"Transforms"? "Private"? "Tenuous"?

If it was not for the Times of Bazzázístán, M. Amer Mohsen's press summaries would hardly exist at all. Today's specimen is typical. The communitarian bias of Al-Sabáh is mde clear enough, while you won't learn about that of the TOB and M. AQMJ through this particular filtration mechanism. The more dubious claims of the "official" Twelver fishwrap are recounted inside shudder-quotes, but M. le Ministre and M. al-Bazzáz's employees are attended to more respectfully. On top of which, we get a healthy dose of flat-out newsitorializing pointed in the predictable direction.

Defense Minister Speaks Out The Iraqi Government Transforms Tribes Into Private Armies By Amer Mohsen The Iraqi minister of defense admitted to Az-Zaman that weapons earmarked for the Iraqi army somehow find their way into the hands of the militias. In an interview he gave to the Iraqi newspaper, ‘Abd al-Qadir Muhammad Jasim declared that corruption and militias inhabit the halls of his ministry. Jasim confirmed that the phenomenon of “fictitious” employees is still rampant among his units, which means that salaries and benefits are paid to non-existent staff and soldiers. This problem plagues several administrations of the Iraqi state, and it points to the extent of complicity between administrators and corruption in Iraqi institutions. More significantly, Jasim affirmed that “he is being pressured by the major political blocs in Iraq to restructure his ministry along the lines of power-sharing deals.” The minister claimed that he is resisting such pressures and that he is not beholden to the will of the political parties. Statements like these have been made by other Iraqi officials, but, as is often the case, Jasim did not specify which militias are illegally receiving Iraqi Army weapons, and did not name the politicians who are “pressurizing” him to comply with “power-sharing deals” (or muhásasa in Arabic, a polite term for legalized corruption and patronage.) Jasim’s statements inform us about two contradictory strands within the institutions of the Iraqi state: on the one hand, there is the legacy of the Iraqi central state, which runs as far back as 1958; on the other hand, the new sectarian power-sharing formula, which was established –through formal and informal means -- since the American invasion. The Iraqi administrations and ministries are facing pressures to comply with the “new rules of the game”, whereby sectarian formulas (which often run through patronage networks) determine the composition and functioning of the state bureaucracy. Az-Zaman also revealed new facts pertaining to the execution of Taha Yaseen Ramadan, Saddam’s vice-president. According to “sources close to the tribunal,” none of the major court members of Ramadan’s tribunal were present during his execution. The judge was “on a vacation in a foreign country,” while the public prosecutor was in Kurdistan “presenting his felicitations to the president Jalal Talabani for his recovery (from a recent health crisis).” Az-Zaman reminded its readers that the Judge of Saddam’s case had applied for asylum in England, a hint as to why Ramadan’ judges avoided being present in the scene of his execution. The government-owned As-Sabah headlined with the news of the clashes between Anbari tribes and al-Qa‘ida. The newspaper said that “full mobilization” has been announced on the part of the clans against the armed groups in Anbar. In addition, a front-page op-ed by the editor-in-chief, Falah al-Mish‘al saluted “the heroic tribes of al-Anbár” for their “continuous victories” against “the terrorists.” The paper reported that the city of al-Falluja is being “cleaned” of armed men, in house-to-house battles which have left large sections of the city under the control of the clans and the Iraqi police. Al-Sabáh’s front page today marks a new turn in the relationship between the central government and the tribes. The editorial by al-Mish'al signifies that the government now openly supports the tribal forces in their fight in Anbar, and publicly acknowledges them as allies and partners. Iraq, like several states in the Levant and the Gulf region, has always had a tenuous relationship with its tribes. The central government has often seen the clans as a threatening and competing centrifugal force, even though in some instances, the government tried to conciliate with [sic] tribal groups and attempted to use them as political allies (which the monarchical regime did, as well as Saddam after the 1991 Gulf War). Several questions will need to be asked sooner or later regarding the “legitimacy” of arming tribes and recognizing their armed militias (formally or informally) as legal entities. Will these tribes be disarmed after al-Qa‘ida’s flight from Anbar? Or will they be used as a paramilitary force to police the province? What will the long-term effects be of allowing tribal armies to garner power and influence? Is the Iraqi government effectively replacing one armed militia with another? And finally, how will these arrangements reflect on the shape of the “New Iraq” that is to emerge from the current crisis?

