"Loony-Tunes People"?

Obviously there is a conflict between the expressed US-Maliki program of national reconciliation, and this apparent escalation, both personal and military, against Sunni leaders and groups. Some will attribute this to vacillating US policy. Others posit a distinction between two factions of the Bush right wing, one favoring a return to Sunni control of Iraq (and finding the Allawi-coup theory, for instance, plausible), and the other favoring a Shiite-led eradication of the Sunni establishment once and for all (a position represented by the loony tunes people at the AEI and elsewhere who say that from this perspective, things are going really well, because not only the armed Sunni resistance, but the political Sunni groups as well, are falling apart).

Arf, arf! Bow-wow! Grrrrrrr!

Which particular invasion-lovin' AEIdeologue do you suppose it is that Mr. Badger wants to bite yoday, Mr. Bones? Neither of our own two favorite specimens seems to match the caricature. Col. V. D. H. Blimp doesn't know enough about the Middle East to be dangerous -- and why should he, pray, when geistige Militärismus as such cares nothing whom or what it militates against?

Col. R. M. G. Spook, however, could be the original human being behind the badgisterial caricature. Spook's latest deliverance is available at The Weekly Standard under the title "On Democracy in Iraq", a scribble we said we might talk about the other day but never got around to. A compare-and-contrast exercise would be a twofer, then, so let's go for it, shall we?

As I recall, the putative culprit never said anything very like "Things are going well, O Weekly Standardizers, so rejoice ye, no matter how the hateful MSM lie! Not only is the armed Sunni resistance falling to pieces, so is the U.I.A. as well." The authentic Spook perorates as follows:

We, too, [as well as the Congressional Democrats]have benchmarks for Iraq. The surge needs to show real progress in providing security by the beginning of 2008. American and Iraqi forces in Baghdad will have to figure out a way to diminish significantly the number and lethality of Sunni suicide bombers. Given the topography of Baghdad, the possible routes of attack against the capital's Shiite denizens, and the common traits of Iraq's Arabs, this will be difficult. If we and the Iraqis cannot do this, then the radicalization of the Shiites will continue, and it will be only a question of time before the Shiite community collectively decides that the Sunnis as a group are beyond the pale, and a countrywide war of religious cleansing will become likely. If the U.S. military can change the reality and spirit of Baghdad, the rest of Iraq will change too. Contrary to the despair of so many, internal Iraqi politics will probably be the easiest part of this campaign. In the next few months, of course, things could go to hell. One suicide bomber killing the right Shiite VIPs could threaten all. Yet with Petraeus, Maliki, and Sistani in charge, things may work out. If they do, we can only hope that by the time they do, the leadership of the Democratic party will have ceased to have anything in common with those Sunni Arabs who have always wanted the new Iraq to fail.

There's a lot in that passage for the staff and management of the Daily and Sunni Mystic Lynx not to care for, and also not a little that we don't much care for ourselves, especially invasionites like him badmouthin' America's party, yet pretty clearly Spook thinks Twelver solidarity is a good thing and he by no means gloats, not even preëmptively, because all the native theo-communities are crumbling like cookies dipped in hot chocolate. Col. Spook sees, and apparently Mr. Badger overlooks, the fact that, compared to the former Sunni Ascendancy in "Iraq," neither the Free Kurds nor the People of the Household are visibly crumbling at all. Of course both groups always might crumble, and in both cases the dotted lines, as it were, along which such internal communitarian crumbling would procede are not difficult to spot for anybody with a decent amateur ab externo knowledge of the region such as Spook and you and I possess, Mr. Bones. Over at the Mystic Lynx, they probably more or less know that much too, but find it inopportune or inexpedient to talk about it much.

I daresay the core Mystic Lynx constituency is aghast at the notion of a Petræus-Málikí-Sístání tri-unity -- "PMS Amalgamated, Inc." as it were. We ourselves are more than a little surprised at the notion, and doubtful that all three members of this somewhat flabbergasting troika are really running the same race, and Dr. Gen. Petræus especially. Ever flabbergastinger, though, is the way Neocomrade Col. Spook blithely assumes that the rest of his Boy-'n'-Party crew have anythin' the least bit like THAT in mind. However we have known Col. Spook a good deal longer than we have known Mr. Badger, and we are accordingly more willing to suppose that when Spook appears to put a blind eye to his factual telescope, he is doing it in the spirit of Horatio Nelson rather than in the spirit of The Dream Palace of the Arabs. That is to say, that Spook feigns blindness judiciously for some crafty purpose of his own and is not in fact ideologically or chauvinistically besotted. Why waste valuable time -- time that is gettin' very short out there in the Big Management Party's badly botched Peaceful Freedumbia-- tryin' to persuade GOP geniuses, or GOP base-and-vile either, that "PMS Amalgamated, Inc." is a good idea? Much easier to assume the dumb-dumbs one strives to be for have already agreed to what somebody sensible and yet Party-friendly has proposed: Toujours l'audace!.

