"The leading US Democrats are all lapdogs, would you agree?"

Ah Mr. Bones, what does Mr. Badger's oddball ideology have against our leading donkeys?

anonymous said: Badger, you really shouldn't take these Green Zone politicians so seriously. They are all lap dogs. None of them have any credibility. According to a recent AP article, Maliki scuttled off to Ramadi because he's afraid Bush will dump him. There's a good article on Allawi on the Guardian website. It concludes as follows: "When the current 'surge' inevitably fails, and Washington's (and Riyadh's) itch to combat Iran grows, keep an eye out for the rotund one. He offers the fantasy of an easy solution to an intractable problem - a "magic bullet" which will only lead us deeper into fiasco." badger said... They're all lapdogs, probably in the same way that the leading US Democrats are all lapdogs, would you agree? But just as it still matters what happens in Washington, lapdogs or not, it also matters what happens in the Green Zone (less so, but still...). So when this guy says the climate and the times are changing, and change for the better is conceivable, shouldn't you pay at least as much atention to him as you would to a similar claim in Washington? That's where my seemingly unrelated final point comes in: there is a knee-jerk (forgive me, I'm not talking about you) reaction feeds into the groupthink: they are all bad, and the situation will deteriorate as it is fated to do.

Before we lash back a little, let us quote the supreme oddball about neo-Iraq, Dr. Reidar Visser, in another assault upon "our" position:

... [T]here are indications that the greatest casualty of the Samarra incident was public opinion in America. Increasingly after February 2006, the Democratic Party opposition has aggressively – at times almost hawkishly – touted the thesis that Iraq’s main problem is a chronic, “centuries-long” civil war involving its three main ethno-religious groups. This argument – which rests on an outrageous falsification of history[64] but has clearly been seized upon in a deliberate attempt at establishing an opposition counter-narrative on Iraq – is being put to use to advocate a “Dayton-style” settlement that would presumably exonerate the United States by establishing three loosely federated ethno-religious states in the ashes of the old Iraqi state. This approach effectively means tearing up the Iraqi constitution (where the initiative for forming federal regions is vested at the local level), but this point is largely ignored by Democratic Party politicians today. Some may simply be unaware of it, some are unable to conceptualise an Iraq built on anything other than ethnicities, and some do not care a fig for constitutionalism in Iraq as long as American soldiers remain bogged down in the country. So far, and the numerous problematic aspects of its Iraq policy notwithstanding, the Bush administration has proved resilient to this particular kind of challenge. True, it too has occasionally strayed in a “Dayton-style” direction – as in its advocacy of “Sunnis finding a role in an Iraqi federation”, and, more recently and perhaps more forcefully, in the lavish treatment of selected Iraqi sectarian leaders, such as Abd al- Aziz al-Hakim of SCIRI and Tariq al-Hashimi of the Iraqi Islamic Party. But the Bush administration has invested significant amounts of symbolic capital in the vision of a unified, multi-ethnic Iraq, and this factor – along with the appropriation of the ethnic confederation scheme by Bush’s Democratic arch-rival, Joseph Biden – might deter the administration from launching a full-blown partitionist model even as a desperate last-resort solution.[65] (( Both footnotes reference RV himself, who thoroughly agrees. ))

Naturally one wonders where RV takes his Crawfordology from, to suppose that poor Sen. Biden is anybody's "arch-rival." Is everybody in Norway equally misinformed? He is, however, the honourable gentleman's chief Yankee bogeyman, so at any rate it is reasonable clear what the target of the vilification is and why it gets vilified, whereas Mr. Badger just blithely assumes generic anti-Democrat attitudes all 'round -- "The sun rises in the East, would you agree?" On the other hand, RV in his anti-partition paranoia must be desperately worried that Mr. Biden is not a "lapdog" but a real menace to all goodness and justice.

The chief point of overlap between our vilifiers is the clause I have emphasized in the Visser passage. There is no use denying that quite a number of Americans think that, however I believe we may deny (1) that those people are predominately members of our party, and (2) that they have any significant influence on the militant GOP's invasion and occupation policy. Furthermore, Dr. Visser allows his partisan hormones to lure him into sloppiness, because (3) such folks don't know enough Levantine history to falsify it, they accept and recommend the "perpetual sectarian strife" version because it chimes with their desire to have nothing more to do with neo-Iraq, not because they know or care whether it was really the case. Finally, (4) those who just want to turn their backs on the damn place don't give a hoot how many subprovinces it falls apart into afterwards. Real partitionites, those fiends in human shape, of course do give a hoot: they mean to impose partition and are as positively against the One as they are for the Three. However, without his polemical sloppiness, RV probably couldn't find enough U.S. partitionites to be terrified of. It is true that Ambassador Galbraith and Senator Biden are Democrats, and for all I know so may Dr. Gelb be, but that is rather a peculiar sample of a large political party, statistically speaking. For that matter, extremist Republicanism does not of itself absolutely guarantee that one is not a partitionite, as we see in the case of Master David Brooks at the New York Times.

