Selling A Smellout

The Oscar Wilde way with banalities -- "Divorces are made in heaven," and so on -- is too mechanical to be interesting ordinarily, but in this case there are mitigating factors, Your Honour, three of them: (1) Is not "smellout" pretty exactly the business that the gentry of Mu’ámara Junction themselves profess to be engaged in? (2) May one not say in Mandarin English, or Middle High Bloggish, that Dr. Goebbels used to "sell" his wares, even though he never charged anybody a penny? Thus too MJ. (3) Finally, no opportunity to cartoonize the august Dr. Cartoonoclastes ought to be missed. Failure to shoot his sort of fish in its barrel is not charity or humanitarianism, only culpable negligence.

But ad rem! Here's a whiff of the smell outed:

The sources say that the unpublished part of the agreement relating to Mosul includes an agreement [between M. al-Háshimí and the Free Kurds] on the administration of Mosul that gives two-thirds of the city to the Kurds and one-third to the Arabs and the other ethnic groups, in addition to adding the district of Sinjar to the Kurdish administration. If the truth of this is confirmed, then the Islamic Party has placed itself in a very difficult position vis-a-vis the Sunni-Arab street, which will not be able to allow this to happen under any circumstances. So far the Islamic Party has refrained from commenting on this very serious report.

That passage is a discovery, not a concoction or even a twistification, of the Mu’ámariyyans. Miss Lynx, who of course performs all the more banausic labours for her male colleagues, found it at http://news.76news.net/news.php?id=6320 . Mr. Badger -- the MJ newsroom chief, so to speak -- indicates the general nature of its aroma, "the Sunni-oriented Haq news agency," though one should be aware that that orientation is specifically towards the TwentyPercenters of the former Iraq rather than the Intergalactic Sunnintern. To be sure, a tendentious contortion like "the Sunni-Arab street ... will not be able to allow this to happen under any circumstances" gives the game away: no ideologue I know of was ever permit her crew's enemies to "be able to allow" this or that to happen. For reasons of convention rather than of logic, to bark and bellow "That is totally unacceptable!" about what one cannot begin to prevent is a joke when the other guys do it, yet nobody in the Heimatland so much as smiles when Dr. Goebbels goes on like that. (Perhaps the sweet puppies think there is a disloyalty to the team involved in any admission of impotence? But God knows best why team people like to play their silly games....)

As to the sellout rather than the Sunnianity, that smell is rather in the nostril of the besniffer. You and I, Mr. Bones, would not consider that M. al-Háshimí is well placed to sell anybody out, since he does not represent much of anybody to begin with. Indeed, his attaining to so lofty a pinnacle as the vice quasipresidency of ex-Iraq was very likely facilitated by his not representing much of anybody beyond himself. The circumstances of his exaltation are very peculiar, to be sure, a genuine curiosity for the student of Pol. Sci. to collect and treasure, because even in Peaceful Freedumbia, no Free Kurd or Twelver pol can be considered to be at an advantage because he has nobody and nothing in back of him.

So say you and I, Mr. Bones, but the anonymous street Arab quoted, like the gurus of the Mu’ámariyya who quote, believe nothing of the sort. In their alien and bewildering world, M. al-Háshimí "represents" all of GOP-occupied TwentyPercenterdom, and he may accordingly play Benedict Arnold to the same if he chooses to. As Gen. Arnold actually did, TH could maintain that he is "betraying" his own team in their own long-term best interests, a plea that seems less demented in a TwentyPercenter of the former Iraq than in a commander of Patriots. But we outside aggressors and anti-aggressors should probably avoid that sentimental variety of "seems" altogether, because it is not, after all, our team that is being discussed in conjunction with a M. Táriq al-Háshimí. Whether such a hack "sells out" in vain or becomes the all-time champion political turncoat does not have much bearing on the primary aspects of the bushogenic quagmire. It would be very unfortunate if extremist GOP schemes of aggression and prëemptive retaliation came to be regarded as having "worked" in the former Iraq -- that is the ball to keep your eye on, Mr. Bones, and if the career trajectory of M. Táriq al-Háshimí has any close connection with that, I have missed it entirely.

I have, rather impolitely, editorialized this faint whiff of news my way before taking notice of how Dr. Cartoonoclastes editorialized it the Mu’ámariyya Junction way. Like this, that was:

Myself, I think this type of horse-trading or attempted jurisdiction-swapping in the north would be consistent with a coming GreenZone musical-chairs restructuring, in the form of Hashemi buying some support from the Kurdish parties. And the musical-chairs concept, I think, is what is probably going to come out of the current "reconciliation" process, of which the next step is the officially unannounced Cairo meeting, where I think the outreach to the resistance is going to turn out to have been mostly for show.

Since "musical chairs" is an entirely new figure of rhetoric, I am not sure whether the honourable and gallant rhetor means his stuff strictly or not. The crux of the literal parlour game is that the number of chairs is steadily reduced, so that players are compelled to drop out one by one. But since there is a certain radical looseness of thought amongst the MJ gentry, in my estimate, Cartoonoclastes may have meant no more than "merry-go-round," that is to say, a continual reshuffling of political furniture among a fixed and constant quantity of Green Zone collaborationist pols.

In any event, M. Táriq al-Háshimí in particular is not slated to drop out. On the contrary, we are told that he is going to "buy" "support." Does that mean that somebody else's "support" must dwindle? Might it mean that the "support" of poor M. al-Málikí in particular shall dwindle? If you can make anything out along those lines from this latest oracle, Mr. Bones, I hope you will share it with me. Clearly Cartoonoclastes and I do not think about political events in the same way. In this case, I'd pick up his stick by the opposite end and wonder why on earth the Free Kurds should be interested in "selling" M. al-Háshimí any more "support" than they have furnished him with already. The cartoonoclastic analysis may conceivably have something to be said for it, but at this point in the aggression, it is far easier to see how TH can advance the interests of Free Kurdistán than vice versa: in addition to helping them enlarge their holy homeland, M. al-Háshimí might be of assistance in keeping the Turks off their back, although obviously the militant Crawfordites would be more useful still in that department.

If one did not know of the mu’ámmariyyan mindset, the whole affair would be a puzzle indeed, since the Free Kurds possess nothing plausible to "buy" M. al-Háshimi's "support" with that begins to be of equivalent value. What are they going to do, let the man call himself "President of the Republic," or perhaps "President of the Council of Quasiministers"?

For you and me, Bones, that last is a rhetorical question, for even a neo-Iraqi hack pol cannot attach that much importance to empty vainglorious gauds. What on earth is this traitor to his theocommunity supposed to be selling out FOR?

Taking cognizance of conspiratorialist psychology, however, one begins to get a glimmering. Miss Lynx and Mr. Badger and Dr. Cartoonoclastes need not be supposed to account M. al-Háshimí a bubbleheaded idiot. Far more likely they have not the imagination to consider such an affair from the Hashemite standpoint at all: what, if any, "support" the traitor is "bought" with does not concern them, they arise in factious wrath that the betrayal should happen, or indeed, that it should be possible -- they arise bi-lá kayfa, as it were, "without [asking] how."

====

Cartoonoclastes' little joke about "the officially unannounced Cairo meeting, where I think the outreach to the resistance is going to turn out to have been mostly for show" could be taken, somwhat maliciously, for a profundity about the metaphysics of the Mu’ámariyya: Secret Truth is a zillion times more important than mere appearances, yet if it be disclosed and vulgarized -- and that seems to be what the firm of Lynx, Badger and Cartoonoclastes exists to do -- does Secret Truth not in some sense become a mere appearance too?

As usual, the Mu’ámariyya's diagnosis of its patients winds up peculiar. It sounds as if the black hats propose to reach out to "the resistance" at Cairo mostly in the form of a secret show. I daresay Humpty-Dumpty could make sense even of that, though probably nobody really needs it made sense of for mere political purposes. BGKB.

To Puke Or Not To Puke?

The occasion alleged seems pretty run-of-the-mill bilge for the Wall Street Jingo to me, Mr. Bones, but Don Juan professes to be beside himself:

I just wanted literally to puke on my living room carpet when I read this bilge.