C'est magnifique, mon colonel, mais .. . . . . but probably it is not going to work, sir. Such exemplary gallantry will end up being its own sole reward, I fear, sir.

At the end of day, Col. Spook might easily end up being respected by nobody more important than Bones and McCloskey, give or take Col. Blimp, who in principle ought to cherish his AEI colleague Col. Spook's heroic adventurism, but may in practice consider merely intellectual and bloodless gallantry insufficiently geistlich to qualify.

Now back to Badgerton:

But the apparent contradiction between reconciliation and escalation can be explained in a much simpler way, based on what you could call the Bush "two carrots, two sticks" policy. As Hamoun Mohammad wrote in the piece summarized here yesterday, Bush appears to have deputized the Islamic Party to offer the Sunni-Arab leaders the prospect of a return to power, if they will cut their ties to the resistance, and join in the "political process". (Otherwise, the implication is, they should contemplate the "message" of the Adhamiya wall, or what the Baath party calls the scotched earth policy). This is the mirror image of the offer to Maliki, outstanding since at least the November Bush-Maliki meeting: "Pacify the country, or else we will oust you from power." What appears to have changed is in the details of Bush's assignment to Maliki: in dealing with the Sunnis, Bush has said, via Petraeus, go heavier on the stick, relatively less focus on the carrot. And in his message to the Sunni groups: "join the political process now, or else!" While the purpose is to bring resistance groups into the political process, by adding fear of annihilation to hope of power, the obvious risk is this could backfire, and Bush ends up driving some of the Sunni political groups already involved in "the political process" into joining the resistance instead. In which case the Bush assignment to Maliki could well become even clearer: "Forget the carrot entirely and wipe out the Sunni strongholds."

Oh, well....

What do you suppose is radically wrong with the Mystic Lynx mystifications, Mr. Bones? Could it be in the end as appallingly simple that the lynxers REFUSE to understand that even ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of tweny percent remains only 20%, that even if every last Arabophone GOP subject in occupied neo-Iraq defected to the "resistance," and even if the twenty-umpteen "resistance" factionettes could get their act together absolutely perfectly, the "resistance" would still remain outnumbered by its former victims four to one?

A dark hypothesis, Mr. Bones. It reminds one rather alarmingly of Secretary Albright's War as viewed from the aggressed-upon side, for whom Kosova would somehow be essentially and forever the Serbian blackbirds' 'Kosovo' of 791/1389, even if ten thousand percent of the province's actual population in 1418/1998 be mere recent immigrant Albanian scum and miscellaneous trailer trash.

The name of that game is "History is trumps," obviously, and who can seriously imagine that Kennebunkport-Crawford neo-dynasts, dimwit scalawag sons of shifty disingenuous carpetbaggers, are likely to want to play it? Nobody at the Mystic Lynx, anyway! History isn't trumps, Mr. Badger, it's mostly only trash, the 'bunk' of Huxley's 'Our Ford', now that "creative destruction" rules the roost and only pauses momentarily in its depredations because it now appears that a Bin Ládin can somehow manage the "creative destruction" shtik even better than Crawfordites can, that he should have suckered the gland-based bozos into aggressing against the former "Iraq."

Wirklich wir leben in finsternen Zeiten!, Mr. Bones, although of course Centiury XV/XXI is a fun show to watch as well.

Our own sympathies must lie ever with the not-so-much fun grown-ups, Mr. Bones, with those who pour cold water into all the soups of all the Boys and all the Boyish Parties, with those who despise all "creative destruction" and resign themselves to mere boring and thankless grown-up preservation instead. In this taedious endeavour, a few partisans over on the wrong side of the aisle assist us, Mr. Bones, and it is only decent that we should acclaim them, sir. Let the record show, then, that we think to some extent kindly about Herr Prof. Dr. Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins, and, though to be sure only at a lower and a merely para-academic level, about the AEIdeologue Reuel Marc Gerecht, both of which gentles seem able to contemplate the idea of an "Iraq" run by the local eighty percent majority of heretics and hillbillies without going instantly bananas or ballistic. It is no small achievement on their part to be able to think such unconventional thoughts even as all the conventional-wisdom Boy-'n'-Party swine rush down the Gadarene slope of expediency to pander, futilely, to the formerly ascendant TwentyPercenters in neo-Iraq.

Securus judicat orbis terrarum, that's the right tune, sir! Let us dance to it ourselves, Mr. Bones, and applaud the occasional "loony-tunes people" over on the Rancho Crawford team like Gerecht or ‘Ajamí who overcome their antecedent Boy-'n'-Party or Sunnintern prejudices to join us in the dance, and do not instantly blanch with dread at the thought of an "Iraq" that is mostly heretics and hillbillies. Harún al-Rashíd turns over in his grave, perhaps, that such unseemly things should ever come to be, but here in Eastern Massachusetts, we have seen the Papist "Antichrist" celebrate all the idolatrous abominations of the mass on Boston Common without the sky ever actually falling, no matter how rapidly Governor Winthrop may have posthumously and subterraneously rotated himself to the contrary in protest.

So maybe there is hope?