Fat Lady On Stage For Richard Bruce Cheney

Although the New York Times Company writes the funeral of a neo-ideology up more like a gossip column than a grown-up political analysis -- "The Whispers and the Why Nots," begorrah! Nevertheless, the present hour looks like the next-to-last one for the dogma of Preëmptive Retaliation as originally misconceived.

Ignoring Little Brother’s own policy input, as needless to say one ought to ignore, Neocomrade R. B. Cheney is the last of that small band of willful men who gave Uncle Sam his neo-Iraqi subjects in the spring of 2003. And now here is Ms. Clio up front and center putting the bugle to her lips to play "Taps" for the whole invasionite racket (as originally intended) as well as for the unlamentable individual RBC:

Someone in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office has gotten everybody on this city’s holiday party circuit talking, simply by floating an unlikely Iraq proposal that is worthy of a certain mid-19th century British naturalist with a fascination for natural selection.

We shall call it the Darwin Principle.

The Darwin Principle, Beltway version, basically says that Washington should stop trying to get Sunnis and Shiites to get along and instead just back the Shiites, since there are more of them anyway and they’re likely to win in a fight to the death. After all, the proposal goes, Iraq is 65 percent Shiite and only 20 percent Sunni.

Sorry, Sunnis.

The Darwin Principle is radical, decisive and most likely not going anywhere. (&c. &c.)


Literaliter and without the bugle, it seems that RBC, the Last of the Aggressors, now wants to swerve one way, whilst his Natty Bumpo wants to swerve another.

Let’s see, what does Ms. Helene Cooper (who must doubtless be some relative to James Fenimore) have to say about what Little Brother will do all by his lonesome? "[T]he president will probably throw the ball toward his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice." That’s what I mean by gossip-column stuff, of course. Neocomrade Dr. C. Rice appears to be a complete zero as far as the conduct of the occupation goes. Last spring she was reduced to explainin’ to some obstreperous Old Euros that although the Crawfordites may have made "thousands" of "tactical" errors out in Peaceful Freedumbia, in the long run Princess Posterity will rehabilitate them and even applaud them, for their hearts were pure all along -- and that’s the main thing, innit? The late Rumsfeld was extremely annoyed by that emission of idiocy, as well he might be. No use anybody throwin’ a policy ball to that little lady!

But let’s see, what is perpdom’s brave new policy ball supposed to be like, no matter which particular GOP genius is to blame for it?

[T]o give a moderate Shiite government the backbone necessary to stand up to radicals like Moktada al-Sadr through new alliances with moderate Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds . . . America’s Sunni Arab allies would press centrist Iraqi Sunnis to support a moderate Shiite government. Outside Baghdad, Sunni leaders would be left alone to run Sunni towns. Radical Shiites, no longer needed for the coalition that keeps the national government afloat, would be marginalized. So would Iran and Syria. To buy off the Sunni Arab countries, the United States would push forward on a comprehensive peace plan in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Well, yes, that’s more or less how the remainin’ stumblebums seem poised to err next, although it would be better to delete all references to solvin’ the Palestine Puzzle, a general rule applicable to the nattering nabobs of Hamiltonian Bakerism as well. Plus Ms. Sapientia Conventionalis and I miss the magic word "surge," which we had thought to be mandatory in even the shortest journalistic account of The Way Forward. Considering that Ms. Cooper fancies Dr. Rice catchin’ this Hail Mary pass and runnin’ with it, she may have deleted the violence-professional details as unladylike or unsuitable for mention in conjunction with Foggy Bottom. Fortunately Neocomrade Rear-Colonel F. Kagan has written up that side of it at some length for those students of neo-thuggery who possess a reading knowledge of PowerPoint..

Freddie is very lite on the non-military side, just as Ms. Cooper is on the military side, but taken together, they adumbrate a tolerably distinct sort of brave new ball for Little Brother to play with.