We need not leap to the conclusion that Slogger City as a whole sees the neocolony through Bazzázian spectacles, strictly speaking, although M. Amer Mohsen certainly seems to. His concluding deluge of questions can hardly be taken as other than Ba‘thophil or Ba‘thoid. The Central Government (may it speedily be restored to the fatherland's Natural Masters!) should in principle not make deals with the backward Bedouin, and in practice the incumbent usurpers are "conciliating with" entirely the wrong militant Sunnites.

M. Mohsen would not dream of viewing the question from the viewpoint of poor M. al-Málikí and the U.I.A. caucus, who quite naturally have no theo-communitarian leverage in al-Anbár to speak of, and might be pardoned for making mistakes about exactly which horse thieves to back. Advising that they support none at all amounts to recommending that they give up all pretenses to controlling the Wild West at all. That is questionable advice in itself, and doubly so given the likelihood that M. al-Bazzáz and M. Mohsen look forward to a day when the Málikí crew will no longer be able to pretend to govern any other governates either, that being the ideal shape for their preferred "New Iraq."

There's no harm in these gentry rooting for their favourite team, of course, and probably not much in pretending to be objective and neutral as they do so either, as long as the pretense is written up in Arabic and nobody who matters is likely to be taken in. Doing it in the language of invasion, however, is more open to reproach, since the target audience is very ignorant and thus readily deceivable. M. Amer Mohsen definitely needs a few points subtracted from his score.

As to the management and staff of Slogger City, one cannot say more for sure than that they do no object to this sort of thing. It seems likely that they have no special communitarian preferences for Sunnites over the Shia of their own. Yet it is not quite impossible that they might. Had Rebecca West written this mess up rather than the Yugoslav mess, she might have quoted us "Sunnis are heroes and Shiites are lawyers," or some equivalent folk wisdom, as a sentiment to be approved by all left-minded persons. It's rather a good parallel, since her adorable Serbs were natural masters in charge of the central government, whereas all those pettigoging Croat attorneys were partition fans and troublemekers generally. (Ah, Mr. Bones, what might Black Lamb and Grey Falcon be like, had the lady visited those provinces in the wake of a Mussolini invasion that had put the "lawyers" temporarily on top, in violation of justice and nature?) In any case, extremes of sympathizing with particular factions in very remote quarrels must be possible, seeing that it has actually happened. Nevertheless, the odds are against it.

Much more probably, Slogger City as such is only militantly sympathizing with pretty well everybody's conventional wisdom about Crawford's conquered provinces: the best way to kiss the quagmire and make it well is "clearly" a ruthless program of Affirmative Action for those poor mistreated Arab-speaking Sunnites. Needless to say, that plan of campaign overlaps with the agenda of the Times of Bazzázístán well enough to be getting on with. True, the Bazzázian subset of occupied natives themselves want a good deal more than Crawfordites or CFR/ISG gentry have in mind to allot them, but for that matter, so do most of the Free Kurd natives as well. In the abstract, Peaceful Freedumbia might work well enough if those lines were projected and enforced: Free Kurds and Arab Sunni subjects would settle for less than total independence and total domination respectively, because if the militant Republicans ever went away, they'd have even less than they have at the moment. And the UIA usurpers would have a stake in a permanent GOP occupation as well, since it allows them to pretend to be the central government nominally, though scarely substatntially.

The real world does not work quite like that, however, and so much for "in the abstract"! Only in the case of Free Kurdistan do abstraction and reality even begin to coincide. And, as a pessimist might expect, that is the wheel that squeaks least already.

So then, how about Ms. Sapientia Conventionalis and her abstraction? If the Ba‘thoids and all the rest of them, al-Qá‘ida in ‘Iráq excepted, are once sufficiently pandered to and overrepresented, would that sufficiently do the trick? By doing the trick we must mean that the arrangement remains viable after some sort of partial withdrawal of GOP forces from the neocolony, perhaps rather along Senator Clinton's lines, which would allow hit-and-run strikes against evil globoterrorists, but no additional mucking about with the Green Zone pols. The latter would have to be set on exactly the right course at the outset, like an ICBM, and not continually fine-tuned like a cruise missile. Given that crucial restriction, can a hefty dose of Affirmative Action for Bazzázístán be expected to save the face of Boy and Party?

