Congratulations on the Promotion, Moody!

SENIOR Kurdish lawmaker Mahmoud Othman confirmed that U.S. pressure was mounting, especially on the oil bill, which was endorsed by the Iraqi Cabinet three months ago but has yet to come to the floor of parliament. "The Americans are pressuring us to accept the oil law. Their pressure is very strong. They want to show Congress that they have done something so they want the law to be adopted this month. This interference is negative and will have consequences," Othman told AP. Kurdish legislators oppose the formula for distributing oil revenues among the Iraqi communities, arguing for a greater say in how the money is disbursed.

How about that for "a marshall's baton in every private's knapsack," Mr. Bones?

Unfortunately M. Mahmúd Osmán's individual path of glory is not open to all comers. Before your daughter can hope to become a senior lawmaker for somebody else's country, Bones, she would no doubt have to be a junior lawmaker for somebody else's country, and such slots are not numerous. The necessary arrangements may even be exclusively peculiar to the colonies of Rancho Crawford.

Unless I misremember, though, a certain M. Czeslaw Milosz, in a prose tract called Zniewolony Umysl, mentioned a acquaintance who had the honour to vote in 1940 for the henosis of Lithuania with the Soviet Union without being a subject or citizen of either. An objector might object that this unnamed gentleman, who will have sprung, of course, from the Polish gentry, was scarcely engaged in "lawmaking" on that occasion. But what else is it to be called? More pertinently one might point out the difficulty of fashioning a whole career after that pattern. Still, perhaps M. Quelquechose -- Pan Kelkeszowski? -- managed to hang around Wilno /Vilnius / Vilna as a Bolshevik dietine, so to speak, until the Hitlerites chased him and his political friends out. Who knows, this tertius quis may even have come back in 1944-45 and legislated for the (provincial rather than national) happiness of Lithuania ever after, although in that case his papers must have regularized at some point.

M. Osman would not care for this slightly fanciful analogy, should he hear of its being proposed, and in some respects he would be warranted. To begin with, nobody at Moscow in 1940 was afraid of Lithuanians at all, let alone terrorized of them as Free Kurds are terrorized of all Baghdad régimes, past, present or yet unborn. Then, too, M. Kelkeszewski dabbled in the affairs of the Lithuanians in order to annex them to a larger entity, where as M. Osman dabbles in the affairs of the neo-Iraqis mainly in order to make thoroughly sure that they never, ever get a chance to re-annex Free Kurdistan. In common with every other statesperson nowadays, from M. Bethmann-Hollweg of Imperial Germany down through M. Bin Ládin of Khurasán and M. Olmert of Telavivistan, the Senior Lawmaker will solemnly profess to be overstepping the ordinarily received bounds of measure and decency only out of desperate necessity -- Not kennt kein Gebot! -- and even then purely in self-defense -- "But Mommy, she hit me first!.

Compared to our own Republican Party extremists in particular, M. Osman has quite a presentable case along these lines. There is no doubt at all that the Ba‘thís wronged Kurdistan, whereas it remains mysterious to this day exactly what they did to Mr. Bush and M. Wolfowitz and M. Feith and Mr. Blair (&c. &c.) that finally brought down the roof on them.

Graded on the curve, then, M. Osman is not all that reprehensible. And insofar as we evaluate him individually and personally, grading on the curve seems appropriate, harmless enough and charitable too. However one is not to extend this courtesy to the general principle that allows such a career as the Senior Lawmaker's present career to exist in the first place. The abstract proposition of Political Sciece™ or political philosophy that it can ever be OK for alien statespersons to become even the lowliest of lawmakers inside somebody else's country must be evaluated on a pass/fail basis, and then pitilessly flunked. If it were possible to tar and feather an idea, that is how this one ought to be dealt with. Anathema sit!

