More Leakages for the Big Management Party

Surely you can appreciate their bigmanagerial difficulties, Mr. Bones? Those who make policy would ideally prefer for the Party to remain in neo-Iraq for decades, if not centuries. Perhaps they might reconsider around 2125 when the petroleum is effectively exhausted, but perhaps not even then, considering that neo-Islam and Hyperzionism, perhaps even the militant GOP, will still be around, and for that matter, considering that libido dominandi need not be proportioned to the value of what it craves to bigmanage. In any case, every violence professional since Cyrus seems to agree that Mesopotamia really is located delightfully in the strategic middle. The dominatorial classes do not much want to live there, it seems, they prefer to reside amidst material and ideological splendours at Persepolis or Susa or Tel Aviv or Crawford, yet it is, ideally, Babylon that one dominates from. (The alternative scheme based on the Mediterranean was seen to be plainly inferior as early as Alexander of Macedon, who had "discovered" how many unruly tribes there are farther east that badly need the authoritative guidance of Western Civ. also.)

I inflate the Wolfowitzian Vision of Boy and Party astride the world a little bit, perhaps, but it scarcely matters, since of course that neo-balloon has popped already. At the moment we should remind ourselves of it only to avoid underestimating their salvage efforts and begin kidding ourselves that they'll set for less than they can get. At the moment their greatest challenge is in the middle disatnce, the first week of November in 2008. Unless they can then produce a new Executive Branch boy dedicated to the essentials of the current Boy's invasion and occupation schemes, there will be wailin' and gnashin' of teeth at Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh as Forward Base Babylon is resigned to the local natives once again. To elect a card-carryin' member of the Big Management Party would not be absolutely necessary, but the chances of a Sen. Lieberman or a Secretary Albright being nominated by America's party are very slender, not even to speak of election.

However, a week remains a long time in politics, so at the moment the biggest future problem for Boy-'n'- Party fans is very remote compared with what amounts to damage control, makin' sure they don't "lose" their Peaceful Freedumbia before Master Bush returns to his playpen for good in January of 2009. It will occur to the stumblebums at once that the Surge of '07 should be bigmanaged so as to last for at least twenty-four months, and that is what Major Leaker seems to be up to. We may give General Odierno the benefit of the doubt, I believe, since he is not likely to have leaked his own "confidential assessment" to further the cause of Crawford. Perhaps Neocomrade E. Abrams or Neocomrade S. Hadley made the decision to leak it for him, the exact name does not matter. What matters is that the cause should be forwarded, and the goalposts moved a little farther away from where they stand at present, with six-to-eight months vaguely alloted as a suitable amount of surge time in the intellecually respectable media. Perhaps the general has technical West Point reasons for fixing on twelve months instead, or perhaps he is just guessing and micawberizing the same as the Party chickenhawks are. From the perspective of the latter, that question is unimportant. They propose to hang around their conquered provinces forever, if they can manage to, and that whether or not the Surge of '07 "works" for them or for anybody else. Such a memo would be worth leakin' even if Odierno had based it on reading tea leaves. Why, here's four more months taken care of for them!

Possibly even more: Messrs. Cloud and Gordon come to the aid of Boy and Party, perhaps not deliberately, with " the last of the brigades is not expected to begin operations until June." Perhaps in that case the twelve month count-down should only start on 1 July? That would be fifteen months taken care of, with a gap of only eight or nine remainin' to be bigmanaged. Possibly we won't have Major Leaker comin' back for seconds more than once otr twice, then.

The worst danger to this reasonably intelligent strategy of procrastination and prevarication is the chickenhawk stumblebums themselves, as with "the Bush administration has cited what it calls early signs of progress." Exactly how much "progress" the GOP geniuses profess to detect as they surge is a somewhat delicate matter. Of course a Tet-like fiasco would not do at all, but a rehash of The Boy's "Mission accomplished!" clownin' would not be much better, because that would only raise questions about why they hesitate to withdraw. That everything continues much as usual is the likeliest way to bet, or at least the easiest, but the aggresion faction needs a little bit more than that to show for their surgin', I should think. A detectable, but not decisive, improvement in the state of the occupation would seem to be what they should aim at. Later next year, as the election nears, Boy and Party will need to perceive a bit more "progress" still, so that "President Giuliani" or "President McCain" does not become an impossibility by association with gloomy vistas of dark tunnels stretching on endlessly before US.

If they can find confidential assessments from their violence pros to leak in support of these alleged glimmerin's of "progress," so much the better, obviously, now that Televisionland and the electorate have learned to mistrust declarations about fact and military intelligence that come straight from chickenhawk Party sources. Neocomrade R. Murdoch and the rest of the tribe of dubyapologists cannot help very much, unfortunately. To the extent that any genuine pacification and liberty creep into the Peaceful Freedumbia of the invasionites, the place stops seeming newsworthy at all. The tame Boy-'n'-Party press could useful in connection with an altogether different scenario, a high-risk attempt to rally everybody 'round the Kiddie Krusade banner even at this late date and sally forth with Shock-'n'-Awe instead of just sluggishly surgin'. Perhaps they may even undertake some such fresh adventure against the evil Qommies, but that would only make the bushogenic fiasco in neo-Iraq worse still, of course, and it is of the latter that we speak at the moment. In any case, almost two years' worth of shockin' and awin' would be quite as problematical for the militant Republicans as a Tet or a Blenheim would be: if they have to keep on doin' the S&A bit, doesn't that mean they are not accomplishin' much with it? Plus S&A is more expensive even then idly hangin' around as an Occupyin' Power is, so how would they pay for it? Congress is unlikely to give them the money for it, and their new Saudi and Gulfie buddies probably don't have as much spare change as would be required, or any inclination to let Master Dubya, a proved incompetent and wastrel, gamble with such easy-won bucks as they do possess.