And here, without more ado,

What Iowans Should Know About Mormons By Naomi Schaefer Riley (Ms. Riley is the Journal's deputy Taste editor.) Yesterday, at the end of Mitt Romney's speech, he told a story from the early days of the First Continental Congress, whose members were meeting in Philadelphia in 1774: "With Boston occupied by British troops . . . and fears of an impending war . . . someone suggested they pray." But because of the variety of religious denominations represented, there were objections. "Then Sam Adams rose and said he would hear a prayer from anyone of piety and good character, as long as they were [sic] a patriot." Were Adams alive today, he most certainly would hear a prayer from a Mormon. It is hard to imagine a group more patriotic than the modern Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But there is reason to believe that voters in Iowa and elsewhere will not accept Mr. Romney's invitation -- put forward implicitly in his remarks yesterday at the George Bush Library -- to ignore religious differences and embrace him simply as a man of character who loves his country. A recent Pew poll shows that only 53% of Americans have a favorable opinion of Mormons. That's roughly the same percentage who feel that way toward Muslims. By contrast, more than three-quarters of Americans have a favorable opinion of Jews and Catholics. Whatever the validity of such judgments, one has to wonder: why does a faith professed by the 9/11 hijackers rank alongside that of a peaceful, productive, highly educated religious group founded within our own borders? Many evangelicals in the GOP view Mormonism as "a cult," or at least not a Christian faith. One Southern Baptist leader recently called it the "fourth Abrahamic religion." I remember, a couple of years ago, sitting in on an apologetics class at a Christian high school in Colorado Springs, Colo., and hearing the teacher describe a critical moment in the history of the Muslim faith, when the rock that now sits under the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem tried to fly to heaven and had to be restrained by Mohammad. Acknowledging that it sounded a little wacky, the teacher added: "Well, it's no stranger than that guy who found golden tablets in upstate New York." The students laughed uproariously at the reference to the Mormons' founding father, Joseph Smith. Six years ago, I probably could have counted on one finger the number of Mormons I had met. Having lived most my life in the Northeast, my situation was hardly unique. Then, while researching a book on religious colleges, I decided to spend some time at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. In preparation, I picked up Mormon America: The Power and the Promise by religion reporters Richard and Joan Ostling. The Ostlings offer a comprehensive account of the church's history and theology, as well as helpful descriptions of the Mormons' cultural and political outlook. "The onetime believers in plural marriage, considered a dire threat to Victorian probity and the entire nation," the authors write, "have become the exemplars of conservative monogamous family values." It is hard to disagree. Mormons marry young and have large families. They don't drink, smoke or gamble. The church does not condone homosexuality. Members give at least 10% of their income to the church and often volunteer more than 20 hours a week in some religious capacity. With no professional clergy, the survival of congregations (or "stakes") is entirely dependent on lay participation. All young Mormon men and many women spend two years as missionaries, their travels funded by their own families. The church stocks soup kitchens across the country and internationally (both its own and those of other faiths) with food from its farms and warehouses. Rather than behaving like an insular cult, members are integrated into the society around them, sending their kids to public schools and assuming leadership positions locally and nationally. Once Mormons complete their missionary service, they are not obliged to proselytize, so having Mormons as neighbors doesn't mean a constant bombardment with invitations to join up. But many Americans, unless they've actually had a Mormon neighbor, might find all these rosy facts meaningless, feeling deeply uneasy with some of Mormonism's tenets. A lot of what we call religious tolerance depends on social contact, not theological understanding, and there are only about six million LDS members in the U.S., mostly concentrated in the Western states (though increasingly less so). If you press Baptists, they will acknowledge finding Catholics' belief in transubstantiation implausible at best; Jews like me have a little trouble getting over the virgin birth. But we all get along, for the most part, because we know each other and live similar lives as Americans, whatever faith we profess. But most Iowans will not meet a Mormon in the next six weeks unless Mr. Romney comes to call -- Mormons make up less than one half of 1% of the state's population. So let me offer a brief snapshot, not in the hope that Iowans will vote for Mr. Romney but in the hope that, if they don't vote for him, their decision won't have anything to do with his religion. The young men and women at Brigham Young University are among the smartest, hardest-working and most pleasant college kids you will find anywhere. (For better or worse, I have visited dozens of college campuses.) The student body lives by the Mormon principle: "The glory of God is intelligence." Most reside off campus without adult supervision, yet they adhere strictly to curfews, rules about contact with the opposite sex and every other church directive. They are purposeful but seem to enjoy themselves, spending their free time hiking in the sprawling desert. And BYU has America's largest ROTC program outside of our military schools. This last fact is one I had occasion to think about on my trip. I left for BYU on Sept. 7, 2001, and returned home a week later. On 9/11, the students gathered for a campuswide devotional. The university president tried to comfort the students with "the eternal perspective." My eternal perspective is not the same as theirs, of course. But hearing more than 20,000 young people around me reciting the Pledge of Allegiance made me realize that our temporal perspective is the same. I'm sure Sam Adams would have agreed.

Meanwhile, back on the carpet,

I just wanted literally to puke on my living room carpet when I read this bilge. Islam is not 'the faith professed by 9/11 hijackers.' Islam is the religion of probably 1.3 billion persons, a fifth of humankind, which will probably be a third of humankind by 2050. Islam existed for 1400 years before the 9/11 hijackers, and will exist for a very long time after them. Riley has engaged in the most visceral sort of smear, associating all Muslims with the tiny, extremist al-Qaeda cult. We could play this game with any human group. Some Catholics were responsible for the Inquisition. Shall we blame Catholicism for that, or all Catholics? Of course not. Jewish Zionists expelled hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinians from their homes in 1948. Is that Judaism's fault or that of Jews in general? Of course not.[1] She goes on to further stick her foot in her mouth by complaining that she heard conservative Christians call Mormonism 'the fourth Abrahamic religion' (alongside Judaism, Christianity and Islam) and complains that they compared a Muslim belief she considers 'wacky' to Mormon stories. It is all right for her to call folk Islamic motifs wacky, mind you. She's only interested in being fair to Mormons, not to Muslims. Mormons are good people, but some of their forebears were also involved in violence in the 19th century of a sort that other Americans viewed as terrorism. Riley's remarks exemplify the problems with Romney's speech, which demands fairness for his group but not for, e.g., secularists. Thus, he says: "In John Adams' words: 'We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. ... Our Constitution,' he said, "was made for a moral and religious people.' Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom." What Romney omits is that many of the "religious people" among the founding fathers were Deists, who did not believe in revelation or miracles or divine intervention in human affairs. Thomas Jefferson used to sit in the White House in the evening with scissors and cut the miracle stories out of the Gospels so as to end up with a reasoned story about Jesus of Nazareth, befitting the Enlightenment. Some Founding Fathers were Christians, some were not, at least not in any sense that would be recognized by today's Religious Right. Jefferson believe that most Americans would end up Unitarians. As for the insistence that you need religion for political freedom, that is silly. Organized religion has many virtues, but pushing for political liberty is seldom among them. Religion is about controlling people. No religiously based state has ever provided genuine democratic governance. You want religion in politics, go to Iran. Liberty can survive religion, especially a multiplicity of religions within the nation. Because that way there is not a central faith that imposes itself on everyone, as Catholicism used to in Ireland or Buddhism used to in Tibet. But organized religion would never ever have produced the First Amendment to the US constitution, and the 19th century popes considered it ridiculous that the state should treat false religions as equal to the True Faith. Deists, freethinkers and Freemasons--the kind of people that Romney was complaining about-- produced the First Amendment. When Tom Jefferson tried out an earlier version of it in Virginia, some of the members of the Virginia assembly actually complained that freedom of religion would allow the practice of Islam in the US. Jefferson's response to that kind of bigotry was that other people believing in other religions did not pick his pocket or break his leg, so why should he care how they worshipped? And that's all Romney had to say. But he did not want to say that. Romney said the opposite. He implied that is is actively bad for a democracy if people are unbelievers or if there is a strict separation of religion and state. We know the Founding Fathers and Romney is no founding father. By Romney's definition of freedom, Sweden and France, where 50% and 40% of the population, respectively, does not believe in God, cannot have a proper democracy. But of course Swedish democracy is in many respects superior to that in the United States. Look, the reason that Americans took religion out of the public sphere was because the religious kept fighting with each other in the most vicious way. We had violence between Catholics and Protestants in schools in the 19th century because religion was in the public schools, and therefore each branch of Christianity wanted to dominate and control it. You take religion out of the schools, suddenly people stop fighting about it. People like Romney who want to put religion back into the public sphere are just going to cause a lot of trouble. 14% of Americans don't believe in God. Another 5% belong to minority religions (and both categories are rapidly growing). That nearly 20% doesn't necessarily want sectarian Christian symbols in public schools. Even a lot of the 80% that are some kind of Christian don't belong to a church and aren't necessarily orthodox in their views. So Romney's so-called plea for tolerance is actually a plea for the privileging of religion in American public life. He just wants his religion to share in that privilege that he wants to install. Ironically, the very religious pluralism of the United States, which he appears to praise, will stand in the way of his project. posted by Juan Cole @ 12/07/2007 06:30:00 AM

The gut of the WGAS got a bit distracted, it looks like. Nausea began with Big Management Party neocomradess N. S. Riley badmouthin’ Muslims to entertain the tasty readership of the Jingo, which has not much to do with Gov. Romney on the errors of Deism. Rather au contraire, I should think, since any toleration His Latter-Day Excellency can win from Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh for persons hereditarily encumbered with silly fables about Mr. Joseph Smith logically ought to apply to Dome of the Flying Rock fans as well. To be sure, "logically" often does not go down well with religionists and neoreligionizers, but that is scarcely poor Mitt's fault.

"Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom" is possibly a bit barf-inducing, but it is probably not really very venomous. Like most neocomrades and some other shallow thinkers, poor Mitt assumes that all the things that he happens to like must be united by some intrinsic bond more impressive than "being liked by Willard Mitt Romney." The Narcissus Perspective is all that such muddle comes to, usually. As an actual practitioner of Big Management, though, the governor may mean somethin’ more sinister, for the GOP/CEO/HVS/MBA gentry invariably consider that their True Freedom consists in the ability to bigmanage unobstructed. Exactly what such a specimen would consider its True Religion to consist in could be problematical, though more likely it would be only the basis for a phony fellowship with his managees, "Hey, look, I let Father Zeus bigmanage me, so why can't you guys . . . &c. &c.?" A very old song. [2]

Don Juan's countersong is familiar as well, and none too persuasive in context. Suppose we stipulate that His Latter-Day Excellency's "so-called plea for tolerance is actually a plea for the privileging of religion in American public life," what does this wicked "privileging" substantially amount to? Is the Mormonite brand of Enthusiasm and Superstition particularly oppressed and persecuted because other brands do not recognize it as a proper E&S? Not very obviously, and even if it were, by Don Juan's own principles, that would be no business for Uncle Sam to take action about. It is not inconceivable that the barbarians may benefit in some respects from being located outside the Great Wall of Separation. To decide that such benefit involves a "privileging" and must be regulated out of existence is contradictio in adjecto, to abandon the separation under pretence of enforcing it. Naturally the devotees of E&S can't be permitted to assign themselves extra votes at elections because of their devotion, but neither can the devotees of anything else, TrueFreedom™ and freedom and toleration included.

The jingo neocomradess is out beyond the Great Wall also. At least I cannot think of any plausible way to restrict her badmouthin’ of Muslims. N. S. Riley and her co-conspirators and her dupes must be allowed one vote per election also, and Uncle Sam would be misbehaving if he tried to alter that magic number 1.00 either upwards or downwards. The Straight Way is so easy to detect and expound hereabouts that the importance of walking in it may be lost sight of. There are lots of good reasons for disliking bad people, Enthusiasm and Superstition are far from alone in affording such reasons. The ’phobe Riley's own specialty, Taste, is perfectly adequate. She'd never dream of votin’ for a Muslim terrorist swine, and nobody is gonnta tell her different. If she wants to dress up Neocomrade R. Neuhaus's naked public square with op-eds against terroristical swine, Uncle Sam, at least, can do nothing to stop her. Unlike TrueFreedom™, plain public-domain freedom does tend to run to an unedifying tune: we can be most assured that we are bestowing it upon the needy when the needy insist on behavin’ so as to inspire warm holiday thoughts like "I just wanted literally to puke on my living room carpet."

Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison.


____
[1] Oh, dear.


[2] To insist on the bigmanagement of Zeus theologically might indeed make a religionizer averse to Deism, although the consequence is not strictly logical. Still, His Latter-Day Excellency would probably not care to be held to a Deistic standard of competence in operations control, with everything foreseen in the Original Intent and no course corrections ever necessary afterwards. Indeed, if a Big Manager doesn't get to meddle as he muddles through, is he really "managing" at all, let alone bigmanaging? Even though there is patently no need to meddle? Father Zeus does not have to worry about establishing Who is in control, the mythographers claim, but mere mortals are not often so fortunate. A poor Mitt could quite conceivably degrade the Mark I plan a few percentage points in order that all his subalterns understand clearly that it is the Romney Plan they must comply with.

