day. "People have been living off watermelon and bread for the past few weeks," said one Iraqi from the capital. The city itself has broken up into a dozen or more hostile districts, the majority of which are controlled by the main Shia militia, the Mehdi Army.

The scale of killing is already as bad as Bosnia at the height of the Balkans conflict. An apocalyptic scenario could well emerge - with slaughter on a massive scale. As America prepares its exit strategy, the fear in Iraq is of a genocidal conflict between the Sunni minority and the Shias in which an entire society implodes. Individual atrocities often obscure the bigger picture where:

* upwards of 1,000 Iraqis are dying violently every week;

* Shia fighters have taken over much of Baghdad; the Sunni encircle the capital;

* the Iraqi Red Crescent says 1.5 million people have fled their homes within the country;

* the Shia and Sunni militias control Iraq, not the enfeebled army or police.

No target is too innocent. Yesterday a bomb tore through a party of wedding guests in Ur, on the outskirts of Sadr City, killing 15 people, including four children. Iraqi wedding parties are very identifiable, with coloured streamers attached to the cars and cheering relatives hanging out the windows.[A]

Amid all this, Dick Cheney, the US Vice-President, has sought to turn the fiasco of Iraq into a vote-winner with his claim that the Iraqi insurgents have upped their attacks on US forces in a bid to influence the mid-term elections. There is little evidence to support this. In fact, the number of American dead has risen steadily this year from 353 in January to 847 in September and will be close to one thousand in October.

And there is growing confusion over the role of the US military. In Sadr City, the sprawling slum in the east of the capital that is home to 2.5 million people, American soldiers have been setting up barriers of cement blocks and sandbags after a US soldier was abducted, supposedly by the Mehdi Army. The US also closed several of the bridges across the Tigris river making it almost impossible to move between east and west Baghdad. Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, added to the sense of chaos yesterday when he ordered the US army to end its Sadr City siege.[B]

Mr Maliki has recently criticised the US for the failure of its security policy in Iraq and resisted American pressure to eliminate the militias. Although President Bush and Tony Blair publicly handed back sovereignty to Iraq in June 2004, Mr Maliki said: "I am now Prime Minister and overall commander of the armed forces yet I cannot move a single company without Coalition [US and British] approval."[C]

In reality the militias are growing stronger by the day because the Shia and Sunni communities feel threatened and do not trust the army and police to defend them. US forces have been moving against the Mehdi Army, which follows the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, but he is an essential prop to Mr Maliki's government. Almost all the main players in Iraqi politics maintain their own militias. The impotence of US forces to prevent civil war is underlined by the fact that the intense fighting between Sunni and Shia around Balad, north of Baghdad, has raged for a month, although the town is beside one of Iraq's largest American bases. The US forces have done little and when they do act they are seen by the Shia as pursuing a feud against the Mehdi Army.

One eyewitness in Balad said two US gunships had attacked Shia positions on Sunday killing 11 people and seriously wounding six more, several of whom lost legs and arms. He added that later two Iraqi regular army platoons turned up in Balad with little military equipment. When they were asked by locals why their arms were so poor "the reply was that they were under strict orders by the US commander from the [nearby] Taji camp not to intervene and they were stripped of their rocket-propelled grenade launchers"[D]

Another ominous development is that Iraqi tribes that often used to have both Sunni and Shia members are now splitting along sectarian lines.

In Baghdad it has become lethally dangerous for a Sunni to wander into a Shia neighbourhood and vice versa. In one middle-class district called al-Khudat, in west Baghdad, once favoured by lawyers and judges, the remaining Shia families recently found a cross in red paint on their doors. Sometimes there is also a note saying "leave without furniture and without renting your house". Few disobey.

The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq by Patrick Cockburn is published this month by Verso.



Mil. Sci. is not my best or favorite subject, being devoted to _politique d'abord!_ personally, but I do recall a few accounts of memorable sieges, and none of them went to that tune that I recall. Col. Cockburn and Generalissimo Cole, who corrected Cockburn's paper, or rather, found it correct already, envision a siege directed against only a portion of the population of the embattled town. I daresay that scenario has in fact happened, for it is certainly not a logical impossibility, but perhaps it is not the best characterization of the actual situation at New Baghdad.

Cockburn and Cole may verbally agree on "siege," but they entertain strikingly different notions of the objectives of the besiegers. Rear-Col. Cockburn was not as explicit as he might have been, but I believe we are to understand the sentence

"The country is being partitioned as militiamen fight bloody battles for control of towns and villages north and south of the capital"

to mean that partition is the purpose, as well as the result, of those fighting on behalf of the former Sunni Ascendancy. Gen. Cole, however, takes for granted that their purpose must be to overthrow the Green Zone neo-régime altogether. The GZ itself unfortunately happens to be on the "wrong" or right or Sunni bank of the Tigris, but if the palaces and the proconsuls and the mercenaries and the invasion-language journalists could be transferred over to Sadr City or thereabouts, that would satisfy the besiegers as Cockburn seems to conceive them, they would not require to abolish it altogether. Of course the GZ writ would not run west of the river, but that is only to say that the future Intifadistan or Saddamistan would be on a par with the Kurdistan that has existed for more than a dozen years already. To be sure, Cockburn has no sooner said "partition" in his second sentence, than he says "disintegration" in his third, the one word suggesting that the process is deliberate, at least on the Sunni Ascendancy side, and the other that everything is happening in a mindless and uncontrolled,.even uncontrollable, manner. He goes on to adduce Bosnia, which does not clarify things much, and neither does that mysterious verb "implode" that our journalists have all become so fond of.