Declarations from Cairo and ‘Ammán and Riyádh and Kuwait City that the Surge of '07 is working wonders are not obviously desirable either. Televisionland and the electorate here in the Holy _Heimatland_ could not care less what such exotics think, and for the Arab Palace gentry to say such things out loud is only to ask for additional troubles with the ragged street Arabs. To arrange to have Boy and Party praised by Green Zone collaborationist pols would not be significantly different, assuming they can still find some neo-liberateds who do not have a long list of grievances against "America" to work through before mustering up a little praise for an aggression that did, after all, install themselves in quasipower. Perhaps in Free Kurdistan the Crawfordites could find themselves some praise that is more or less sincere -- and indeed, some allies who would be glad enough to let the Big Management Party occupy New Baghdad indefinitely, as long as it does not meddle with themselves. But that sort of succor would do the extremist GOP no more good than to exhibit fan letters from the far side of the Moon.

Who shall sing their praises, then, and assure Americans that the Surge of '07 is succeedin' and that "progress" is bein' made? Boy and Party invite only mistrust and disgust when they do so themselves. The Sunni International may dictate half of their current policy, but praise from that quarter is worthless in US politics. No matter who they decide to patronize at New Baghdad, poor M. al-Málikí or a regalvinized Dr. ‘Alláwí or Hárún al-Rashíd's nearest livin' relation, there will be no love lost on either side and also no impression made on public opinion at Peoria and South Succotash. Cupboard love speaks for itself, and anyway, all those folks are only exotic natives also.

Who's left? As far as I can see, only Major Leaker, meaning not just that gentleman himself, but also the authors of such "confidential assessments" as it may seem advisable to Neocomrade Leaker to release for Boy-'n'-Party purposes. In the abstract, this may seem a very last-ditch affair, that the GOP geniuses should be thus reduced to solicitin' testimonials from their own hired hands and deployin' reports from them as testimonials that were never intended as such. That is about like the bigmanagers at Coca-Cola polling their own employees in order to "prove" that hardly anybody likes Pepsi better. No, it's even more so, because the violence pros have an a priori investment in the proposition that violence works, whereas everybody at Coke and Pepsi, bigmanagers included, could go take a position elsewhere without any jolt to some supposed ideology of sweet fizzy drinks.

Nevertheless, practice diverges from theory, and some folks may actually be impressed to hear colonels and generals singin' hosannahs and detectin' "progress" all over the lot in Peaceful Freedumbia. If worst comes to worst, they make less incredible defense witnesses for Boy and Party than anybody else in sight can hope to. If they can't get an acquittal, nobody can.

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Notice the technical problems that Neocomrade Leaker encounters. He can, in violation of both statute law and of an oath that he swore, hand Messrs. Cloud and Gordon the piece of paper with "Top Secret" at one end and citizen R. T. Odierno's signature at the other, but he cannot make them issue such a virtual press release unaltered, or prevent them from wandering around soliciting additional opinions in the usual journalistic way. Actual results vary: when Master Hadley's "trip report" and Rumsfeld's Last Memo were autoleaked, they were printed substantially intact, whereas here the basic Boy-'n'-Party dribble is festooned with quite a lot of alien matter. "But the Army and Marines are falling apart" is an especially prominent secondary theme, and not one that Leaker can be expected to be happy about. The neocomrade might have been wise to wait a week or ten days and let the Walter Reed Hospital fuss die down a bit more so that Cloud and Gordon would not be quite as likely to pursue that particular avenue in their quest for ballast not obviously GOP-tainted.

Of course some brassy violence pros would be naturally disposed to think like that in any case, even without the current scandal or any particular devotion to Crawfordite factional interests. As we agreed before, Mr. Bones, it is not "the military" in general that has recently grabbed control of one lobe of The Boy's brain, as far as aggression and colonial policy go, conceding the other lobe to the Sunnintern, it is rather certain colonels and generals actually out there at Green Zone Officers' Club along with a few subfactious allies at home, notably Rear-Col. Kagan of AEI and Dr. Gen. Petraeus of Princeton. The literal Pentagon people are rather different, and far less reliable from Maj. Leaker's special point of view. This is all the more the case insofar as the Beltway City warriors have spent do much time and energy resisting and deploring the late Rumsfeld, thus perhaps not attending as closely as they might have to the most fundamental interests of the violence profession as such. Their budgets may be very important indeed, but it would be far worse than even the most Draconian cuts, surely, if the notion that Sole Remaining Hyperpower cannot cut the mustard anymore ever became widely disseminated.

But that's enough of that, Mr. Bones, considering that we are not actually prepared to side with any of these people, no Boy-'n'-Party subfaction, and no Defense Department subfaction either, and certainly not Neocomrade Maj. Leaker at the interface between GOP and DOD. It is fun to play their cards for them on occasion, but only so as to clarify our own thinking about the actual correlation of forces at Rio Limbaugh and Wingnut City and Rancho Crawford.

Clarification suggests that Mr. Bush would do well to pretend, at least, to put himself and his Dynasty and his Party, in the hands of the Green Zone Officers' Club, and then let them, and nobody else, explain to Congress and the world exactly how well the Surge of '07 is comin' along. Experience, however, suggests that probably he won't, because he is far too eager to praise himself on even the flimsiest of pretexts and grossly incapable of understandin' why his colonial and imperial plans never seem to work out right. We'll see. Meanwhile Neocomrade Leaker is not doin' badly, if we once overlook the nature of the cause he does it in.