The Core Problem, said Mr. Badger, is that . . . .

Just kidding, Mr. Bones. The Master of Missing Links would never, ever begin a sentence like that. He, like Rupert Baron Murdoch's hired hands, only reports -- selectively, of necessity, for life is too short to mention everything, and half-hour news hours are shorter still -- and leaves it to us humble to decide which portion of the fair and balanced selectivity is core and which part is only shrink wrap. It's M. Atwan, a badgerian favorite, who thinks he knows where a core is. But is it a jugular or only a capillary that M. Atwán should so think? Take a look, please:

Proliferation of conferences seen as a sympton of half-baked US policy All of a sudden the idea of holding an international conference on Iraq has become a very popular idea, Azzaman [A] notes in its curtain-raiser to the Baghdad conference starting today. In Baghdad, European sources told the reporter they think there will be a follow-up meeting in Berlin, with the same participants, if there is any progress at all in Baghdad this weekend. In Ankara, the news is that Turkey, for its part, is also making plans to host a meeting of countries neighboring Iraq. And The Egyptian foreign minister said Cairo will host a meeting of Iraq-neighbors, right after the Riyadh summit of the Arab League (the end of this month). The Azzaman reporters don't offer any explanation for the sudden outbreak of meeting-announcements, but Abdulbari Atwan does, in his regular column this morning in Al-Quds al-Arabi. The Bush administration, he notes, has run out of friends elsewhere, what with Congress threatening to cut off funds for the Iraq fiasco, Latin Americans preparing demos against his visit there [and Mayan priests announcing plans to re-purify national lands after they are defiled by the Bush visit] and so on and so forth. So the axis of moderate Arab regimes, ironically, has become the designated front-line ally and rescue team. Their task: Somehow extricate the US from the Iraq quagmire, where troop-casualties are escalating, political support for the regime is eroding (citing the Fadhila exit from the UIA), and victory is not in sight. If necessary, it will even be permissible to talk with Syria and Iran about this [but the US will do this only over orange juice, according to the latest pronouncement from David Satterfield of the State Dept]. The moderate regimes would like to help, Atwan recognizes, but what can they do?[B] The leaders of Saudi Arabia and Egypt are old, and suffering from the complaints attendant on senility, they surround themselves with experts in medical diagnosis, in place of economists or those familiar with international relations or politics. And their regimes are not that stable either.[C] For Atwan, the Bush adventure has resulted in a situation where the alternatives are stark. Iran's price for definitive settlement will be its recognition as a nuclear power. Syria's price will be return of the Golan Heights, restoration of its influence in Lebanon, and killing the international-court project re the Hariri murder. The other alternative would be interim pacification, in recognition of the one common-denominator of all participants, which is the undesirability of all-out civil war and eventual partition. None of these alternatives is likely to be in the interests of the Arabs, Atwan says.[D] Interim pacification, if it is part of, or facilitates, the US runup to an attack on Iran, will only mean untold catastrophe for the region once Iran is attacked. On the other hand, definitive settlement with Iran on the basis of its nuclear status would mean transferring the center of gravity in the Gulf region to Tehran and away from the Arab states.[E] The core problem, says Atwan, is that the Bush administration isn't prepared to face its primary adversaries, and is still attempting to deal with secondary factors as if they were the determining ones. Thus: Instead of dealing with the Iraqi resistance, which has been the root cause of its defeat in the country, the Bush administration wants to limit itself to conversations over orange juice with Syria and Iran. Similarly, while touting the importance of Palestine, the US continues its year-old starvation-blockade against the Palestinians, and continues to refuse to recognize the elected government. This penchant for not facing up to issues, Atwan says, is what has resulted in this spectacle of reliance on senile Arab regimes to try and reach solutions that would not, in any event, be in the interests of the Arabs themselves.[F] (The problem of Bush turning away from the main issues is sometimes recognized even in America, where it is seen as the result of an internal conflict between the Cheneyans and the Riceites. A couple of investigative pieces by Conflicts Forum, one a while ago on attempted negotiations with the resistance, and one more recently on the Mecca agreement, give you the picture. It is an insight that could be seeping into the mainstream. At the conclusion of the orange-juice citation above, someone from Brookings is quoted: “They want to be coy about it,” [the Brookings person said, referring there specifically to talking to Iran]. “But are they being coy because they’re really coy, or are they being coy because half of the administration doesn’t want any talks, which forces the ones who do to adopt this middle position?”)[G]

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[A] This is from the London Times of Bazzázístán, not the New Baghdad ditto.


