Under the circumstances, if he's still sufficiently bewitched by celebrity to let Mr. Wong inside his front door, he cannot complain too pathetically about how he found himself "profiled" subsequently. If he did not anticipate that Mr. Wong might be as fixated on the current USA as he himself is on the former Iraq, what can we say except that he damn well should have? If intellectual celebrities cannot anticipate that sort of thing better than most, one begins to wonder why Modern Times bothers with them at all.
The burden of anticipation falls on the learned clerk rather than on the hack scribbler, surely? Mr. Wong would not have behaved as he did if he had properly reflected on M. Makiya's peculiar situation. Nevertheless Wong seems to have reflected at least a little, since he at least managed not to emit some blatant crudity like "Don't you think you owe Americans an apology, sir?"
Enter Don Juan Orientalista to supply the crudeness deficit:
Kanaan Makiya, an intellectual architect of the Iraq War, admits it is a disaster but insists he has nothing to apologize for. Makiya is still peddling the Neoconservative myth (as an ex-Trotskyite, he is a genuine Neoconservative) that everything would have been all right if the US hadn't occupied Iraq after conquering it. How likely was that? Makiya, after having tried to convince us all that Ahmad Chalabi is a really great guy and not a fraud, now wants to convince us of other things. Why should we agree to be convinced by someone so wrong about so much? Couldn't he please work out his intellectual theories in ways that don't get more US troops killed? |
To begin with the last error first, poor M. Makiya did at least manage to cover his posterior as regards getting undue numbers of Republican Party troopers killed:
“The first and the biggest American error was the idea of going for an occupation.” |
We shall have a general critique of Makiyatism later on, so suffice it to say his counterfactual political dabblings may be no better than his actual ones. Very likely Mesopotamia would not be the Garden of Eden now even if the militant GOP had departed before Christmas of 2003. Nevertheless, that is what M. Makiya would have advised, it appears, and so the prosecution's last charge, at least, must be dropped.
"Why should we agree to be convinced by someone so wrong about so much?" is an interesting question indeed. Perhaps the effective answer is merely "Because he is a celebrity intellectual, of course." I fear Mr. Wong will have taken more or less that view. He did not get quite the ringing denunciation of Crawfordite extremism that he presumably was hoping for, but he did fairly well:
Then there is the small issue of American policy. “Everything they could do wrong, they did wrong,” Mr. Makiya said. |
Prof. Cole rebuts that the whole Dread Neo-Con Cabal tend to talk like that now that Little Dubya has somehow botched all their clever schemes. Dr. Strangepearl said almost exactly that to the reporter from Vanity Fair, did he not? To which I respond that it is silly to classify M. Makiya as a neoconservative. The former Iraq is all in all to him, whereas for the real Weekly Standard article, "Iraq" is only another sports club for their libido dominandi to take a workout in. If the accused is in fact rebounding from Trotskyism, he has rebounded very thoroughly. "Makiyatism in one country" is the only brand of his product that exists, and the country in question is not Mr. Wong's and Dr. Cole's. Genuine neocomrades like Kristol Minor and the Kagan clan are concerned at this point to rescue the general proposition that American invasionism is good for the lesser breeds without from certain doubts that the performance of the militant GOP has caused some students to entertain. M. Makiya is not interested in American invasionism as a generality even in the slightest. What good will it do him or his "Iraq" if the next thrilling neo-con episode works out far less disastrously somewhere else? Are we to suppose madly that he wants the militant GOP to take another whack at his country a few years from now, after they improve their technique elsewhere?
Mr. Wong may be a bit disappointed that M. Makiya is no more against American invasionism as a general principle than for it, but his attitude is understandable enough once you get the hang of not always putting America first.
What's left in the indictment? Ah, "Makiya, after having tried to convince us all that Ahmad Chalabi is a really great guy and not a fraud, now wants to convince us of other things." As regards M. le Docteur Tchélabi individually, our intellectual celebrity seems willing to admit to a misjudgment, but "Mr. Makiya said he preferred not to name names." Be that as it may, the prosecutions's real charge is not that he recommended A.C. to the Crawfordites, but that he implored them to come invasionize his country. So many people have been diddled by M. Tchélabi that it is a very minor midemeanor indeed, compared with encouraging international vigilantism.
I can't guess what Prof. Cole is afraid of being talked into this time. Does he seriously disagree that "Everything they [the Republicans] could do wrong, they did wrong"? Not likely. Perhaps he is more worried about "There were failures at the level of leadership, and they’re overwhelmingly Iraqi failures"? On the whole, Don Juan is not very interested in discussing failures by anybody other that the Occupyin' Power, just as M. Makiya instinctively concentrated on the invadees and had to be prompted to add the other remark. How either of them could suppose that the Green Zone collaborationist politicians have shown even average competence at their new profession eludes me. Still, if they do disagree about it, I'm with M. Makiya. Similarly, it seems extremely unlikely that the JCIA considers the execution of Saddam a resounding success. (Mr. Badger may think that it ought to, but that is another story.)
I can't find any policy advice for the future in the piece at all for the JCIA to fear being deceived into agreeing with, unless monumental (but shelved) plans for rebuilding brave New Baghdad are to count.