Towards An Anthology Of Idiocy

Wherever we end, Mr. Bones, and no matter what the Aggression of the Month Club gentry may really be up to en masse, their Little Brother deserves to march first in this week's parade:

"I think it is very important for the international community to recognize the fact that if Iran were to develop the knowledge that they could transfer to a clandestine program, it would create a danger for the world. And so I view this report as a warning signal that they had the program, they halted the program. And the reason why it's a warning signal is that they could restart it."

Maving happily missed out on instruction from the Harvard Victory School and the New Haven Seminary for Undergraduates, you at least, O Bones, can have no trouble placing that elegant specimen of Big Party pidgin poop under the most suitable rubric, namely ‘Lucus’ â non lucendo, "Let it be called a ‘danger for the world’ in light of the clear fact that it poses no danger." This movement of the mental bowels is notorious in the textbooks as a fallacy, but one does not actually meet it outside very frequently nowadays. Perhaps some part of one's response should be a muted cheer that so agreeable and venerable a dottiness has not gone extinct altogether.

Dubyapologists, mercenary or deluded, will classify their hot dynasty poop differently and appeal to other maxims and saws. Fas est et ab hoste doceri! From the point of view of the twistatorial Baní Rove, what is to be done with their head laddie's "And the reason why is ...."? There is no proverb ready to hand -- is there? -- that inculcates "Whatever can once be started can forever after be RE-started." That's no worse a fortune cookie than most received apophthegms, I daresay, but unfortunately for Big Management just at the moment, this one does not happen to have been received.

Merely for the fun of the thing, let us suppose the wooden figurehead of Grant's Old Party totters on the brink of absurdity deliberately, and not merely Yalewise. That strategy, if it existed, could bring Little Brother to a fallacy that is even more fun than â non lucendo -- to our old friend the Invisible Cat, who, whenever he sits down on a chair, immediately causes the chair to appear unoccupied. Sixteen hundred intelligence agencies, with or without SIGINT and G@@GLE, could not distinguish that situation from the case in which the chair is re verâ empty. We know the impossibility of such a demonstration in advance, we know it a priori, the philosopher might say, although some party poopers would speak instead of a trivial verbal deduction from the meaning of the word "invisible." Whatever the Faculty Club finally rules on that case, it would by no means poop the Big Party's schemes of invasionism and Preëmptive Retaliation™ to marry the Invisible Cat to the Qommie Nukes, as it were. "Clandestine," as Little Brother's speech therapist named the pertinent magic ingredient above, works both ways: decent political adults can no more absolutely prove the nonexistence of invisible felines than the lemmin's of Wingnut City can demonstrate it. (The upshot might seem a Mexican stand-off to a mere logician, but that only goes to show what makes logicians mere. There is no genuine deadlock here, not when Little Brother disposes of his Uncle Sam's hyperpuissance unilaterally, and the doubting Thomases cannot even write a valid traffic ticket. [1])

Himself went on to play at bein’ a nuke-you-larry scientist personally, just like Jimmy Carter used to. (Golly!)

"And the thing that would make a restarted program effective and dangerous is the ability to enrich uranium, the knowledge of which could be passed on to a hidden program. The N.I.E. provides an opportunity for us to rally the international community — continue to rally the community to pressure the Iranian regime to suspend its program. You know, the N.I.E. also said that such pressure was effective, and that's what our government has been explaining to other partners in keeping the international pressure on Iran. The best diplomacy, effective diplomacy, is one of which all options are on the table."

So then, let China and Peru (&c. &c.) simply agree that it is an antisocial act for anybody but a Crawfordite or the friend of a Crawfordite to enrich uranium for any purpose whatsoever, and we shall have arrived in Beulahland. How anybody can resist such an "opportunity" as that at Beijing and Lima is a mystery, Mr. Bones, but for some reason I feel confident that they will manage to do so.

As a matter of fact, I did not "know the N.I.E. also said that ... pressure was effective," and after examination of the unclassified "Key Judgments" of the Sweet Sixteen, I am afraid that I still don't know that knowledge for sure in the sense that Little Brother's speech therapist had in mind.

We judge with high confidence that the halt, and Tehran’s announcement of its decision to suspend its declared uranium enrichment program and sign an Additional Protocol to its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Safeguards Agreement, was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran’s previously undeclared nuclear work.

As regards the protocol, that was obvious all along, like the protocol itself. The "halt" however is by way of being an invisible cat, and a newly unsighted invisible cat at that. The honourable and gallant spooks, like everybody else in politics, should be taken at their word as regards what they profess to believe with subjective sincerity unless it is impossible to do so without extreme mental contortions. So I judge with high confidence that they do indeed judge with high confidence. Whether they judge accurately as well as sincerely remains a different question, however. [2]

____
[1] Big Party neocomrade K. Rove's famous summary of the post-BigBang correlation of farces, as told to Mr. Suskind of Esquire , may not be attributed to the right neorightist perp, but it is not to be improved upon materially:

"You know, Ron, guys like you are in what we call the 'reality-based community.' ... But that's not the way the world really works now. We're an empire of sorts, and when we act, we create our own reality. ... We're history's actors, who are willing to do what's needed, and you can study what we do. And if you start being nice to us --which you haven't been, maybe one of us will deign to visit you at that seminar you teach up at Dartmouth in the summers, in your tattered tweed blazer."

One rather elementary analysis of the latest human events reported from Beltway City would be that sixteen "intelligence" agencies have decided, on balance, that they may safely bet against the Imperial neocomrade's splendid visions of reality-creatin’. Whether the cat-associated chair is vacant has now, as they suppose, reverted to being an old-fashioned Rechtfrage rather than a neo-Rovean Machtfrage, an "objective" rather than a "subjective" issue.

Princess Posterity is bound to think so in the long run, but I'd hesitate to affirm that the long run has already commenced as of 5 December 2007. The Tattered Blazer Folk run a genuine risk, as I consider, of coming out to dance on the graves of the Big Management enemies of the human race before all the troops of the latter have been disposed of and accounted for. Rovianity might be even become more formidable practically if trapped in the last ditch, for all that it is hooey conceptually and has never been otherwise. No band of Yale-based narcissists and greedies can ever set up a Rove World with the same boundaries as Uncle Sam's united states, but the creation of an intellectual ghetto, or Party theme park, exclusively for militant OnePercenterdom on a much smaller scale is not impossible at all. For one thing, our political landscape is already infested with Hoovervillains and AEIdeologues and Heritagitarians and jihád careerists who certainly are not gonnta vanish no matter who nukes whom in the Greater Levant --- not even if nobody gets nuked at all. Inside the Big Party's tanks of thought and its gated communities of the pricily credentialled, a shadow and subimperial Rovianity may linger for decades, quite unable to impose a general Weltordnung on the human race, but strong enough to make sure that nobody wearin’ a tattered blazer significantly exists anywhere in the immediate vicinity.

[2] As a parlor game, of course, anybody at all may stipulate the recently unsighted "halt" and speculate about its causes. ’Tis rather a silly pastime, though, so I shan't go farther than venturing to suggest that the evil Qommies might conceivably have concluded that nukes were not quite so urgent once the Busheviki had replaced the Ba‘thís next door in the former Iraq.

Those who take for granted that effacement of the Tel Aviv statelet is the only imaginable reason why a mad mullah would desire The Bomb will not care for any frivolous notion that defensive considerations might play some role.

Needless to say, God knows best what the Levantines are really up to, nukewise. And otherwise as well, for that matter.

Non-Euclidean Invasionism

Watch the parallels meet, Mr. Bones:

Ahmed Abu Risha, who took over leadership of the Anbar Salvation Council from his murdered father, brother, obviously, gave a long interview to al-Arabiya this week. It's interesting to get a sense of how his political thinking is developing. He began by talking about his recent visit to Washington. He placed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Joe Biden in the same category - really. He said that first Zarqawi and Abu Hamza al-Muhajir declared an Islamic State in Anbar, and then Joe Biden declared a plan for partitioning Iraq, and that he had gone to Washington to argue that neither was the reality of Iraq. He said that he told Bush that he carried a message from all the tribes of Iraq, Sunni or Shia, that they opposed partition of the country - and that Bush told him three times that such a partition would not happen. Somebody tell Abd al-Aziz and Ammar Hakim. Intriguingly, there is no indication in the interview that Abu Risha was made aware of the impending Bush-Maliki agreement, announced a couple of days after the interview aired, during these meetings with the President.

It somewhat lowers the credit of 1950's vintage Pol. Sci. that Abu Aardvark overlooks the possibility that the schizomaniacal fiends of SCIRI may rely upon corrupt smoke-filled townsmen to the exclusion of noble open-air Bedouin. AA retains enough proportion to see the funny side of der Erwecker des al-’Anbárs, but he remains decidedly Sunninternocentric:

The most interesting parts of the interview revolved around the question of Sunni political representation. The interviewer asked Abu Risha who gave him, or the Anbar Salvation Council, the right to claim to represent anyone. Abu Risha replied that their success against al-Qaeda was the basis of their legitimacy, a fascinating mirror of the claims of the insurgency factions that their legitimacy derived from their military success against the American occupation. (He repeatedly praised the institutions of the Iraqi state, especially the the Army - but said little about the Iraqi government.) Power indeed flows from the barrel of the gun, in Abu Risha's answers, rather than the ballot box.

If Abú Rishá has trouble distinguishing Sen. Biden from M. al-Zarqáwí, how about Abu Aardvark's syncope of "power" and "legitimacy"? Even in the 1950's, social scientizers knew better than that, I believe, the question having been raised recently in conjunction with Germany, among other neorégimes of those times. And then there comes Staat versus Regierung, an antithesis which seems much better to befit the Berlin end of the Baghdád railroad, although at this point AA muddles that Prussian antithesis up with the one between Macht versus Recht, a.k.a. "the ballot box." That is quite another story. AA might reflect, to begin with, that it is perfectly possible for a neorégime to lack both ingredients, as for instance that of poor M. al-Málikí, which possesses little "legitimacy" and less power. Even der Erwecker cannot envy poor M. al-Málikí his gun barrels too seriously, I trust, not at this point in the aggression. When the Sunní Ascendancy enjoys its own again, things will be different, of course: that proposition is a political tautology.

