Havin' once conquered the provinces of the former Iraq, did the militant GOP try to bring their most recent conquests up to the Kansas City level by inflictin' the Kansas City sort of governance on the neo-liberateds? Did they insist on a strong central Fedguv of the sort that has engendered their own George XLIII Bush? Did they insist on "first past the post" and "winner take all" in the spirit of Floridagate 2000? Of course not, what a silly idea! What Khalílzád Pasha and Prof. Dr. Noah Feldman (&c. &c.) did was to give their subject indigs a "constitution" that reads like a hostile travesty of proportional representation -- that Old Euro system so utterly un-American that we have adopted it here in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (We alone in all of Greater Texas, or so I'm told.)
Even the Big Management Party's holy of holies -- which is of course what I'd call "Political Capitalism" and which pious OnePercenter devotees account far too sacred ever to be named at all -- turns out not to be an export product, although to be sure in this case the Boy-'n'-Party stumblebums did at least take a whack at exportin' it. For a brief season of carnival under Sultan Jerry Bremer, New Baghdad was overrun with the nephews and nieces of AEIdeologues and Heritagitarians and Hoovervillains who attempted to drum elementary AdamSmithism into their Party's alien and bewildered neoliberateds. There has been nothing quite like that show since the Russian intelligentsia condescended to "go to the people" back in eighteen seventy-whatever. In both instances, however, the OnePercenter señoritos and señoritas got bored very rapidly when it turned out that there would be serious sales resistance to the ideoproducts that they hawked. Neoliberatin' individual peasants or indigs face-to-face turned out to cost far more than it brought in, and it is therefore in strictest accord with the Big Management Party orthodoxy of 1869-2007 that it should be dropped. (Russian Populist orthodoxy of 187? had perhaps not the same excuse available, but that's their problem, not America's or neo-Iraq's. Anyway, they're all long since safely extinct, Russian Populists are.)
Clearly there is a pattern here, a systematic discrepancy. Sooner or later somebody over across the aisle in the Stupid Party was bound to notice it and write it up from the extremist GOP standpoint.
So, then, without further preliminary ado, I give you
| Reagan Could Save Iraq / By Bill Steigerwald What would Ronald Reagan do -- with Iraq? President Reagan was way too wise to have gone to Mesopotamia in the first place. But what if he had to extract us from Iraq today? And what if he wanted to make sure Iraq had a chance of becoming a functioning, semi-civilized country after we left? The Gipper probably would be in favor of doing something the Bush administration won't do -- decentralize and federalize Iraq’s government. As is documented in the new book The Reagan Diaries, Reagan understood the value of a weak central government in countries boiling with ethnic, religious and political hatred and violence. On July 2, 1986, he wrote in his diary that one way to solve the tricky transition of power in South Africa from 5 million whites to 26 million blacks might be to set up “something like Switzerland's ‘Canton’ type of govt.” A lot of smart folks -- conservatives, liberals and libertarians -- have always argued that decentralization is exactly what Iraq needs to avoid total meltdown. Some have proposed a three-part split of Iraq -- a partition that gives the Kurds, Sunni and Shia control of their own turf. Republican 2008 presidential dreamer Tommy Thompson has mentioned a vague plan to create 18 provinces ruled by Iraq’s main Muslim sects. But Democrat 2008 presidential dreamer Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, with the help of Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations, has proposed a more detailed scheme. Under Biden's plan, a unified Iraq would be maintained but government power would be seriously decentralized. Oil money would be shared proportionately among the Kurds, Sunni and Shia. Baghdad’s mixed population would become a federal city protected by international peacekeepers. The Biden plan, Biden's presidential Web site says, is not a partition and it is consistent with the Iraq Constitution. Biden, like many others, believes that giving Kurds, Sunni and Shia their own territories is the only way to ensure that their militias don’t slaughter each other trying to get sole control of the central government. Overall, Biden contends, his plan is in the self-interest of the Kurds, Sunni and Shia -- as well as Iran. Ivan Eland of the Independent Institute, who discounts fears that federalizing Iraq will bring even worse chaos and instability or result in meddling by Iraq’s neighbors, believes decentralizing power in Iraq is still the best -- and last -- hope for saving it from “going up in smoke” after we leave. Biden's Web site lists nearly 40 people or editorial boards that support his idea or want to pursue it -- including Henry Kissinger, Republican Sens. Richard Lugar and Sam Brownback and Bill O'Reilly. Unfortunately, the idea of formally decentralizing Iraq's government -- which is already occurring neighborhood by neighborhood on its bloody own -- is going nowhere. The idea barely registers on the mainstream media's radar screen. It has not been seriously addressed in the presidential soundbite-trading "debates." And the Bush administration still isn't interested in it. Ronald Reagan would not have been so stupid. He obviously understood that Switzerland’s Frenchmen, Germans and Italians lived in peace and prosperity in part because of their loose confederation of 26 highly autonomous cantons. But unfortunately Reagan’s not coming back from heaven to fix Iraq or anything else the Bush Republicans have broken -- no matter how hard the GOP's faithful pray. |
Quite a strong performance for a OnePercenter fan, is it not?
A severe critic might criticize that the moral for the Stupid Party is not pointed absolutely unmistakably with some language like "Look, guys, if we are for states' rights and not any kind of Fedguv supporters at all here at home in Greater Texas, as of course we are, shouldn't we back states' rights out in our Party's newly conquered boondocks as well?"
Such criticism strikes me as way too harsh. Beyond a certain point the stupidity of the stupid is inexpugnable, so to subtract points from anybody's score because she declines even to attempt the impossible is unreasonable and unjust. If the Elephant People cannot make out their own Neocomrade W. Steigerwald's meaning from his scribble, that will be their fault, not Bill's.
Prescinding from any narrow Big Management Party context and speaking absolutely, it is perhaps not very impressive that Bill should need to take refuge with "nearly 40 people or editorial boards that support." If Mr. Bones and I send in our names, that will make it nearly forty-two, but even so . . . .
Which brings us to St. Ronald: would he really agree to up the ante to nearly forty-three if he was still with us in the same way Jimmy Carter is still with us? I suppose I ought to know as well as anybody, having voted for the man three times, though the third time he was somewhat disguised as "George Herbert Walker Bush." But in fact I have no idea at all. Certainly Mr. Reagan thought it an excellent idea that the Soviet Union ought to be decentralized and Swiss-cantonized even to the point of partition, but that was about somebody else's conquests, not about the militant GOP's conquests, and thus it is a very dubious parallelism indeed.
Neocomrade Steigerwald should perhaps reflect that St. Ronald was always basically on the defensive, still always engaged in Mister X's "containment" exercise dating from 1947. Now that Republican Party extremism can safely be a hyperpowerful Godzilla if it chooses, a terrifyin' menace to every ninety-pound weaklin' in sight with a changeable regime, the fundamental parameters of Weltpolitik are become so different that it would probably be better to just let Ronald Reagan go in peace and not speculate about what he might have done, had he ever been in a position to aggress and invasionize with the Kennebunkport-Crawford Dynasty impunity.
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