Should M. Osman wish to defend his careerism as a matter of "principle," or should somebody at Wingnut City or AEI or Hoover or The Weekly Standard volunteer to do that job for him, I presume the argument from necessity would be advanced rather than the argument from self-defense, insofar as that gruesome twosome can be disentangled. "It simply happens to be the case," I fancy the sophist warning us, "That Free Kurdistan can never be properly safe and secure unless it permanently controls twenty percent of the quasilegislature at New Baghdad -- and simultaneously tolerates not the most pianissimo peep out of the other eighty percent of quasideputies as to how Free Kurdistan shall conduct its own affairs. Perhaps this arrangement does not look altogether fair and balanced. Perhaps it really is a bit unfair and imbalanced. Nevertheless, the practical consequences of any other arrangement would be disastrous because _________" [Dear Ms. Reader: please fill in the blank quant. suff.with bloodshed, genocide, instability, high gasoline prices, perils to Jewish Statism, annoyance at Ankara, cowardly appeasement of the Qommies, international loss of faith in the absolute reliability of alliances with Greater Texas, or whatever other relevant political product(s) you happen to prefer . I can't guess what appeals to you most, but it seems reasonable to assume that Dr. Sophist can. Nobody wants to take unfair advantage, after all! -- that's exactly the topic we are discussing.]

To rebut Dr. Sophist after leaning over backwards to let him frame his argument as indefinitely as that may not be possible, but let us see what we can muster up, Mr. Bones. The best place to start, I think, is over chez Clio: this peculiar Osmaniac or Mahmoodian arrangement has never been found necessary before. If Saxons and Normans and Plantagenets and Yorkists and Lancastrians and Tudors and Stuarts and Hanoverians, along with their equivalents nearer to New Baghdad and Free Kurdistan, managed to scrape along without it, well, possibly so can we. The GOP geniuses keep tellin' us, or anyway they used to for a while, that 11 September 2001 marked the inauguration of a Whole New World, an epoch so posthistoric as to be positively neo-Fukuyaman. We need not here dispute that claim in general, I don't think, when it is so difficult to see what good it would do Dr. Sophist's case to stipulate it. The Senior Lawgiver's new career, his ever vigilant Watch on the Tigris, might very well work successfully, in the sense of guaranteeing 100.0% that none of the Arabophone flatlanders left in the former Iraq ever impertinently mucks about with Free Kurdistan, but what would that success have to do with "9/11"? It did not count as "global terrorism" when the late M. Saddám al-Husayn mucked about there. As far as the Boy-'n'-Party crew were concerned, Saddám's mucking about in Kurdistan wasn't any sort of terrorism at all when it was actually going on. (Militant GOP attempts to reclassify it as such retrospectively have been so transparently self-servicing that in kindness to intellectual kiddies, let's not go on about that, please!)

After arguing that what was never found necessary at all before last Thursday afternoon is probably not absolutely necessary now either, we may go on to doubt that Osmaniac "extramural representation," so to christen the scheme in question, might not even work. Despite the best efforts of Khalílzád Pasha and Prof. Dr. Noah Feldman and their distinguished colleagues, both paleface and collaborationist, what passes for a "constitution" in neo-Iraq does not quite altogether guarantee that eighty percent of the quasideputies can never muck about with Free Kurdistan. Plus, rather obviously, there can be no ironclad guarantee that the neoliberateds will pay much attention to their "constitution" in any case. They have not exhibited much reverence for it so far, not to speak of compliance with it.

(I believe that is putting the point rather mildly. Yet bear in mind how unreasonable it would be to expect spear-won subjects of Crawford to feel about farfetched exotic Khalílzáds and Feldmans at New Baghdad as Americans feel about Mr. Madison and his friends at Philadelphia. If being constitutional at Boston this morning meant insisting on a document written a few months back in consultation with, or even under pressure from, Louis XVI and M. de Vergennes --military allies in a good cause, perhaps, yet also foreign gentlemen who might be said to entertain some rather un-American presuppositions about proper governance -- , . . . ! Well, I daresay you can see where that sentence was headed. Allowances are undoubtedly to be made.)

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So much for M. Mahmoud Osman's lawmaking, even though perhaps this off-hand two-point rebuttal does not settle Dr. Sophist's hash altogether as regards the theory of extramural representation.

The pol's "seniority" as lawmaker for another people's country can be dealt with briefly. It consists mostly in the fact that M. Osman can speak the language of invasion fluently and is ready and willing to seek out Green Zone hotel-lobby journalists to practise his Texan on. Such behaviour is neither illegal nor immoral nor even fattening, but it can be a bit misleading to the extent that it may tend to throw the views of less polyglot collaborationist statespersons into the shade. Caveat lector.