Der Erwecker may be a bit less of a clown than the Herr Prof. Dr. makes him out. Perhaps. Some sentence containing "[our] success against al-Qá‘ida [is] the basis of [our] legitimacy" would be plausible enough in the context of Little Brother debriefin’ the hero on the tribes of semiconquered Mesopotamia: the hero would be referring exclusively to the sort of legitimacy-basin’ to be expected of Crawfordite vigilantes, i.e., "Our legitimacy from your point of view, Mr. President." ’Abú Ríshá's private notions of why his relatives and friends and clients and dupes support him, or should support him, almost certainly contain many factors of scant interest to a militant extremist Republican.[1]

Even by the Aardvarkidean account of him, the hero must attach some smidgen of importance to ballot boxes, at least to deny any support thence to his miserable opponents and rivals:

Abu Risha dismissed the electoral legitimacy of both the local councils and the Tawafuq Bloc due to the low levels of Sunni participation in the elections. He pushed the idea of an Iraqi Awakening (Sahwa Iraq) as a "political entity" as the legitimate representative of all Iraqi tribes and all the various Awakenings. He claimed that there could be no conflict between the Awakening and the armed factions, but never got specific despite some pointed questions from the interviewer. Whenever the armed factions came up, he would change the subject to tribes - an obvious finesse of a politically major question.

I'd have thought it worth explaining from a high and dry Pol. Sci. point of view, Mr. Bones, exactly what "pushed the idea of" signifies here. It does not sound as if der Erwecker desires any encounter between tribes and ballot boxes, in which respect he shows himself a thoroughly orthodox and up-to-date Levantine pol, of exactly the same mindset as Gen. Mubárak and Col. Qadhdháfí and les altesses royales du Ryadh and so on down the list of usual suspects all the way down to the tiniest Gulfie minnow.

’Abú Ríshá might conceivably recommend himself to the Party of Grant on precisely those grounds, for it is the Party of Harding as well, after all, that has, or used to have, a cravin’ for "normalcy." Normalcy is not exactly the same political fluid as legitimacy, perhaps, but it has been closely associated with it ever since M. de Talleyrand-Périgord made the match. "Hey, guys, put ME in power, wouldja? I promise you I'll make your Peaceful Freedumbia normal again!" Some classy invasionites from the tanks of thought would find that an unattractive propositions, bein’ stubbornly devoted to mirages of Domino Democracy™, yet a majority of GOP geniuses. and even of Party base and vile, would probably be prepared to settle for normalcy at this point. [2]

One speculates in a void, to be sure, for the Herr Prof. Dr. says not a word about what "pushed the idea of ... a ‘political entity’ as the legitimate representative of ..." means on the positive side. Perhaps the correct guess is to take that wordlessness at face value and imagine the Awakener proposing no arrangement with GOP extremism more definite than "Why not everybody simply pretends that I am legitimate?" Political grown-ups in the West will find that a paltry sort of legitimacy, no doubt, but then ’Abú Ríshá is no Westistání, and the Kiddie Krusaders are, ex hypothesi, political kiddies.

A little of the rust and tarnish comes off Georgetown Pol. Sci. after that, however, when Abu Aardvark offers a tolerably just appreciation of the stumblebums' nifty Bribe-A-Tribe™ gizmo:

Finally, as always with the Awakenings, his position ultimately came down to money: he complained that under "the former government," Anbar received 870 [b]illion dinars a year from the central government, but in the 2007 budget (he claimed) it got only 289 [b]illion dinars, which weren't being spent appropriately. Hint, hint.

If the begging bowl is to be obtruded by der Erwecker himself, then the suggestion I made in note [1] becomes more urgent than ever. The Crawfordites are not likely to go on payin’ out the hero's pension -- plus relatives' and friends' and clients' and dupes' ditto -- indefinitely merely because of his ornamental value or his past services. The militant Republicans can be rather astoundin’ly stingy when it comes to their little foreign friends, as opposed to their good ideobuddies over at Blackwater or Halliburton.

(AA goes on at length, but here ’Abú Ríshá and I will exit the bus.)

"the least astonishing word in our language"

This scrap of grammatical hyperanalysis originated with the usual in-house TomDispatch social scientizer, Schwartz of Stony Brook, and was drawn to intergalactic attention by the world's greatest area student, JC of AA:

... [T]here was news lurking in an answer Col. Bannister gave to a question from AP reporter Pauline Jelinek (about arming volunteer local citizens to patrol their neighborhoods), even if it passed unnoticed. The colonel made a remarkable reference to an unexplained "five-year plan" that, he indicated, was guiding his actions. Here was his answer in full: "I mean, right now we're focused just on security augmentation [by the volunteers] and growing them to be Iraqi police because that is where the gap is that we're trying to help fill capacity for in the Iraqi security forces. The army and the national police, I mean, they're fine. The Iraqi police is -- you know, the five-year plan has -- you know, it's doubling in size. … [We expect to have] 4,000 Iraqi police on our side over the five-year plan. "So that's kind of what we're doing. We're helping on security now, growing them into IP [Iraqi police]…. They'll have 650 slots that I fill in March, and over the five-year period we'll grow up to another 2,500 or 3,500. Most astonishing in his comments is the least astonishing word in our language: "the." Colonel Bannister refers repeatedly to " the five-year plan," assuming his audience understands that there is indeed a master plan for his unit -- and for the American occupation -- mandating a slow, many-year buildup of neighborhood-protection forces into full fledged police units. This, in turn, is all part of an even larger plan for the conduct of the occupation. Included in this implicit understanding is the further assumption that Col. Bannister's unit, or some future replacement unit, will be occupying these areas of eastern Baghdad for that five-year period until that 4,000 man police force is finally fully developed.

It is pleasant to observe that practitioners of Soc. Sci. can still deign to take an interest in the minor articles of the former humanism on occasion, even merely morphological ones. Perhaps PowerPoint has not yet rotted their brains after all, then, or rotted only Mr. Anthony Cordesman's? Nevertheless, when children play with new or unfamiliar toys, mistakes happen, and Schwartz of Stony Brook seems to be the locus of such a misfortune. He even manages to fall off both sides of the anti-aggression horse simultaneously: (1) If he actually required this degree of HaroldBloomoid strongreading to work out that the militant extremist GOP have no intention whatever of relinquishin’ their grip on the former Iraq, our scientizer is perfectly capable of overlooking his own spectacles perched atop his nose.

But then (2), once supplied with that all-but-invisible scintilla of evidence from the lips of Big Party neocomrade J. Bannister, Dr. Schwartz erects vast and foundationless castles of swamp gas. All he knows for sure is that the neocomrade colonel had in mind somebody's Five Year Plan that he refers to in mumbles that also contain the words "we" and "our." Who the Godzilla is "we" in the mouth of a mouthpiece like J. Bannister? WHOSE plan is it? Rancho Crawford's plan? The official GOP's plan? DOD's plan ? Is it a plan of the Ever-Victorious Neorégime of poor M. al-Málikí?

The list of candidates could be extended considerably if one assumes that when Neocomrade Jeff stuck in that "you know" he was merely mumblin’, not actually alludin’ to specific Party or Pentagon secrets already familiar to his select audience. The rest of the transcript makes this hypothesis seem probable to me, and after examination of it, my estimate of Stony Brook Schwartz is not enhanced by finding that he did not "quote in full." So allow me:

COL. KECK: Pauline? Q Pauline Jelinek of the Associated Press. Sir, can you tell us about use of concerned local citizens in your area, what numbers you have them in, how formal your agreements are or arrangements are with them, what they do for you? COL. BANNISTER: Sure. That's a good question now. And I'll have to frame it for you. It's a little different on east Baghdad than it is in west Baghdad. And the reason it's different is because west Baghdad has al Qaeda. East Baghdad we have, you know, more of a militia threat, and the al Qaeda comes into east Baghdad in the form of a VBIED [PowerPointesque for "car bomb"] and -- because that's what they go after, the VBIEDs, is the population centers where the Shi'a are located. So you got to consider -- (audio break) -- no al Qaeda. So do we have a requirement that -- to where we need concerned local citizens as much as the west side, because you also have to remember they have a police gap on the west side, where they don't have as many Iraqi local police. So we're building capacity here in MND-B [Party Chinese for "Crawford-controlled troops at New Baghdád"], 12,000, you know, police, and the preponderance of them are going to go on the west side. In my area, I've -- I have 1,300 that I have hired, and we're going to fill a class in March with concerned local citizens that we have hired to become IPs. ["Iraqi policemen"(?)] And what we've done is, we've broken them down. I have six coalition force battalions equally partnered with Iraqi battalions, and each one of them have a piece of these IPs to get them ready for this March class. And we've applied them in areas where we think that there's a -- you know, a security -- where we could use an increase in security. But they come from the local area, and they work in the local area. And they're partnered up with the coalition and the Iraqi security forces in those areas. So it's just not as large on the east side as it is the west. Now what we're hoping is -- and they're working on this with the Iraqis right now -- is, we can grow it to where we put them to working the essential services jobs, and so they don't have to carry a weapon and be an IP at the end of this; they can become, you know, part of the aminat or the beladiyas and work for the government of Iraq in another capacity. So that's being discussed as well. And I think that program will be huge on the east side, kind of like the IP -- you know, more of the concerned local citizens and Iraqi security volunteers that they have on the west side. So it's a little different. I hope that answers your question. Q Yes, except for one thing. They're largely Shi'a? Can you give us a sense of who they are? COL. BANNISTER: Could you say again? I didn't hear you. I'm sorry. Q (Off mike) -- mostly Shi'a? COL. KECK: Say it one more time. COL. BANNISTER: That's a good -- that's good. I can break that out. Right now we have -- you know, as coalition forces, our oversight responsibility on this is to make sure they represent the population of the areas they come from. So we have an area along the sectarian fault line, which is al-Fadel, Abu Seifein (sp) and Qenbar Ali (sp). And it is right on the fault line, and it sits near Adhamiya. So we have Sunni that work in the Sunni mahalas, up in al-Fadel; we have Abu Seifein (sp) that has Shi'a. The preponderance of our other areas, they have representation of the mahalas that they're going to be assisting in. And so there is Sunniat (ph). I will tell you that some are 70-30 Shi'a percentage-wise, but we have some that are 70 -- in one of my areas, Zayuna, it's 70 percent Shi'a, 30 percent -- I mean it's 70 percent Sunni, 30 percent Shi'a. So they represent the area they come from. Q And just an example or two of what they will be doing after the classes? COL. BANNISTER: Oh, yeah. Well, they're already doing it. I mean, they will guard schools, they will guard mosques, they will be on checkpoints in a combined fashion with the security forces. We will not put them on checkpoints by themselves. So they're going to augment existing security. And I'll tell you where we're really going to -- where this is really helping at, especially in al-Fadel, is the intelligence that comes from them, because they're from those mahalas and they are a voice for the people because the people help elect them. So I see this as -- you know, there's all goodness, not only to help with security but really to -- because our Iraqi security forces, they don't come from the mahalas that they're in. I mean, I have a Fallujah-based, a very capable Iraqi army brigade. So, you know, having volunteers from the mahalas working hand in hand with them is all goodness. It really gives them a better read on the people and the threats that are in those mahalas. Q When you said they'd be working in another capacity, I thought you meant something like services or -- they are still doing security? COL. BANNISTER: Yeah. Yeah, that is -- that isn't what (above me ?) is doing right now. They're working hand in hand with the government of Iraq to help build capacity for the aminat and the beladiyas. So an idea that they're working hand-in-hand with them on is how to grow the workers for the aminat, which is municipalities, and the ministry, the beladiyas, where they have more capacity to be able to push out essential services into the mahalas, as well as, you know, it gives them a job. I mean, right now we're focused just on security augmentation and growing them to be Iraqi police because that is where the gap is that we're trying to help fill capacity for in the Iraqi security forces. The army and the national police, I mean, they're fine. The Iraqi police is -- you know, the five-year plan has -- you know, it's doubling in size. (Short audio break) -- 4,000 Iraqi police on our side over the five-year plan. So that's kind of what we're doing. We're helping on security now, growing them into IP. They'll have 650 slots that I fill in March, and over the five-year period we'll grow up to another 2,500 or 3,500. COL. KECK: Andrew?