We need not insist on ascribing any definite theory of the besiegers' objectives to Rear-Col. Cockburn to distinguish him from Generalissimo Cole, however. It suffices that he does not see the Big Picture as they do at GHQ. To repeat,

The Sunni Arab guerilla movements have been attempting to cut off Baghdad for some time, and have at times successfully imposed a fuel blockade on it. So far the blockade has been staccato and not very successful. But if they really could blockade the capital, they could deprive the Iraqi police and army of fuel for their vehicles, and then execute them. This step could only come, of course, once the US begins withdrawing. Once that process starts, the Shiites had better start negotiating with the Sunni guerrilla groups, or else it wouldn't be long before the Green Zone fell.

To begin with, Cockburn said not a word about fuel, his "siege" was a matter of keeping people, Shiites and Crawfordites, bottled up inside, not of keeping refined petroleum products outside. Considering that half the people inside the bottle are those on whose behalf the campaign (if there is an organized campaign) is being carried out, cutting off the oil and gas for everybody is not necessarily the smartest plan, although of course that does not mean they mightn't do it. The colony does not exactly abound in military and political talent on any faction's side.

But on to the Big Picture! Gen. Cole is quite sure that the GZ is inexpugnable as long as the Republicans hang around, but will be at the mercy of the former Sunni Ascendancy as soon as they turn their backs. The first proposition is sound enough, but the second is dubious at best. This turning of backs would presumably leave the GZ pols with a good deal of access to money and air power from Crawford, advantages that nobody in sight is likely to bestow upon the Sunni Ascendancy, playing the role of North Vietnam in the Macnamara-Kissinger war. Even if Sa`udiyya or Jordan or Syria or Turkey suddenly went berserk and attempted to do so, they could not, of course, ever hope to match Crawford money and Crawford air power. The GZ is in all probability inexpugnable altogether. As usual nowadays, everybody involved seems to be very strong as long as she keeps strictly on the defensive: the Green Zone cannot be overthrown from the rest of "Iraq," but that bare minimum of security does not mean that the GZ pols are likely to start effectively ruling ever square centimeter that Saddam ruled any time soon.

Generalissimo Cole may in agreement with my estimate, actually. I have a sneaking suspicion that JC makes up military stuff like today's for extraneous and non-military reasons, in this case to twist the arms of M. al-Maliki and other Twelver politicians and compel them to be nicer to the Sunni Ascendancy folks: the former "had better start negotiating with the Sunni guerrilla groups" -- where "negotiating with" of course means "making concessions to."

But God knows best.

_____

[A] Cockburn evidently does not care to enter the O-How-Awful-To-Be-In-Iraq Purple Passage Contest, although he admits more local colour than is strictly required in a military dispatch.


[B] A siege within a siege, then? There are literary possibilities in that raw material as well, along Kafka or Borges lines. (These, too, are better neglected.)


[C] How come nobody else in the ranks of the invasion-language press caught that scrumptious quotation?


[D] Poor M. al-Maliki certainly deserves everybody's sympathy, trapped as he is under the unwieldy bulk of a demented and thrashing elephant, but decorum requires that we not move so far in that direction as not to sympathize with Marvin the ARVN also. Should the roof fall in altogether --as they fear at GHQ, in my view exaggeratedly --, Marvin has much less prospect of living happily ever after in London or Qom or Beirut than a thoroughbred OnePercenter like M. al-Maliki has.

Meanwhile the "sovereignty" and "independence" of neo-Iraq, attributes which lawyers and diplomats have traditionally considered to be absolute, can be equally violated at the Marvin level and the Maliki level, and in fact are being so violated, if Cockburn has his facts straight and Marvin is indeed not allowed out of the barracks compound with an RPG in his hands unless some Crawfordite or Crawford hireling okays it. M. al-Maliki can't move "his" companies around without GOP permission, and Pvt. Marvin can't move "his" grenade launcher around without GOP permission either. That plan is so consistent and konsequent that it sounds far too good to be true of the invasionite stumblebums. But those gentry do bitterly hate ever letting any instrument of power out of their own paws, so perhaps this is an exceptional case of non-stumbling?

Yet are Col. Cockburn's facts everything they should be? He's already insinuated that the Crawfordites rather enjoy watching the natives go to it without caring to join in themselves -- one may watch a Texas cock fight without wishing one's own mother had been a hen, after all. From a sportin' point of view, it would be reasonable to handicap one team, taking away Marvin's RPG when the local guerillas/terrorists/insurgents/Sunnis are not comparably equipped so as to make a better show.

That's an agreeable fantasy, but it is so at odds with the Rancho Crawford way of war, Shock-'n'-Awe and the like, that one hesitates to believe it on the word of a single witness, however sterling his character. The military logic is elusive as well: doubtless the Crawfordites prefer that cheap Marvins should take most of the casualties so that their own very expensive Joes don't have to, but why shouldn't Marvin get to take his RPG out on patrol? Are they afraid he might fire it in the wrong direction?