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.