*****

Let's start over, Mr. Bones.

That is an interesting specimen of the Invasionite Mind in action, no doubt about it. ’Tis rather a pity that Stony Brook Schwartz failed to be interested by most of it. No doubt he must have wanted to rush off to announce to universal dovedom that the aggressor Busheviki, like the former Bolsheviks, now go in for Five Year Plans. A cheap shot, of course, although fun as far as it goes. Alas, the professor doctor was in too much of a hurry to extract the "all goodness" from his lucky find, as neocomrade Jeff would presumably mutter.[1]

The señorito colonel itself seems to have no very definite plans past "650 slots that I fill in March," -- that being almost certainly March of 2008, four or five months hence. There is no way to tell which month of the Five Year Plan that will be, for we have no more information about when it was adopted than about who adopted it. Well, perhaps we may follow Sidney Smith and be content with taking short views, "not past tea time," for the Harvard Victory School MBA classes have never yet been very reliable in their spread-sheetin’s more than a few months out.[2] The last fifty of Big Party Management's projected sixty months are probably to be classified as science fiction, come what may.

Neocomrade Col. Jeff was nominally answerin’ the Associated Press lady's questions about the past and present, after all. As always in dealings with the Baní Rove, whether pros or amateurs, one would do well to remember exactly what was asked before the Party perps got a chance to wander off in the direction of "And I'll have to frame it for you." So, then:

Sir, can you tell us [1] about use of concerned local citizens in your area, [2] what numbers you have them in, [3] how formal your agreements are or arrangements are with them, [4] what they do for you?

Neocomrade K. Rove might account Master Bannister's performance unsatisfactory, quite apart from any supposed scandalous revelation of Five Year Plans. He tells the lady that he has "hired" thirteen hundred MND-B capacity persons, the number as plain as day, although the nature of the things numbered remains well shrouded. A curious class of hired things they appear to be, since we learn elsewhere that "they represent the area they come from" and even -- flabbergastingly -- that "they are a voice for the people because the people help elect them." That is not at all the customary formal arrangement when Daddy Warbucks "hires" an employee for his favorite business corporation. If we assume that the señorito colonel is bein’ strictly truthful, it looks as if his "hires" means little more than that he pays those MND-B capacity persons their wages. It is "the people" -- the militant GOP's subjects in its semiconquered Mesopotamian provinces! -- who conduct the job interviews. Or so we are told.

One can appreciate why Ms. Jelinek was invited to attend this particular séance: having been told that, she does not bat an eye or ask a follow-up question about what "hired" means or anything else about formal agreements, she does not pursue any of her four original questions, she only raises a new and different fifth business, "They're largely Shi'a? Can you give us a sense of who they are?"

That's interesting also, of course. Quidquid recipitur, recipitur ad modum recipientis. It seems that the AP is distinctly interested in Sunnís and Shí‘a, rather more in that than in subtleties about "I hired" and "they represent" and "the people elect." The only story I recall encountering that went into any practical detail about the great Bribe-A-Tribe™ scheme of Dr. Gen. Petrolaeus and Party Proconsul Crockerius actually works appeared in the Wall Street Jingo. Well, naturally the slaves of Murdoch would take an interest in cash flow trajectories. Anybody could predict that.

The most interesting thing that Neocomrade Jeff let slip had nothin’ to do with Five Year Plans for the perpetual occupation of Peaceful Freedumbia, but once again with the implications of "I hired." Ms. Jelinek was not struck by it, and neither was Stony Brook Schwartz, but me, I'm fascinated by "where this is really helping at, especially in al-Fadel, is the intelligence that comes from them." Ordinarly one thinks of policemen as hiring informers. In the bushogenic quagmire things are done differently. According to Big Party neocomrade Col. Jeffrey Bannister, who certainly ought to know, his IPs were hired to be informers -- insofar as that capacity comports with popular election and neighborhood representation, anyway.

Ms. Jelinek and the AP were handed more Crawfordological data than the most optimistic reporter could reasonably expect to extract from what seems to have been a routine Five O'Clock Follies. It seems unlikely that they have passed it on to their customers, although I shall certainly check on that. The Soc. Sci. of Stony Brook did not even notice it. Presumably it would require an exponent of Pol. Sci. to want to look into a situation where a theocommunity under alien occupation does not often drop dimes to the authorities directly, yet where the latter can hire themselves intelligence sources under the rubric of "policemen."

Once you discern that Big Picture through Col. Jeff's mumbles, you'll agree that it makes excellent sense for him to add "We will not put them on checkpoints by themselves. So they're going to augment existing security." Fancy a checkpoint manned by stool pigeons! Not even GOP geniuses are likely to fall into that sand trap.

(But God knows best what they are up to.)


____
[1] Which planet of the Wingnut Cluster is it where everybody talks all funniness like Master Jeff does?


[2] I speak of their public-sectorian spreadsheetin’s only, of course, not being privy to any of the HVS future case studies, which must -- hopefully! -- be a little less inaccurate.

Let those who have paid the tuition worry about the quality assurance, however.

The Vision of St. Hugh the Simple

But those who have studied Islam, studied the behavior, over many decades, of the Arabs, know perfectly well -- unless those students are apologists for Islam, collaborators with Muslims, out of conviction or cupidity (or sometimes both), or possibly are antisemites (or sometimes both) -- that the Arabs have no intention of recognizing Israel. Ask the defectors from that world. Ask Wafa Sultan. Ask Nonie Darwish. Ask Walid Shoebat. They know. No, there is not a "solution." There is one way to prevent open warfare. It is to create, and maintain, a situation in which Israel is not only vastly more powerful militarily, but is widely understood in the Arab and Muslim world to be so, which allows Arab leaders the excuse of not going to war based on their invocation of the concept of Darura, or Necessity. That, and that alone, can justify, in the minds of the Muslim masses, a failure to take military action against Israel. Moral arguments are not relevant.

It is picturesque, not to say "ironic," that St. Hugh the Simple should chance to speak of "one chance to prevent open warfare" in a passage I single out as epitomizing the jihád careerist faction's passionate determination that peace should never be allowed to break out. Charity is naturally pleased to learn that the vanguard of the Kiddie Krusade does not insist upon its own preferred forms of Enthusiasm and Superstition triumphing by mere physical violence of the traditional sort. Perpetual cold war amongst the faith-crazies will suffice, it appears, an endless mutual contempt and loathin’ between the two camps, yet unaccompanied by much actual bloodshed.

If we are lucky, that is. For as you can see, Mr. Bones, St. Hugh's mystic vision of Armageddon avoided or averted is strictly conditional and precarious. And, as we ought to have anticipated, whether or not the ultimate balloon goes up does not primarily depend upon the efforts of Bob Cardinal Spencer and Dr. Pipesovitch of Harvard and all the mighty forces of jihád careerism -- even includin’ humble St. Hugh Fitzguerriere himself. Keepin’ their Long War™ "cold" does not depend upon their Boy and Dynasty and Party, nor upon their Big Party's base and vile, nor even upon the whole white host of nonpartisan Kiddie Krusaders from Crawford to Tel Aviv. Preventing Armageddon dependeth not upon Wunnerful US at all [1], but rather upon THEM. And ’tis rather an odd and unexpected subset of THEM that turns out to be critical, namely "Arab leaders."

More exactly, two slices of THEM figure in the Vision of St. Hugh, for it is not with Kiddie Krusaders that "Arab leaders" have primarily to contend, but with what is called either "the Arab and Muslim world" or "the Muslim masses." If the latter were ever to get the upper hand, why, Armageddon would take place in a flash! Fortunately no project is dearer to "Arab leaders" than making quite sure that those lesser ethnically and theologically undesirable folks are confined to the kennels where they belong. To be sure, St. Hugh the Simple does not himself mention this point expressly, an omission I attribute to his unwillingness to descend from the lofty heights of Enthusiasm and Superstition to the Romulan sewer of politics. Yet nowadays perhaps one neocomradely tank-thinker in ten is willing to oppose democracy for Arabs and Muslims without beatin’ around the bush, no matter what the Bush itself may bloviate to the contrary. (And even Little Brother has largely learned to keep his trap shut of late.)

Yet St. Hugh is hardly marchin’ in step with most of his Party's lemmin’s. How could he be? Though a militant and extreme jihád careerist himself, most of the neocomrades suffer from a very plain case of IADS (Islamophalangitarism Awareness Deficiency Syndrome). Poor St. Hugh the Simple must keep barkin’ and bellowin’ "Wolf!" to an audience that scarcely knows that particular four-letter word. To bark and bellow about "Arab leaders" and "Muslim masses" collects only a limited number of fans and curiosity-seekers in the naked public squares even of Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh. At Peoria the crowd that assembles for Fitzguerrierean homilies is bound to be even smaller. "Fit company, though few" are they, perhaps, but all the same, rather alarmin’ly few, from the jihád careerist viewpoint. How fortunate, then, that avertin’ Armageddon should depend on "Arab leaders" and "Muslim masses" primarily, not upon voluntary self-defense efforts in the lands of Western Civistán!

