| 2 Comments: Reidar Visser said... Badger, I think you are covering an important track here. I just wonder whether Washington is sincere in the apparent revival of ties with Allawi. Allawi may have been visiting Riyadh, but Abd al-Mahdi was in Washington recently…It is not clear to me whether this policy is intended merely to put pressure on Maliki, or is a real attempt to push for his replacement. Perhaps the administration hasn’t made up its mind? Theoretically, a coalition that had Allawi and Fadila at its heart would certainly dovetail with Washington’s declared aim of a unified, non-sectarian Iraq. badger said... Good points, and food for thought. Having re-read some of the material, I think I would put it this way: The political logic in Washington (Democrats in 2008: "Republicans gave Iraq to our enemy Iran") and in the region (the problem of alienating the big Sunni regimes) mean that replacement of Maliki is more than a pressure-tactic, it has to be a medium-term goal. However, you're probably right about the shaky nature of the specific link to Allawi. I think you could say Allawi has unilaterally grafted himself onto the American strategy, and there isn't any actual evidence of US commitment to him, except circumstantial. It think that's perhaps where Washington hasn't made up its mind, and where the Mahdi visit with Bush makes sense. The composition of a new government is sort of open-ended (in Bush's mind), but at the same time I think the commitment to a new non-Maliki government, of some kind, at some time pre-2008, is bankable. Needless to say I could be wrong. (Now that you raised this, I do recall something, I think it was in Azzaman around the time of the Bush-Maliki meeting, where the Wasington correspondent was talking about the Bush administration "auctioning off" the Green-Zone government. I didn't get it at the time, but perhaps this was his idea). Naturally, from the resistance point of view, they would be bidding on something of no real value, but that of course wouldn't be the way Washington and Riyadh see it. |
Mr. Badger does slip in one swipe at us humble, but it is rather a well deserved one probably. Perhaps he is not quite as weak on mere negligible American politics as he seems?
But the world doesn't revolve around us donkeys, and here we have an interesting partial meeeting of partial minds even without anybody "giving" the militant GOP's neo-Iraq to anybody else. Of the two, RV maintains his traditional fortified ideoposition more stoutly: SCIRI has always been his magna fons et origo mali, and remains so, with that rotund person either a mere distraction or perhaps even postively a good guy. Mr. Badger is quite sure that Dr. ‘Alláwí is basically a bad thing -- second the motion! -- but he thinks hat the abstract idea of a Patriotic (wataní Salvation Coup D'État is more important than exactly who gets to ride on the prancing white horse at the head of the parade. The second part of his motion is not so secondable. It sounds well, but in practice coups are made by individual people, not by abstractions, and flair counts for more than the excellence of the cause. (I speak dogmatically, admittedly, but you may have noticed, Mr. Bones, that really gifted coupsters -- Dr. Castro, for instance -- tend to stay on decades after their supposed cause has somehow evaporated out from under them? Putting Flair first and Cause maybe ninth or nineteenth would at least explain that phenomenon.)
Dr. ‘Alláwí seems about as flairless as any more or less normal human being can well aspire to be, this side of Richard Milhous Nixon, but the whole category is obviously culture-bound, so perhaps we aliens miss something in His Rotundity that our neo-Iraqi subjects can perceive. One can't ever tell for sure. And there's the upshot for occupation policy purposes: if "one" can't tell for sure about Dr. ‘A., what hope is there that the Crawfordites can tell?
Dulce desipere in loco: my own principal recollection of M. le Docteur ‘Alláwí is that he seems to really believe in magic, the incantatory sort of magic. If only he repeated often enough during his former quasi-premierial troubles with the Rev. Muqtadá that the hateful rebels against everything decent and invasion-based had either shamefully surrendered or had been shamelessly annihilated, why then it would have happened like that. Nevertheless, somehow incantation failed and it did not. If half the clowns of Crawford hesitate to back that bozo as a coupster, perhaps there is something to be said for their doubts.
Yet both Dr. Visser and Mr. Badger underestimate almost all the clowns of Crawford to suppose that they would, if short-term success was assured, have no qualms or scruples about sponsoring a coup against all their own most outstanding Party mischievements in their neo-Iraq, a coup that would knock down all four quasi-pillars of neo-Iraq at once, the "independence" and the "sovereignty" and the "constitutionality and the "democracy" all alike. These things can never be primary or central with a Big Management Party, of course, but that does not mean that they are nothing to Party members and Party fellow-travelers at all. In any case, who that wasted so much time and so many billions of dollars in erecting a Green Zone house of cards would not think twice before smashing all those elaborate Party pretendings flat with her own hand? Even Richard Bruce Cheney, of all people!, has been credited with conscientious scruples about not "betraying" the Twelvers a second time as he supposedly did in 1991.
Between reviling Democrats and overestimating the Nietzschean side of Republican Party extremism, Dr. Visser and Mr. Badger virtually kick Uncle Sam out of their notional Levant altogether. Not a bad plan at all, if we could only get rid of the "virtually" and the "notional"!
Mr. Badger editorializes with glee and gusto at any sign that the Arabophone Levantines are now at last going to start settling their own hash what you might call "behind Uncle Sam's back." Dr. Visser (usually) focuses so narrowly on the Far South of the former "Iraq" and of the invasion-based neo-Iraq, on his three-governate Gulf Squadron, that he seems scarcely aware that militant Republicans may have become a problem farther north. You and I, Mr. Bones, what are we to do with friends like these two?
First things first! They really are our friends at the end of the day, of course, it would be absurd to let "the narcissism of petty differences" overwhelm the basic concord.
If narrow Dr. V. and enthusiastic Mr. B. mistakenly think a Sam- and Dubya-free Middle East already exists, at least you and I can agree that such a Middle East as that certainly ought to exist. At worst, the discrepany is that they think we've already arrived, whereas we more gloomily think that there's quite a long ways to journey still.
Except ... except ...! The fatal difficulty is that Visser and Badger both set up to teach Secret Levantine Truths that are all about IS rather than about OUGHT, "truths" which are, well, .. . well, "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all."
"Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality."
Well, I'm going, O Bird, I'm on my way out, but allow me to point out which unbearable reality is operative here. Even if we could stop all disputes intramurally, the fact remains that the whole sum of everybody who seriously disapproved, or has subsequently repented or her invasionism and come to seriously disapprove, of the Crawfordite Party aggression of March 2003 can't amount to more than perhaps five percent of the human race at most.
In a rather dreadful way, this is good news, for what's the alternative? Are we seriously to wish that invasion and conquest and occupation and counterinsurgency actually worked, them? The squalid failures of the Busheviki in Mesopotamia are a credit to the general soundness of the human race, as it seems to me.
And now, O Bird, I'm gone.
(But God knows best.)
No comments:
Post a Comment