Dr. Rice certainly didn’t invent or patent this snake oil, although no doubt she’ll slather it on the patient as instructed. Credit for the development of the product is not too difficult to allocate properly, however. The military part comes from certain colonels and generals at the Pentagram or, more likely, inside the Green Zone and out in Indjun country at FOB (Forward Occupyin’ Base) Crawford. The diplomatic part comes from les altesses du Ryad and the Hashemite Highness at ‘Ammán plus the Gulfie dwarves, with probably Gen. Mubárak lurking in the background as well. The two parties have such different backgrounds and self-interests that one can hardly imagine them ridin’ the range together for long, but for the short-term future their aims in Peaceful Freedumbia pretty much coïncide, and certainly they both know what they want, a trait that Little Brother somewhat excessively admires, presumably because He can’t do it Himself.

There will be plenty of time to criticize the AEI Sunni Plan later on. Mr. Spencer Ackerman has already fired off a salvo at Rear-Col. Freddie, and Badger the blogger has been keeping an eye


http://arablinks.blogspot.com/ [16 Dec 06 @0140 and passim]

on the neighborhood plot to restore the normal and natural condition of Mesopotamia, i.e., the Turk-Brit-Háshimí-Ba‘thí Sunni Ascendancy.

At the moment, it suffices to notice that Neocomrade R. B. Cheney thinks the AEI Sunni Plan is pure spinach and would prefer to pick the opposite side in the upcomin’ grand shebang. Even after his former (?) owners in Sa‘údiyya called him in for a stiff lecture about the need to keep heretics and hillbillies in their place, RBC is of the same opinion still, it looks like. Wouldn’t you know it? here the detestable perp is expirin’ in his last throes of ideological autointoxication, and he finally manages to get somethin’ right for a change, or at least not quite altogether wrong, but at this point Little Brother has finished takin’ advice from RBC, and seeks his next brain transplant elsewhere.[A]

Ms. Cooper only alludes to what other gossip columnists have more explicitly alluded to as a personal motive on Neocomrade R. B. Cheney’s part: America abandoned the Shiites in 1991 and look where that got us. Mr. Cheney has argued that America can’t repeat what it did after the Persian Gulf war, when it called on the Shiites to rise up against Saddam Hussein, then left them to be slaughtered when they did. We have been given to understand that RBC feels personally responsible for George XLI Bush wimpin’ out after the War for Kuwait. One would have to be personally acquainted with these ethical and political clowns to know whether there is anything to that hypothesis. From a safe distance, my guess would be that there is not, that RBC transcends personal shame as he transcends public Rulalaw, that "Never apologize, never explain" would be Axiom One in The Big-Management Secrets of Oilslick Dick. Even if he does feel some compunction specific to himself, it seems pretty safe to bet that the basic cause of the Cheney Swerve is not of that character at all, but is sheer Lone Cowpokerism, as discussed in note [A].

It might be more eligible to suspect that Little Brother is finally gettin’ out from under the RBC thumb because He suspects some such thing and takes it as lesé majesté against Himself, a treacherous sidin’ with His Daddy’s unsatisfactory approach to native affairs. However all such guesswork is of no great importance, even though it is fun to indulge in. To scrutinize the sawdust where Dubya’s gray matter ought to be for secret motivations is no more reasonable an occupation than to seek policy ideas in the same place. There’s just no there there.

Even if the aggression faction hadn’t already come up with a couple of dozen distinct and contradictory "reasons" for their zig-zag stumblebumism, it would still be necessary for a sensible critic to prescind from all discussion of WHY they misbehave as they do, and stick to a merely external account of HOW they have misbehaved and are misbehavin’.[B] That’s quite enough to be getting on with. Please stay tuned.

(Ms. Cooper’s last paragraph is interesting, but even she doesn’t seem to think it has any connection to Neocomrade R. B. Cheney. Accordingly, I pass it over as belonging to a different scribble about what ideally ought to be done about Dubya’s Disaster. New and improved reasons for the invasion-basers doin’ what they ain’t goin’ta do can be discussed any time.)