Still, the visionary guidance from Beyond does enjoin jihád careerism and Kiddie Krusadin’ "to create, and maintain, a situation in which Israel is not only vastly more powerful militarily, but is widely understood in the Arab and Muslim world to be so." It seems that the objective facts about this Blessèd Ideal Situation are of some importance quite apart from what "Arab leaders" and "Muslim masses" may widely understand. Once again St. Hugh the Simple lucks out, for such a situation does after all obtain at the moment. If the Apostle of Unpeace thought it did not obtain, he would have to bark and bellow at his auditory to "create" it from scratch. It looks as if in fact we have only to "maintain," however. O lucky us!

The practical question is clearly how to maintain, or perhaps how to tell that we have maintained. Here is the key element that makes WUNNERFUL US dependent upon "Arab leaders" and "Muslim masses" for the avoidance or postponement of Armageddon. Jewish Statism must both be and be perceived as "vastly more powerful militarily." I think. The Beyond would be displeased with us, I presume, if we tried to fool "Arab leaders" and "Muslim masses" into thinking Jewish Statism very formidable when it fact was not. However it is more likely that St. Hugh the Simple worries mainly about the opposite case, in which the Tel Aviv statelet's supplies of tanks and bombers and bayonets -- and perhaps money from Crawford as well -- would be mistakenly underestimated by "Arab leaders."

The "Muslim masses" are made to sound as if they routinely make that underestimation, which brings us to the heart of the Vision of St. Hugh Fitzguerriere. The Beyond plainly takes the view that although "the Muslim masses" inveterately underestimate the massive armed forces of Zion and neo-Zion and para-Zion and Hyperzion, their ignorant and vulgar mistakes can usually either be corrected by "Arab leaders" [2] or else simply ignored, because "the Muslim masses" have no say in the policies of the Arab Palace people.

Alas, the Beyond warns of two distinct dangers through the mouth of Hugh the Simple, yet the Beyond does not tell us which danger to dread the most. Is Armageddon more likely to ensue because the existing Arab leadership will succumb to democracy / populism / ochlocracy, or because, while the cardboard kings and the barracks-based republicans maintain their total exclusion of street Arabs from power, they will nevertheless come to accept the foolish errors of their inferiors?

Quite different grand strategies to "maintain" would be called for in the two cases. Should Boy and Dynasty and Party commence by makin’ quite sure that nothin’ like Neocomradess K. Hughes ever happens again? That would be a reasonable plan if upholdin’ Gen. Mubárak and Col. Qadhdháfí and les altesses royales du Ryad be the crux of Armageddon evasion. However if the real and urgent threat is that these good Kirkpatrician gentry will remain in place but may relapse into the errors of 1948 or 1967 about the organized violence potential of Jewish Statism, it is not so easy to see exactly what steps Kiddie Krusaders ought to adopt. Naturally it would be desirable that the Tel Aviv violence pros should perform in public a little more successfully next time than they managed against the God Party of Lebanon in the summer of 2006 -- yet how is such a "next time" to be arranged, exactly? And for that matter, once arranged, how is the desired outcome of it to be ensured in advance?

Certain tank thinkers at Wingnut City, mere mortals who necessarily lack St. Hugh the Simple's special relationship with the Beyond, have suggested with some plausibility that launchin’ an anti-Safavid front in the Big Party's Long War would be opportune. Given proper manipulation and twistification, [3] that strategy could probably close the gap between "Arab leaders" and "Muslim masses" to some extent: "Hey, guys, let's everybody pile on the Shí‘a!" The fearsome specter of Levantine Democracy might be seriously discouraged thereby, at least for a time, but a Crawford-Qom match (if plainly won by the vigilante cowpokers) would have no very obvious tendency to make Jewish Statism look stronger than it does.

Reflection as I scribble suggests that an attack upon the evil Qommies conducted by the Tel Aviv régime single-handed might pull off both St. Hugh's tricks for him, both discouragin’ democracy and exaltin’ the horn of Hyperzion. "Arab leaders" require to be thoroughly terrorized of Jewish Statist power, but for that purpose it is not necessary that the thunderbolts fall upon themselves, M. Ahmadí-Nezhád would make a very suitable victim and illustration. If the cardboard kings and barracks-basers were actually in cahoots with Qadima (or with the extremist GOP) about such an affair, their difficulties with the street Arabs might easily become terminal, but given a decent degree of plausible deniability, the Arab Palaces could come through with their domestic security unimpaired.[4]








____
[1] I oversimplify. Like most of the Big Party ’phobes, St. Hugh the Simple can scarcely open his jaws about the evils of Islamophalangitarianism without attackin’ certain persons in Western Civistán who have not the happiness to be Muslims or neo-Muslims at all, but are only godforsaken l*b*r*ls. He performs exactly this sadly characteristic shtik of his crew's in the quotation provided, with "apologists" and "collaborators" and "cupidity " and "antisemites." Yuck.


[2] St. Hugh the Simple's exemplary simplicity means that one should not expect too much from him in the way of pedantic accuracy, yet perhaps it is not an accident that we hear only of "Arab leaders" and not of "Muslim leaders." M. Ahmadí-Nezhád of the Islamic Republic of Iran would no doubt cross the mind of a jihád careerist first as a non-Arab Muslim statesperson, and that gentleman is taken in most circles of simplism to be the very model of an underestimator of Jewish Statist might. Like the ignorant vulgar in Arab lands, the evil Qommie President is represented by JC's and KK's as thinking that a large eraser is pretty well all it would take to efface the Tel Aviv statelet once and for all.


[3] Not likely to be forthcomin’ from the Harvard Victory School MBAs, to be sure.


[4] When the status quo is a total monopoly on power by the Arab Palace gentry, republican or "royal," there can not be any substantial improvement on it. Balátar az siyáh rangí níst!

"My Analysis Neglects ..."

No, of course the only person who said that was me, Mr. Bones. The original marched to a different tune altogether:

My analysis of this NYT piece is that Bush and the Republicans are betting that they can portray as irresponsible and unpatriotic the Democrats in Congress who decline to give Bush all the war funding he wants. The Democrats are betting that the public desperately wants them to stop the Iraq War, which is hemorrhaging money and costing American lives, all for goals that are unclear. If I were a betting man, I'd put a big bet on the Democrats in this regard, and even without a bet I predict that the Republicans are going to suffer an earthquake-like reversal next November.

'Tis true, Mr. Cole, that I here cite the World's Greatest Area Student. But before your pulse goes wild, sir, recall that central North America is not included in the authorised WGAS Pundit Zone. When it comes to the holy Homeland, one need not be too surprised if some mere New York Times prognosticates more accurately than all the Nostradamuses of Ann Arbour. Ne sutor ultra crepidam!

Our Aunt Nitsy is not, by and large, a bettin’ gal, although she can be a terrible scold when she starts editorializing with "this page" deployed as the pronoun of the First Person Opinionated. However,it is not even a nitsytorial that Don Juan picked up to clobber his Little Brother with, it is only a short unlabelled performance by one David Stout. Since the New York Times is generally regarded as a newspaper, I suppose the thingamajig might as well be classified as a "news story," even though it begins by denying that anything new is going on:

House Democrats and the White House continued their public relations battle over money for the Iraq war today, as two leading lawmakers accused the administration of trying to scare people for political gain.

Well, maybe there are faint traces of nitsytorializing after all, now that I look at that topic sentence in splendid isolation: the man Stout is probably going a bit farther out on a limb than strict Martian or RupertMurdochian objectivity would approve of. Tweedledee (D-US) and Tweedledumb (R-TX) could conceivably be having only "a money battle over money," could they not? Who says it's all about P.R.?

The Honourable Obey of Wisconsin says so, that's who. And the militarist Murtha of PA seconds his fellow jackass's motion:

“We’ve already provided all the money the administration will need to get them through to March and to avoid the horror stories that they’re peddling,” said Representative David R. Obey of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. And money for beyond March will be available if only President Bush will accept “modest and reasonable conditions,” Mr. Obey said. Representative John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, head of the defense appropriations subcommittee and a harsh critic of the war, said, “There’s a difference between supporting our military and their families and supporting the war in Iraq.” “This administration supports this war,” Mr. Murtha said. “This Congress supports our troops and their families, as we proved over and over and over again.”

Come along, Mr. Bones, by the time Congressman Subhead starts worrying about what "support" means and what it is that the holy Homeland "supports" exactly, either we are doing dialectics with postmediaeval religionizers or we're visiting Madison Avenue on a virtual day trip, with the odds heavily weighted towards the latter hypothesis. Nitsy's man Stout had every justification for speaking of "their public relations battle over money for the Iraq war today," and the standard literary license covers his introducing the justification subsequent to the claim justified.

Myself, I should have liked to hear some of those "horror stories" that the legislative lemmin’s of Boy and Party are said to be peddlin’. I don't doubt the fact, for such behavior is thoroughly lemmin’like and by now thoroughly traditional with the Aggression Fan Club, yet those of us who come in late to this particular bout of the Tweedledee-Tweedledumb conclobberation could do with a sight of The Rattle, just to make sure the Great Crow or somebody has not secretly made off with it and thus rendered all these proceedings nugatory in advance.

Here again, Mr. Stout puts the evidence in well after what it is supposed to buttress, and in this case it seems to be an inferior grade of evidence as well as a tardy one:

If the war bill remains stalled, it will soon have harmful effects on normal military operations and could cause many thousands of civilian employees of the Defense Department to be laid off, Mr. [sic] Perino said. A Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, buttressed the White House complaint, telling reporters that people who think the Defense Department has lots of money to transfer between accounts are “simply misinformed,” according to The Associated Press. “We’ve entered into a very serious period here,” Mr. Whitman said.

Big Party neocomrade[ss] D. Perino is "President Bush’s chief spokeswoman." I really should have remembered the gentlecritter's name, Mr. Bones, yet perhaps I am not alone, here in the abendliche Dämmerung of Château Kennebunkport and Castle Cheney and Rancho Crawford, in having lost track of exactly who is dubyapologizin’ for ’em now? Be that as it may, the substantive dubyapology is mildly interesting for a couple of reasons.