It seems unlikely. M. Mohsen accidentally alludes to what I consider the really fundamental problem, the fact that really exists no unified "Bazzázístán" to be pandered to. Humpty Dumpty was pushed off the wall by the invasionites, and now he's not to be put together again, no matter how many horses and men King Dubya sents out to aid Dr. Gen. Petraeus of Princeton. In a way, the Slogger City twistifier is quite right, "the long-term effects of allowing tribal armies to garner power and influence" will not be very pretty. Regardless of which tribal armies are favoured. Also regardless of whether nontribal Ba‘thoids are favoured instead. Whatever neo-Iraqi Sunnite Arabs poor M. al-Málikí, or his patrons down at the ranch, may pick to pander to, he will make more enemies than friends. There is no longer any there there, no functional theo-community, only shreds and tatters of the former one. Historically considered, this fate of disunity and disintegration perhaps serves them right: under Turks and Brits and Mecca monarchy and barracks-based patriots and then finally Saddam, their Sunni Ascendancy was so complete that it did for that theo-community what Kurds and Twelvers perforce had to do for themselves. By the time the Crawfordites broke in and smashed the last incarnation of their racket, they had forgotten how to do unity for themselves. Neocomrade Chas. Murray ought to have preached them a very severe sermon about the insidious dangers of dependency on the Wicked State a generation or two ago.

Not that it would have mattered if he had, any more than it helps now to point out in AEIdeological terms that what conventional wisdom is prescribing at the moment is only a slightly different strain of Murray's Disease. In the improbable event that any sort of Affirmative Action contraption makes it down the runway and up into the air at all, it will crash long before anybody can become conditioned to dependency upon it. A wide variety of outcomes for the Republican extremists' neo-Iraq remain conceivable, but Lady Sapientia kids herself badly about her current favourite, the one in which poor M. al-Málikí is kicked in the head until he makes sufficient concessions to the Bazzázístánís, and then they stop shooting at Republicans and Twelvers, and then the Badr Organization and the Mahdí Army are abolished as unnecessary, and then finally all the polluted water in the Gulf of Petroleum turns to champagne for everybody to toast Success and Victory with.

Doubtless M. al-Bazzáz and M. Amer Mohsen don't expect anything much like that to happen any more than I do. As noted, their schemes overlap with Miss Sappy's only up to a point. As fifty-eight, percent, I think it was, of our neo-Iraqi subjects of the Bazzází persuasion told the pollsters the other day, a "strongman" seems like the best idea going, and that is a very different idea from Miss Sappy's, one involving no silly imported or imposed nonsense about "democracy," let alone "affirmative action," except insofar as Mr. Big will clamp down on everybody indiscriminately -- apart from his family and friends and their traditional clients, of course. M. Mohsen is very hostile in his misplaced editorializing to "patronage networks" that work according to "the new sectarian power-sharing formula," but perhaps he wouldn't mind them so much if they employed "an old Ba‘th-like power-hoarding formula," so to call it. Or call it the Mubárak Paradigm. For that matter, you could as well call it business as usual in the Levant.

Unlike Sappy's radiant visions, the Mubárak Paradigm is undoubtedly workable, and also a fairly probable scenario for the future development of Occupied Iraq. Messrs. al-Bazzáz and Mohsen ought to worry a little, though, that they might end up with unexpectable and regrettable consequences, as for instance the worst of both worlds, a Mr. Big who actually likes "the new sectarian power-sharing formula" and means to shove it down everybody's throat with a ruthlessness that is off the scope of the Crawfordites. Or, even worse than the worst, a Mr. Big who firmly imposes a Twelver Ascendancy, giving the Bazzázians two percent instead of twenty percent of all the goodies and bennies that his Even Newer Baghdad distributes to its subjects.

However it is perhaps useless to warn them about a prospect they will consider so unlikely. I fear they really do more or less think that they are heroes and the usurpers no better than lawyers. They may even calculate that if worst looks likely to come to worst, the Sunni International will rush to bail them out. That is not as impossible as Sappy's plan, but it is nothing to bet the farm on. Here again, even an apparent success could undo them: how if afterwards the Sunni International decided that it ought to administer the provinces it will have just neoliberated from the Safavids? What if the Mubárak Paradigm meant having the General himself in to rule personally, even! (Machiavelli has a good discussion about this sort of difficulty.) The Sunni International is far from being as dismembered and disintegrated as the former Sunni Ascendancy in "Iraq", but it is not exactly a monolithic colossus either, and as to its disinterested concern for coreligionists, there are folks in East Palestine who might have a word to say on that topic.