BGKB. Bomby days.

_____
[A] Actually RBC was more of an ÜberIch ("superego") to his Party’s Little Brother than a brain proper. Since the elections of 15 December 2005, which were a fiasco from the Crawfordite point of view, Sultan Z. Khalílzád seems to have been the Yale laddie’s Iraq brain, narrowly speaking, but doubtless RBC agreed that the AEIdeologue in question was a good brain to pick. Good ol’ Zal’s policy was itself warped in the Sunni direction, but it emphatically did not include the neighborhood natives (or Mizzz Condoleeezzza either) inviting themselves into the hitherto exclusively Bushogenic quagmire.

Considered in that light, Neocomrade R. B. Cheney is still quite as bad a guy as ever, determined to remain a lone vigilante cowpoker, come what may. True, his present swerve can be defended in terms of majoritarian democracy, or defended prudentially as a matter of not workin’ against a quasigovernment that one’s own invasion-basin’ has set in place. The Cheney swerve can be defended in those terms, but doubtless Lone Cowpokerism is the efficient cause of it.

The accused may be in rather a touchy situation vis-à-vis his Little Brother. To say "Look, Your Excellency, don’t You see that You are lettin’ somebody else be Your Iraq brain?" runs the risk that the lad might wonder if RBC thinks he ought to have a monopoly on the emptiness between the Presidential ears. But God knows best what the perps are perpetratin’.


[B] It follows that the whole "Bush lied" fandango is a waste of time and energy. Nothing of any analytical value is lost if we stipulate Little Brother’s perfect subjective sincerity.

I take it the non-analytical value of "Bush lied" is that it allows the pseudo-analyst to pretend that she was personally deceived or her intelligence insulted by the claptrap out of Crawford. Even as autobiography, that seems vix dignum to me, but in any case, it has no bearing on public policy. Such was my opinion about the MacNamara-Kissinger war as regards Daniel Ellsberg and all that, and such is my opinion still. Anybody who claims to have been deceived in either episode has confessed to such gullibility as to discredit anything additional she may say by way of analysis or criticism. BGKB.

"Any Old Changes Will Do"

Rumsfeld doesn't understand the magnitude of the crisis or the tightrope the US is walking in the Gulf. His attitude is almost lackadaisical. Doing an all right job, but it isn't working fast enough or well enough. S o maybe make some changes--apparently any old changes will do-- because there are infinite lives to play with and infinite monies to spend.


Somebody might claim that the Great Teacher of the Grand Old Party saw what a feeble performance old Don handed in on the required term paper and decided it was time to turn him out to pasture. Indeed, the New York Times story speculates in a factual void about whether Sec. Rumsfeld knew he was going to be fired when he wrote it. If he did, that was reason enough in itself for him to be "lackadaisical" about whatever deluge may come afterwards, when somebody a tenth as competent as Rumsfeld thinks Rumsfeld is -- i.e., anybody else alive at the moment -- gets to run the Pentagon.

He shouldn't take that attitude out loud , no doubt, he should try to look more like an adult and disinterested statesman for the sake of his Party -- to look like a Kissinger, as it were. But remember that when he wrote that term paper, it was supposed to be classified. The same thing happened last week to Mr. Stephen Hadley with that almost ludicrous "trip report" that the Bushies leaked out from under him without worrying about how bad it made one of their own look. (They have funny ideas about "loyalty," Bushies do, but don't let me get started about that.)

I'd guess (but it's pure guesswork) that Rumsfeld did not know he was going to be tossed off the sledge, however, mainly because of the tail end of one item:

Aggressively beef up the Iraqi MOD and MOI, and other Iraqi ministries critical to the success of the ISF — the Iraqi Ministries of Finance, Planning, Health, Criminal Justice, Prisons, etc. — by reaching out to U.S. military retirees and Reserve/National Guard volunteers (i.e., give up on trying to get other USG Departments to do it.)