[B] Note the failure of detatchment: M. Atwán just think so, he "realizes" so, meaning that he agrees with How Things Are. Or at any rate, he agrees with how Mr. Badger thinks Things are.

What's that, Mr. Bones? Don't we ourselves consider that the Sunni International now wants to come to the aid of the Republican Party? Of course we do, but that's beside the point. We can't fail at Murdochian detached reporting because we didn't even pretend to be trying to achieve it in the first place. Crawfordology is very like Kremlinology used to be: it would be much more honest to talk about "guessing at" rather than "reporting about" the facts, and it would be absurd to deny that we students begin with an antecedent distrust of and dislike for our subject-matter.


[C] It would be rude to label such stuff a Dream Palace of the Arabs with M. Fouad ‘Ajamí, but isn't it pretty much only coffee-house-intellectual wishful thinking, after all, to suggest the all the Levantine folks who hold nearly all the Levantine power are but so many dinosaurs bound to go extinct very shortly? M. al-Asad at Damascus is in exactly the same line of work, and although he may not be the brightest bulb ever lit, "senility" cannot be the reason why. It's a clever talking-point, and quite likely no rhetor ever came up with exactly that rhetoric before just now, but should it be honoured with the name of analysis? We ask the question as being close enough to our own modus operandi to be dangerous.


[D] It may constitute something very like a "core" that a M. Atwán should tacitly excommunicate all those Arab dinosaurs from some True or Ideal Arabdom whose interests he, but not they, has always at heart. On the other hand, maybe not. Perhaps really existing Arabdom is, as it were, doughnut-shaped, with only a vacuum at its "core" and yet substantial enough some distance out from the centre. Everybody all around the torus can denounce everybody else for this or that.reason, and yet all these denunciations are rooted within the doughnut itself and none of them can be objectively and conclusively proved more radical or fundamental or "core" than any other.


[E] If M. Atwán were truly radical, he might take the line that True Arabdom need not necessarily be top dog in the vulgar sort of way that any militant Republican can understand. How if the Arabs abandoned politics and economics to the upstart Safavids altogether, and aimed at becoming a folk of Dichter und Denker instead?

This is a question about Levantine coffehouse intellectualism also, of course. If that milieu really believed in itself, shouldn't it be dreaming of how someday all society shall become One Vast Coffeehouse? In fact, it rather unfortunately looks as if the dreaming is more about how certain small mammals from the café propose to take over the dinosaur political niches, the centers of gravity, for themselves -- and the sooner the better.


[F] The Middle East being what it is, this sort of incomprehension of the Crawfordites is unavoidable, it looks like. The hypothesis that that the latter simply have not a clue what they are doing cannot recommend itself to minds so steeped in conspiracy-mongering. An nescis, mi fili, quantillâ sapientiâ regitur orbis terrarum? Well, no, actually they don't know, but hardly because they are childish. It's a matter of their having become very, very old without ever having become especially wise, perhaps.

But maybe that is too exalted a way of expressing the problem, and the trouble is merely that the Café du Levant just doesn't happen to know enough basic facts about GOP extremists to understand them or identify "their primary adversaries" accurately? As I said, Mr. Bones, these gentry are not unlike ourselves, and is not making the world out a good deal more complicated than it really is a sandtrap that we might fall into? Especially when everything seems to be headed for Hell in a handbasket and one can do nothing about it. Might not a concerned spider under such circumstances fancy that weaving ever more elaborate Gothic cobwebs of verbiage should somehow count as actually doing something?


[G] Mr. Badger has some rather exaggerated ideas about mainstream invasion-language journalism, I'm afraid. There's a good deal more "seepage" than he notices.