(1) Neocomrade D. Perino distinguishes between "normal military operations" on the one hand, and the Ever-Victorious Surge of ’07™ (I presume it must be) on the other. She expects, or pretends to expect, that even odious Demoncrat defeatists regard "normal military operations" as sacrosanct. Unfortunately she is probably quite justified. I am tempted to digress into editorializing about this national misfortune, but shall content myself with a mere brief "news analysis" instead: although only militant extremist GOP gland-basers can be counted upon always to wish to wish to act like Godzilla, America's Party is full of folks who think it very important that Uncle Sam always be able so to act, though we restrain ourselves to comparative decency in fact. Their attitude can be dignified as Aristotelian and Shakespearean -- "Those that have power to hurt but will do none," etc. -- but more practically, it could also be codified as "normal military operations," and that appears to be what the female flack for Crawfordite invasionism had in mind.

(2) The neocomrade was rather reinforcin’ her first P. R. assault than launchin’ a different one when she spoke darkly of "many thousands of civilian employees of the Defense Department to be laid off." It may well be that she supposes this to be her Little Brother's ace of trumps vis-à-vis the wretched Murthas and Obeys. How shall America's Party resist an appeal to keep civilian unemployment down? Why, that would be to side with Dr. Hoover and against FDR, almost!

Although interesting, Mlle. Perino's agitprop is tame stuff as "horror stories" go. More exactly, only incumbent Congresscreatures like Obey and Murtha and a small circle of immediate associates are likely to perceive the full horror of lay-offs at DOD or interference with "normal military operations" as conceived by Wingnut City tank-thinkers. So-called "real people" do not in general pass through life dreading non-re-election as among the fates almost as bad as D**th, after all.

By those standards, however, perhaps Mr. Stout is not entitled to speak of "public relations" after all. A horror story that can properly horrify only pro pols would appear to qualify as "public" only indirectly and in a very qualified sense. Nostradamus spoke of Big Management settin’ out to "portray as irresponsible and unpatriotic the Democrats in Congress who decline to give Bush all the war funding he wants," but what are we to say about that analysis after we wonder if the WGAS had his reading glasses on? Neocomrade Perino is not quoted as sayin’ a word about "war funding," except insofar as she may have meant to imply that it is quite inseparable from unwar funding.

The neocomradess was certainly not tryin’ to blackmail and blackguard the defeatist donkeys as "unpatriotic" in the straightforward sense of preferring that the Big Management Party's supralegal aggression into the former Iraq should fail ignominiously, an aggression that "works" being more detestable than one that does not, as well as much more likely to be used as a basis for further crimes in future. Those of us who actually take that rigorist view cannot avoid noticing that not many holy Homelanders agree with it, certainly far too few to be of significance in discussions of public opinion or manipulatory Public Relations. The WGAS does not agree with us himself, or at any rate he never worries that saving their bacon for the Harvard Victory School MBA’s might set a very undesirable precedent.[2]


==
Plus in a narrowly political sense, Dr. Cole manages to be exotic-parochial: he grossly overestimates how well "the public desperately wants them to stop the Iraq War, which is hemorrhaging money and costing American lives, all for goals that are unclear" actually plays at Peoria and South Succotash and Rio Limbaugh. Doubtless Televisionland and the electorate ought to take some such view of the Kiddie Krusaders, but nobody paying much attention to the holy Homeland is likely to claim that they -- that "we" -- really do attach that much importance to what the Lesser Breeds Without are up to in the world, or what the LBW think Uncle Sam is up to either.

But God knows best.


____
[1] Quoth the Torygraph ,

The Taliban has a permanent presence in most of Afghanistan and the country is in serious danger of falling into the group's hands, according to a report from an international think tank. The Senlis Council claimed that the insurgents controlled "vast swathes of unchallenged territory" and were gaining "more and more political legitimacy in the minds of the Afghan people". It said that the NATO force in the country needed to be doubled to 80,000 front-line soldiers who should be allowed to pursue militants into Pakistan.

Do Televisionland and the electorate pay any attention to all that splendid innovation by our Big Party Managers, however? There is not much sign of it. Outer Khurasán is simply too far away, I fear, and too unimportant economically and jewishstatistically for the Big Party perps to work up a plausible scare without some really serious input from the direction of M. Bin Ládin and Dr. Zawáhirí. I have no idea whether D. Perino's "normal military operations" include or exclude the normalcy of Áfghánistán. But then it does not matter, does it, Mr. Bones? Even Obeys and Murthas are not going to become hobgoblinized about civilian unemployment levels at Kábúl and Qandahár.


[2] Ann Arbour Faculty Club attitudes are defensible, it seems to me, only insofar as they concentrate on the Greater Levant exclusively and ignore the fact that Rancho Crawford and Castle Cheney so much as exist. In that case, minimizing damage to the patients can be legitimately exalted to the status of unum necessarium. However in the real world, that outcome is very difficult to separate from enhancing the reputation of the militant extremist GOP quacks and encouraging them onwards to their next excellent adventure.

The World's Greatest Area Student does not attempt to unravel this knot at all, and the reason for his failure seems to be a certain muddleheadedness peculiar to himself. The WGAS viscerally detests Little Brother and "Richard Bruce Cheney," as he likes to call Tonto. You and I, Mr. Bones, can match only a small part of the Colean scorn and revulsion. We can, however, perceive from afar that scorn and revulsion are sentimental or emotional and do not qualify as arguments in themselves. "Half the known world hates George Walker Bush" might do as the basis for an adult political appeal. "I, J.R.I. Cole, hate George Walker Bush" is in a different category altogether, despite the formal similarity.

The upshot is that the WGAS takes for granted that nobody sane will ever use the invasionistical doin’s of RBC and GWB as a precedent for themeselves. After all, who would appeal to Chancellor Hitler's precedents except sarcastically and backhandedly? That sort of pitch defiles very aggressively indeed. Unfortunately (?) Little Brother and Tonto do not quite fall in the same pigeon-hole as the Greater German statesperson, and such a classification depends on intersubjective or "objective" criteria that are qualitative in nature, meaning that no mere quantity or intensity of distaste at Ann Arbour or elsewhere can be dispositive.

The WGAS himself does not, I believe, maintain that there was nothing wrong with the aggression of March 2003 apart from its being conducted by a crew of Boy-'n'-Party stumblebums -- or, if you like, by a dread Neo-Con Cabal -- who failed to make their aggression "work." Millions of other people do believe that sort of proposition, though, many more than enough to make it a legitimate question of public opinion and target of opportunity for Public Relations. The reputation of aggression in the path of Preëmptive Retaliation is therefore a cause that might be revived, and indeed is being revived at the moment, largely by the Baní Kagan and other factional boosters of the Ever-Victorious Surge of ’07™, yet also by less culpable and more reflective perps. The WGAS has been responding to this unwelcome stimulus mainly by disputing the facts, and the facts are undoubtedly disputable, especially the facts about the future. That level of response is OK, as I have conceded already, so long as the WGAS is content with being an area student exclusively. Should he essay to be a philospher or critic in addition, however, some grappling with the alarming possibility that supralegal aggression really does WORK on occasion would seem to be demanded of him.

The Con Man As Vulgar Marxist

"Property is theft," Mr. Bones, no doubt about it! Yet up to a point we humble can steal from Slogger City as well as they from the Anglo-Arabian Press Trust. Look what I just liberated, sir!

In an interview with pan-Arab al-Hayat, Ahmad Chalabi, the ex-vice Prime Minister and staunch supporter of the US invasion of Iraq, said that "Iran is exerting its right to defend itself in Iraq," and described the ongoing Shi'a-Shi'a clashes in the South as a veiled form of class conflict. Chalabi, who currently leads the "popular committees" created to support "Operation Imposing Law" in Baghdad, complained about the lack of accountability in the Iraqi government, and argued that it is caused by the preponderance of political/sectarian blocs in the Parliament: "despite all we hear in Parliamentary sessions regarding summoning this or that minister to the Parliament for questioning, all these efforts fail because of the pressures exerted by the minister's bloc, which considers the measure to be directed against it." Chalabi also complained about the "power-sharing deals" that have plagued the Iraqi state and the corruption that accompanies them; when told...

Larceny fails when the trashy treasures of Sloggerdom were not lurking in the HTML page at all. But that's a fun place to break off for speculation purposes, is it not? Imagine that some impertinent indig had objected, for instance, "But surely Your Excellency is part of the ‘accompanying corruption’ as well?" How would the cheek that launched a thousand tanks have responded to that perfectly rational inquiry?

More cheeky than ever is Neocomrade Dr. A. Tchélebi, formerly of MIT and AEI and GOP. It is difficult to say, however, exactly whom he is cheekin’ for at the moment, other than his inevitable and best-belovèd Self. In a mere two and a paragraphs there, we spot him frenetically defendin’ (1) the Islamic Republic, (2) popular committeedom, (3) "Imposition of Rule", (4) the transparency chiché, (5) the antisectarian cliché, and (6) the Quasilegislative Branch of Khalílzád Pasha's Konstitution. As far as I can tell, there could be another six dozen contradictority scams mentioned by the panarabian fishwrap that Slogger City summatorializes from.

And that's minus the Marxism! If indeed there is any Chalabomarxism, for to speak of "a veiled form of class conflict" could easily veil the fact that His Excellency sides ruthlessly with the Benaziriat rather than peasantry and proletariat. Perhaps if his family got its pre-1958 provinces back, the former Iraq would be almost as good as mended? Feudal Landladyism is the sort of scam I can imagine His Excellency really believin’ in, though that may be more a fact about me than about him.

