The employers of M. Nír Rosén are very broad-minded, as corporations go. Not only do they allow him to sell some of his best journalism stuff on the side, they even praise it and direct attention to it when he does so.
That may be what is going on here, but it is also possible that that the management and staff of Slogger City found the following specimen a bit too editorial for their business plan to endure. Like Rupert Murdoch, they would no doubt ideally wish everybody to buy their wares. But considering the nature of the wares they vend -- inside information on the condition of the former Iraq under the yoke of Crawford, especially information about 'security' for foreign ventures of capital -- one appreciates why their actions might be somewhat constrained. Assume the op-ed pages of all Citizen Murdoch's trophies expounded the political views of Mr. George Soros and that the press baron actually allowed them to do so for some unaccountable press-baronial reason of his own. Even in that fantastic case, Dr. Murdoch could reflect that newspapers and picture media will always be in demand, even should the whole Anglophone world fall to the doves and the donkeys. Whereas if (irresponsible) withdrawal of militant GOP forces from neo-Iraq ever really happens, who will be left to pay to have the joint slogged for them? Mr. Soros? The United Nations? The postneoliberated natives, even? These are improbable candidates. Either they would not need the slog product, or they could not afford it, or they would not trust the present crew to do the slogging for them.
Money being money, it is conceivable that the Slogger City management and staff might all thoroughly agree as mere animal individuals with the views expressed by M. Rosen (not to mention the tedious natives again). They may clearly perceive that the Big Management Party's conquest and occupation of neo-Iraq has been an incompent racket, they may judge privately that such a racket would have been wrong even if competently conducted -- but what have these things to do with trying to make a buck or two out of the quagmire while it lasts? Under the circumstances, it would positively be biting the Invisible Hand to allow a general impression to develop that everybody at Slogger City agrees with M. Nir Rosen. Far better he should send it off to the Washington Post! Perhaps there was a slight sigh of relief in the boardroom when they saw M. Rosen safely identified without reference to themselves:
| Nir Rosen is a fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq. |
As an unprofit organization, I daresay this 'New American Foundation' does not need to worry about such things the way any responsible corporate sloggerdom must, and for all I remember to the contrary, the NAF may be hopelessly tarred by association with doves and donkeys already.
The bosses' praise and attention-directing is of considerable interest in its own right:
| IraqSlogger's Nir Rosen pens a scathing rebuttal to Paul Bremer's earlier op-ed in the Post, and one of those rare pieces in Iraq journalism that does not take sectarianism at face value. |
Perhaps we cheapskates should receive that as an accidental tidbit of info usually made available only to paid-up subscribers. Do the management and staff of Slogger City make sure that every time a prospective customer shows up at their door, he hears something like "You must understand, Dr. Warbucks, that what the papers keep saying about sectarianism in Iraq is not at all to be taken at face value."? It seems likely enough that they might. Warbucks Enterprises Inc. would presumably not require their consultancy if there was avowedly nothing to it that could not be found in, for instance, the Washington Post. At very least, the sloggers must offer something different, and furthermore must assure their customers that the Slogger City product is not only different from, but better than, the MSM product. (Whether it really is so remains another question, of course. Caveat emptor.)
For that matter, Dr. Warbucks already has the Slogger City account of the MSM account of neo-Iraq for nothing, just like us cheapskates. One of the implications of that is immediately relevant to our own quest: the management and staff would be asking for sales resistance on Warbucks' part if they did not themselves believe it to be really the case that the so-called sectarianism of the militant GOP's neo-Iraqi subjects is not simply what it appears to be at first glance. They cannot be inviting their marks to make objections such as "But didn't you folks just say on your website that . . . ?" Well, actually they could be doing that, but one supposes they possess enough Adam Smith savvy to know better.
So then, now that we have established not only that corporate and official sloggerdom recommends M. Nír Rosén and his sentiments on 'sectarianism' but that it almost certainly does so sincerely, what exactly are those sentiments? The word itself does not appear. The following passages seem pertinent, and are to be read in light of the fact that the whole scribble is framed as an anti-Bremer tirade. All opinions attributed to Sultan Jerry are ex officio erroneous and damnable:
| Time and again, he refers to "the formerly ruling Sunnis," "rank-and-file Sunnis," "the old Sunni regime," "responsible Sunnis." This obsession with sects informed the U.S. approach to Iraq from day one of the occupation, but it was not how Iraqis saw themselves -- at least, not until very recently. Iraqis were not primarily Sunnis or Shiites; they were Iraqis first, and their sectarian identities did not become politicized until the Americans occupied their country, treating Sunnis as the bad guys and Shiites as the good guys. There were no blocs of "Sunni Iraqis" or "Shiite Iraqis" before the war, just like there was no "Sunni Triangle" or "Shiite South" until the Americans imposed ethnic and sectarian identities onto Iraq's regions. |
Perhaps it is only an inadvertance that M. Rosen's opening salvo of polemical buckshot gives the impression that the accused was not so much obsessed with sects, as obsessed with (Arab) Sunnis in particular. Perhaps it is more than an inadvertance.