That bit sounds more like what you'd expect from Son of McNamara, does it not? Why would DOD be better than any other department if it lost the whiz kid at the top? Lackadaisicality has its limits.

Probably he was only answering the essay question actually presented to him, which will not have been "What can we do different and better?" but more like "What can we talk about doing in public so that everybody is deceived into thinking that we might now do something different, and that way we get them off our backs while we nobly stay our course?" Mr. Rumsfeld may have thought it a bit beneath his unique dignity and greatness to be asked for mere P.R. advice of that nature and hastily scribbled down whatever came into his head in about ten minutes and turned it his paper, mistakenly assuming that nobody would ever judge him by it but his President. At the end of it he did make some slight attempt to please that audience of one, insofar as he seems rather less unserious about the "less attractive options" than about the rest, perhaps trying to point the moral that nothing really important should be put at risk for the sake of a persiflage campaign. All the negative points agree either with Mr. Bush's known prejudices or with those of General Abizaid or with both.

"Rumsfeld openly admits that he wants to run Iraq just like Saddam did" is not fair. It wasn't "openly" at all, it was classifièdly. As with Mr. Hadley, the motives for preparing the document had no necessary connection with the motives for leaking it. I rather suspect that that "senior Administration official" who instructed the Times how to spin the "trip report" was none other than Mr. Stephen Hadley himself, whereas it is inconceivable that Sec. Rumsfeld ever wanted this thing to appear in the papers at all.

Moreover, he certainly cannot have wanted to run Iraq on Ba‘thist lines in every respect. I presume he took the "let's bribe 'em to behave" idea from Mr. Hadley, or whoever else first invented it in Administration and GOP circles, not directly from Saddam, and that the latter's name is adduced only to show that bribery has in fact been known to work with Iraqis.

If the idea of bribing whole provinces as well as particular politicians is Rumsfeld's own extension of Hadley's brainstorm, it is the only thing in the memo that is originally Rumsfeldian.. I doubt this is the case, however, and assume that some of the invasionites have been canvassing the idea behind closed doors for a while now, even though today may be the first time it has turned up in the press. To corrupt a regime that one has oneself set in place is so outstandingly bad a plan that a whiz kid as bright as Rumsfeld is must see what's wrong with it in ten seconds -- even perhaps a Mr. Stephen Hadley in ten days or so. That point is no problem if we assume that neither of them presented "bribe 'em to behave" to Dubya as the thing to do, only as one example of the general sort of new and different thing that the Administration could insincerely pretend to be thinking about doing until the election results blow over and the ISG circus leaves town and the heat is off again.

In Hadley's case, buying foreigners up wholesale was the only item in sight that was more than verbally different from "stay the course," whereas Rumsfeld tossed in what JC calls " a lot of contradictory and not obviously effective policies" as well, but there is no reason to insult the poor man's memory by assuming he actually believed in such shoddy stuff.

Ethically unedifying and useless for the victims in Iraq as this GOP campaign of self-leakage and persiflage is, it will probably more or less work. People who know right from wrong, plus also a fair number of basic facts about the invasion and conquest and occupation, can hardly fail to see through this charade, but it is not aimed at them. The targeted audience is only too likely to think "Gee, they really are looking at new and different ideas! Maybe they'll get it right this time."

Worse, we Democrats can't do anything effective against it. It might be good partisan fun to have a well-briefed Congressional committee show up Mr. Stephen Hadley for the amazing ignoramus that he seems to be at public hearings in the spring, but such a production wouldn't cost him his job, and with Mr. Rumsfeld there won't be any opportunity for even that feeble and pointless satisfaction.

Worst of all, what happens next to the Iraqis? I presume there will be some swerve in the Crawfordites' ever zig-zag course. Proconsul Z. Khalilzad has probably failed sufficiently by now that they'll be requiring somebody fresh to think up an occupation policy for them. Who gets to be Bush's brain next? The ISG/CFR gentry have been unilaterally and preëmptively ruled out, that's one big goal of the persiflage campaign already attained. Who's left?