On the other hand, neomediaevalism is not a very demagoguable cause in Peaceful Freedumbia at the moment, so it is in fact far more likely that His Excellency means to pass himself off as a popularis of some sort. To the extent that the al-Hayát pudding has any theme at all, it is perhaps to exalt the horn of Dr. Tchélebi at the expense of poor M. al-Málikí, whom it is not difficult to present as a model impopularis. All very unfair, of course, since the Chairman of the Council of Quasiministers is only what the GOP genius of Z. Khalílzád and N. Feldman and assorted other Party perps has caused him to be. Still, the incompetence of aggression-based Big Management does create an opening for the likes of Dr. Tchélabi. Nobody can get anything done through the official machinery of "national" "government," all genuine political power must be based elsewhere, and Dr. Tchélebi is at least as good an elsewhere as any other, is he not? [1] Rather a more agreeable elsewhere than your typical warlord bandits and sunny awakeners and Badr brigadiers, in certain respects. Much the best feature of the Error Hero of Our Time is that he does not have a militia behind him and seems unlikely to acquire one no matter how hard he panders to all or any of his widely assorted panderees. [2]

==

On a related topic: Slogger City seems to have miscalculated badly. Their attempt to extort money for "secret" or "insider" info about the semiconquered provinces of Republican Party extremism, info straight out of invasion-language journalism and the Anglo-Arabian Press Trust, has coincided with the pretty people losing interest in the whole fandango now that Dr. Gen. Petrolaeus and Party Proconsul Crockerius have taken the bushogenic quagmire in hand. Maing it impossible to cut and paste from what little they display on their main page can scarcely suffice to save their bacon and allow them to retire to Rio de Janeiro for a suitably financed retirement after the Peaceful Freedumbia racket collapses altogether.

Once in a while, Mr. Bones, one catches such a faint glimmer that maybe some just Providence really does concern herself with the world at times. But God knows best.


___
[1] If we were talking about the holy Homeland, Mr. Bones, that would not be a rhetorical question. The worseness of AEI/GOP con artists has had more than a century to unfold itself to appalled onlookers. However, nobody to speak of in the Big Party's boondocks knows that parochial North American history, which means that most of what is corrupt about Dr. Tchélabi means nothing much to Uncle Sam's neo-Iraqi subjects.


[2] But remember, corruptio optimi pessima! If Dr. Tchélebi ever did manage to get some reliable bayonets behind him, the prospects for Peaceful Freedumbia would be very dark indeed. We may hope that his attested track record is sufficient to ensure that nobody sane would ever loan His Excellency a slingshot or a pea-shooter, yet human events is not an exact science nor sanity always available. The worst danger is perhaps is that H.E. might find some total klutz of a colonel or general who likes prancin’ about the barracks on a white horse and then set up as Ludendorff to Ibn Hindenburg. Fortunately neither the evil Qommies, nor the Sadrist proles, nor the popular committeewomen, nor the wannabe Imposers of Law, nor the enemies of rootless cosmopolitanism, nor the disgruntled quasideputies of brave New Baghdád have any such Colonel Klutz at hand to advance the schemes of Tchélebisme. But the improbability of the event must be multiplied by its immense godawfulness, should it ever occur. Better keep an eye out and knock on wood, everybody!

Cowpokers v. Turkeys (plus "O God, O Montreal!")

The good spooks over at the JCIA [0] are very brief in this morning's dispatches, and one can see why, even though they don't want to talk about themselves. Not TOO MUCH, anyway. It appears that they have joined the rest of Big Party neocomrade H. Fitzdhimmi's "MESA nostra" in at last taking flight from the soil of that holy Homeland that they have so long abused and dishonoured. [1] "Good riddance!" resounds from shore to shore of Lake Goldwater in beautiful downtown Rio Limbaugh . . . .

(The bad news, for the Pipesovitch-Kramerides classes, is that the MESA monsters clearly intend to reenter God's Country after going up to the high-latitude places to worship the abominations of Lady Shariah. Surely Boy and Party ought to be able to give all twenty-seven hundred of ’em a stiff dose of Táriq Ramadán Visa Therapy™?)

Although it is always fun to cartoonize the pomposities of Student Government, and although the WGAS itself takes student self-governance fandangos even more seriously than most of its ilk, and although sticking a spoke in the wheels of the jihád careerists and dossiermongers can never come amiss, nevertheless what the JCIA reports not about itself -- and even not about General Buonaparte! -- is even more interesting still. Behold:

Saturday, November 17, 2007 // Turks Favor Invasion A new poll shows that 81% of Turks favor invading northern Iraq, up from 46% in July. "The number of people saying Turkey should conduct a cross-border military operation against militants of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) stood at 81 percent, up sharply from 46 percent in the last poll in July." ... Despite U.S. offers of help for NATO ally Turkey in fighting the PKK, the poll showed the number of Turks with a negative view of the United States had risen to 86 percent from 49 percent in November 2003 after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Reuters adds, "The survey showed support for Turkey's European Union membership bid had fallen to 51 percent from 52 percent in July, with 40 percent now opposed to joining. A few years ago, support for EU membership was above 70 percent. Turks with higher education were most opposed to joining the bloc. " [2] In other news, the Sadrists oppose allowing Baath officials back into the government from their exile. posted by Juan Cole @ 11/17/2007 06:30:00 AM

A pity I do not know enough Turkish to make it worthwhile to try to ascertain whether the indig pollsters put this matter to their patients exactly as the JCIA reports: "Do you favour your rulers invading Free Kurdistan, O Turk on the Street?" In the holy Homeland such frankness would be almost inconceivable, for the whole business would have to be carefully packaged and presented as involvin’ Preëmptive Retaliation. "Don't you agree that evil THEY have provoked Wunnerful US quite intolerably, ma’am?" Or whatever.

JCIA/WGAS prescinds from mentioning its own view of the legitimacy of the proposed aggression, which seems to ourselves about on a par with the Baghdad caper of militant GOP extremism. If those two instances are considered to involve a suitable casus belli, why then we need never worry again about Peace suddenly breaking out in this alien and bewildered world of ours, Mr. Bones!

As often, however, I notice that few credentialed opinionators are likely to take my own view of the case. Doubtless the vast majority with any opinion worth mentioning would evaluate the attested Big Management Party aggression into the former Iraq quite differently from a Justice and Development Party ditto. Those who approve one crime but disapprove the other will far outnumber those who approve, or disapprove, both crimes alike. A Martian might infer from that line-up that all earthlings agree with Buckley Minor's pet proverb Quod licet Jovi non licet bovi, i.e., that Kennebunkport-Crawford vigilantes are so different in kind or degree from Erdoganian invasionites that it would ludicrous to expect common rules to apply.

Eighty-six percent of the pollsters' patients take just that view evidently. Only one Turk or Turkess in seven (at most) could argue with consistency that appreciation of the wisdom and beauty of Little Brother's Machtpolitik, as conducted for Uncle Sam in the shambles of the former Iraq by GOP geniuses and Harvard Victory School MBA's, ought to increase, now that the heirs of Atatürk are resolved to emulate it. They clearly do not reflect to themselves "Why should heroic Turks not aggress also, just like paleface cowpokers do?" In the absence of such reflection, naturally the notion of redefinin’ the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, to which both great Turkey and Greater Texas adhere, as a joint appliance for salutary aggression wherever aggression may be required in the world does not occur to them, and would be hooted at should it be proposed.

A familiar and customary asymmetry applies to this instance: we may be quite confident that Mr. Zogby and Mr. Rasmussen will not be asking those who endorse Rancho Crawford's invasions and occupations what they would think of their own game if M. Erdogan starts playing it also. We may also be pretty confident, I suspect, that somethin’ like eighty-six percent of Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh would find it fort mauvais that M. Erdogan should behave like that -- actin’ far above his country's proper station in the Kiddie Krusade Weltordnung, that is what Turkish self-help would amount to from the perspective of the Big Party base and vile, unless I am much deceived about their sentiments. Neocomrade W. F. Buckley's fancy Latin proverb applies to their case well enough, although one might reinforce with a cruder Russian peasant saw, "Another's tears are water." The grievances of some wretched far-off Turkey do not often disturb the beauty sleep of Master Narcissus of the extremist GOP, and that fact is quite enough basis to predict how Narky will react if somebody insists on pesterin’ him with such exotic chickenshit. [3]

Despite these polarities and discrepancies, there remains a fairly clear sense in which all gland-basers are alike. I may overestimate peccatum originale a bit to estimate that the pollsters could probably detect 86% approval for pretty well any aggression that ever actually took place amongst the subject populace at the point of maximum jingoism.

However there is a faint trace of a silver lining here, also, in that the J-word forever associated with M. Disraeli of the Brit Stupid Party reminds us that on occasion one can have the jingoism but somehow lack the aggression. So maybe there is hope? [4] God knows best!


___
[0] "Juan Cole Intelligence Agency"


[1] ME does not talk about itself TOO MUCH in its own blog, O Bones! It only modestly provides cross references:

Cole on Academic Freedom The Monreal Mirror carries an interview with me by Samer Elatrash, in honor of the holding of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) Conference in Montreal. MESA has over 2700 members among teachers and researchers at colleges and universities, mainly in North America.

Interviewing the World's Greatest Area Student seems to have become positively pontifical of late: one does not just go ahead and perform the familiar ritual acts, one must go about them with a niyya, offering each detail, and the solemn occasion as a whole, up in honour of . . . of this or that.


[2] Dr. Matrix seems to have attempted to twistify the numbers about Turkish enthusiasm for henôsis with "Europe,", although I can't imagine why anybody at Reuters would bother. If you work it out, Mr. Bones, I believe you will find that opposition has increased from thirty percent to forty percent, which seems to me a good deal less than the efforts of M. Chirac and M. Sarkozy might have looked forwards to when they commenced.


[3] Down in the gutter of Grant where Master Narky dwells, I doubt there would be much resentment of M. Erdogan for infringement of the Big Management Party's virtual patent on aggressions and invasions. Up in the proud towers of AEIdeology and Hoovervillainy and Heritagitarianism, to be sure, that consideration would no doubt swamp any substantive discussion of Turkey's intolerable grievances. No militant extremist tank-thinker can allow any little foreign friends of the Big Party whatsoever to behave with the same unilateralism and preëmption -- and Yoo-based legitimacy -- that belong by right to Little Brother alone.

The very special status of Jewish Statism may cause this rule to be severely tested one day, perhaps one day soon, but I expect it will survive. Should it be M. Olmert who moaned about the Free Kurds as M. Erdogan now moans, that little foreign friend's account of the case would of course be far more sympathetically looked into by tank-thinkers and policy perps. Yet at the end of the day, would the Tel Aviv statelet actually be permitted to exercise a fully Crawfordite latitude of retaliatory aggression and preëmption? The thing is not absolutely impossible, and making up Tom Cruise scenarios about the evil Qommies is not difficult at the moment. Nevertheless, the prudent gambler should, as I'd recommend, bet her chips that tail will remain tail and never be able to wag the Elephant Folk altogether.


[4] Serious discussion of hopefulness would require having a much better idea of what M. Erdogan and his co-conspirators against peace have in mind to accomplish. You'll recall the speculation that the colonels and generals might be fobbed off with announcement of a RIGHT to invasionize that would not have to be actually exercised. BGKB.