The qualifier "at least, not until very recently" leaves one in some doubt as to what M. Rosen would say in a stand-alone account of his own position. Perhaps there is no politically significant sectarianism in "Iraq" even on Wednesday 16 May 2007? Perhaps there is lots of it, but all developed under the Republican Party invaders and occupiers? (Perhaps sectarianism snuck in under Neocomrade Paul Bremer's very own overcoat, as it were?) We'll need to read a bit more to be sure about the current state of affairs, but M. Rosen seems perfectly certain that sectarianism was effectively unknown under the Ba‘th. Onwards!
| Many Iraqis saw the Americans as new colonists, intent on dividing and conquering Iraq. That was precisely Bremer's approach. When he succumbed slightly to Iraqi demands for democracy and created [an] Interim Governing Council, its members were selected by sectarian and ethnic quotas. Even the Communist Party member of the council was chosen not because he was secular but because he was a Shiite. |
(Thank goodness the poor indig wasn't chosen for being a Commie! What would the AEIdeologues have said if he had been?)
Again, M. Rosen's own analysis is not easy to discern. He doesn't quite say that our neo-Iraqi subjects were right to think what they thought, or that Sultan Jerry actually managed to impose conquest-by-division upon them, as opposed to making only an "approach" to doing so.
But let's not linger, for here comes The Biggie:
| In Bremer's mind, the way to occupy Iraq was not to view it as a nation but as a group of minorities. So he pitted the minority that was not benefiting from the system against the minority that was, and then expected them both to be grateful to him. Bremer ruled Iraq as if it were already undergoing a civil war, helping the Shiites by punishing the Sunnis. He did not see his job as managing the country; he saw it as managing a civil war. SO I ACCUSE HIM OF CAUSING ONE. |
Emphasis added, obviously. That thunderbolt answers most of the questions M. Rosen was leaving open. Certainly it can not be accounted successful Big Management according to the traditional divide et impera school to produce a civil war instead of, say, a tamed and sullen populace such as Lord Cromer managed to achieve in Egypt, or even the less adroit French in Syria and Morocco, but that is what M. Rosen tells us that Sultan Jerry did in the former Iraq. Jerry did it on purpose, furthermore, at least as regards the dividing and conquering part, though presumably not the civil war part.
I fear this tale does not altogether recommend itself to me. President Lincoln was joking when he called Harriet Beecher Stowe "The little lady who caused this big war," but M. Rosén does not seem to be joking at all, he believes in his J'accuse! as passionately as M. Zola in the original product. To make this one, personally negligible, middle-rank Boy-'n'-Party neocomrade responsible for the whole vast bushogenic quagmire betrays a certain lack of proportion. Still, M. Rosen does not claim that the accused was solely responsible, or even claim that the D&C policy was little Jerry's own idea. We thus remain up in the air to some extent.
Passing over whether "At least a third of the famous deck of cards of Iraqi leaders most wanted by the Americans were Shiites" establishes that the ancien régime was really a paradise of unsectarianism, let us leap to M. Rosen's peroration:
| Some have indeed pilloried Bremer for his individual errors, such as disbanding the army. But these blunders are not the reasons why most Iraqis hate the American occupation and support violent resistance to it. The main grievance most Iraqis have with America is simply the occupation itself -- an occupation that lingers on years after Bremer waved goodbye. |
The bottom line is so true as to be a truism, but I cannot say that M. Rosen does anything but make his own position murkier than ever with the paragraph as a whole. If we are to understand that the Crawfordite extremists should have marched their triumphant military hired hands back home in the summer of 2003, that would be close to a truism also, I'd say, -- but unfortunately it is indeed I who say it, not M. Rosen. If he had said it, I'd complain that he really ought to add a little bit more to explain why the Big Management Party stumblebums in fact did nothing of the sort.
==
With Rupert Baron Murdoch we began, and with him we may end. Considered as a report of what most neo-Iraqi subjects think at the moment about their lords and masters down at Rancho Crawford, I hereby officially decide that this performance will serve well enough. Considered as an account of the Big Picture, however, or even only as a speech for the prosecution in the case of Decency v. Paul Bremer, it is pretty sad stuff.
I decide so despite agreeing with M. Rosen's basic dovishness and having profited from the Green Bird book. When he tells us what (Arabophone) indigs under the Occupyin' Power say and think, he can be very good -- although not perhaps altogether excellent, for competent authority has advised me that M. Rosen probably cannot read standard Arabic with any readiness, despite his Iraqi colloquial. Assuming that this supposed limitation actually exists, it sets an appropriate limit on how far to take M. Nir Rosen altogether seriously.
When it comes to his Zola impersonation -- undoubtedly the most striking part of this scribble -- that canon would mean that one may safely believe that quite a number of former-Iraqis think some such thoughts as these that M. Rosen has signed his own name to at the Washington Post, but that one should look elsewhere before deciding whether they and he are well advised so to think, let alone whether what they and he think is the way the occupied "Iraq" really is.
As to sectarianism, it seems permissible to speculate that certain neo-subjects might find the real and present yoke of Crawford so disagreeable that they honestly, or at least sincerely, misremember what they equally sincerely used to think about Saddám and all that. I've undoubtedly made that mistake myself and suspect that it happens commonly enough.
But God knows best.
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