That leaves only what seems to be the core of neo-Makiyatism, the theory of where all that nasty "sectarianism" came from. This again is to look backwards rather than forwards. It seems so incoherent, however, that who can be seriously tempted to be diddled by it? Unless Mr. Wong has garbled things seriously, somehow sectarianism is due entirely to the Ba‘th, or perhaps to all the barracks-based patriots who followed the Mecca monarchy. But then, it is also entirely due to the return of unscrupulous exiles after the aggression. Here is the Urtext:
“I want to look into myself, look at myself, delve into the assumptions I had going into the war,” he said. “Now it seems necessary to reflect on the society that has gotten itself into this mess. A question that looms more and more for me is: just what did 30 years of dictatorship do to 25 million people?” “It’s not [as if] I didn’t think about this,” he continued. “But nonetheless I allowed myself as an activist to put it aside in the hope that it could be worked through, or managed, or exorcised in a way that’s not as violent as is the case now. That did not work out.” [omit paragraph of reportorial local colour] “There were failures at the level of leadership, and they’re overwhelmingly Iraqi failures,” he said. Chief among the culprits, he added, were the Iraqis picked by the Americans in 2003 to sit on the Iraqi Governing Council, many of them exiles who tried to create popular bases for themselves by emphasizing sectarian and ethnic differences. “Sectarianism began there,” he said. [And then on to Chelabi.] |
Perhaps it can all be rhymed together somehow, with the Old Régime discrediting nonsectarianism or "secularism" and the returnee pols noticing that this had happened and taking advantage of it. Myself, I don't think most of the post-aggression pols are smart enough to be guilty as charged, so if anything of the sort happened, it will have been accidentally and unconsciously. There may be something to be said for it, with that modification: most of the revenant OnePercenters were presumably "notabilities," ’a‘yán, only locally. Too much time has passed since 1958 for those who conducted politics under the Mecca monarchy to be of much significance. These new big fish in small stagnant ponds may have put together patronage networks of the age-old Levantine type that began as "sectarian" in fact without the OnePercenters deliberately intending anything of the sort. When Sultan Jerry brought all the notability class together to provide himself with a neo-Iraqi facade, like may have associated itself with like at a higher level, again without conscious conniving or malicious intent.
Up to a point a modified neo-Makiyatism is plausible enough, but the various plebescites conducted under the GOP occupation would appear to be the sticking point. The lower ninety-nine percent of neo-Iraqi subjects have certainly shown no sign of disavowing wicked "sectarianism." Au contraire, candidates of the rootless cosmopolitan community did consistently worse than the invasionites had expected and hoped. Sultan Jerry was not endowed with a great flair for politics either, though, not to mention with any knowledge of the neighborhood he was supposed to rule, and it seems a bit unfair to blame him for not seeing what was going to happen before it actually did.
Here, too, M. Makiya's implied counterfactual history might easily have been as bad or even worse. Suppose Crawford had presciently and ruthlessly pretended that only the ten percent or so of neo-Iraqi subjects in the "secular" theo-community were to have any significant role in Jerry's facade? Might not a great many of the excluded have decided that they were being discriminated against because of their chauvinism and religionism, "just like under the Ba‘th"? Such anti-"sectarian" discrimination would not, to be sure, have been just like, but probably close enough to it for practical political purposes.
Viewed from the USA, and therefore with reference to matters that do not concern M. Makiya at all, that counterfactuality was almost certainly impossible. Extremist Republicans perhaps still do not relish majoritarian democracy very heartily, but there can be no question of their flatly opposing it after any such fashion as that. Furthermore, although they were pleased and proud to have invaded and conquered and occupied M. Makiya's country, at no point in the whole saga of fiasco were they seriously interested in administering it. They required, and still require, to have a veto on anything misguided that the natives might do, but on the positive side, they have insisted on very little. Even that monstrosity of a Khalílzád Konstitution was not simply shoved down the throats of the neo-liberated. Their own OnePercenters agreed to it, did they not? Although perhaps they agreed without having the slightest intention of taking it seriously -- apart from the Free Kurds on the cardinal matter of the virtual independence of Free Kurdistan.
I begin to digress. M. Makiya apparently doesn't take the monstrosity very seriously either, or at least he did not mention it to Mr. Wong.
In any case, even if Prof. Cole were so gullible as to "agree to be convinced" that the neo-Makiyatan hypothesis about where "sectarianism" comes from is sound, it's hard to see what difference it would make. Wherever it came from, it's here. Perhaps we should expect a celebrity intellectual to offer us some plan for dealing with it, but if Mr. Wong asked at all, the response must have been judged not worth printing. Had I been the reporter, I should have asked a number of rather obvious questions about the future, beginning with what M. Makiya thinks of the Surge of '07. It may be, however, that he has simply given up thinking about such things. He notably declined to exercise his option to apologize to anybody about anything, yet perhaps he has learned his lesson all the same and has stopped recklessly vending panaceas.
M. Rousseau died too soom, M. Makiya has lived too long. When a celebrity intellectual sets up as sorcerer's apprentice, the happy medium would be to die during the radiant and blissful dawn, when one's dubious panacea seems to be really working, and one does not need to feel tempted to distance oneself from the suggestion that one was "an intellectual architect of" its temporary successes.
Oh, well.
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