Dr. Visser is useful to cite because one can clearly make out where the sneers are coming from, but Mr. Badger's bad attitudes are more worth worrying about. He abuses the invasion-language MSM almost as heartily as the denizens of Wingnut City do, which presumably indicates that he pays a little bit of attention to them at times. They appear to him to be engaged in a deliberate conspiracy to promote that ""perpetual sectarian strife" tomfoolery, although it is not clear whether he supposes them to be outrageously falsifying history or sublimely ignorant of it. Almost every time he lapses into editorializing, Mr. Badger assures us that they are contemptible lapdogs, whereas it was only yesterday that he announced that our party leaders are just as bad. (He apparently agrees with the wingnuts that the intellectually respectable press and the Democratic Party are joined at the hip.) Unlike RV, he presumably knows who the real leaders are and would rank Ms. Pelosi at least ten or twelve slots above poor Mr. Biden on his hit list.

Also unlike RV, he has no soft spot in his ideology for the militant GOP. It would be almost as hard to find figures prominent in American discussions of neo-Iraq who are not lapdogs for Mr. Badger as to find authentic Visserian schizomaniacs. Well, that's OK, perhaps: not to like anybody very much can result in a sort of backhanded impartiality, and for that matter, Mr. Bones, do not you and I usually mention folks like Mr. Badger and Dr. Visser when we think them mistaken? Even though in general we agree with them much more than with Crawfordite invasionists?

The trouble is that Mr. Badger thinks he has political friends who think along the lines of his own editorials, even if very few of them can expresss themselves in English. Unfortunately he is quite right -- again unlike RV, who may well be the head of a party of zero in neo-Iraqi politics. A great many "street" Arabs feel much the same way Mr. Badger feels, and naturally the Arab Palace gentry are all lapdogs too for both. Accordingly, the pieces he summarizes and editorializes favourably about tend to come from the London Arabic press, which the Arab Palaces cannot control, rather than from Cairo or Damascus or Riyadh or even New Baghdad.

Lapdoggism comes close to being the established orthodoxy of the Arab street, and this is not a happy state of affairs. It's rather like Scots chauvinism, the tale of an endless procession of inflictions from outside and "betrayals" from within. Mr. Badger overestimates the importance of the language barrier and appears not to notice that this sort of conceptual self-consolation produces a sympathy barrier more or less automatically. The creatures are so sorry for themselves that one feels it would be gratuitous for an outsider to be sorry also. The least off-putting aspect of it is the one that looks to the the future, when the oppressors and their lapdogs shall be swept away. Everybody with any generosity must approve of that plan. When street Arabs preach their orthodoxy about the present and the past, however, they begin to lose us outsiders, for we seem to be required to acquiesce in some contrary-to-fact "facts" and some very lopsided judgments. Unsurprisingly the Palestine Puzzle is the high point or focus of this syndrome, but pretty well everything political and cultural that the wicked West enters into at all is affected.

There is no question of some hobgoblin like "the Arab mind" being responsible. Even militant GOP palefaces exhibit similar behaviour after their own fashion: ever since 11 September 2001, they consider that being unjustly assailed has somehow conferred permanent (?) and general moral infallibility upon them. Needless to say, the Arab street has suffered, and is continually suffering, a great deal more unjust assailing, and thus is proportionally even more so than the Crawfordites are. The fans of Tel Aviv act much the same, so probably what we have here is at bottom peccatum originale and the monopoly of nobody at all. Nevertheless, "lapdoggism" will not do, not by M. Pascal's criterion and my own, Travaillons donc à bien penser : voilà le principe de la morale.

Mr. Badger may also be rebutted on a far lowel level, and with special reference to Senator Biden, although in a different connection that the one Dr. Visser is terrified of.. Having, as I judge, worked to think well, Mr. Biden concluded and announced publicly that Congress cannot constitutionally take over control of the GOP extremists' "war" from the Executive Branch. That amounts to us donkeys admitting that our hands are tied, and if by calling us lapdogs, that is what Mr. Badger alludes to, there is nothing to do but plead guilty. Perhaps one might criticize his figure of rhetoric a little, however, because Mr. Bush does not exactly hold us in his lap and cosset us and feed us tidbits, and it is not as if we don't want to bark at him and his Party and even bite them as much as we legitimately can.