Big Management at Bay?

From a Harvard Victory School MBA point of view there is a major silver lining to their latest pesky little problem of success:

Iraqi newspapers relayed an interview that the Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki gave to Newsweek, in which he REQUESTED that the US Army desists from arming tribal militias in the Sunni provinces to fight al-Qa'ida. The Iraqi government was, at one point, actively involved in the arming of Sunni tribes in Anbar. The government’s newspaper [1] published several op-eds praising the tribes for their role in fighting al-Qa'ida, and al-Maliki made a visit to Ramadi in order to meet with the leaders of the tribal “Anbar Salvation Council” to express his support for their efforts. However, al-Maliki’s posture changed with his realization that the Sunni tribes are intent on using US support to build their own militias, following the model of pro-government Shi'a organizations, which could produce severe “unintended consequences” for the government in the future. Al-Maliki said that any arming of the tribes should be done with the supervision of the government, and that efforts should be made to ascertain that those receiving weapons and support are not linked to insurgents.

Poor M. al-Málikí can only request, you see. Of course the GOP geniuses both can and will ignore such know-nothing requests. The UN Security Council ventured to make a somewhat similar request of them immediately before the Boy-'n'-Party "Iraq" caper began at all, and they ignored Dr. Blix and world opinion and Rulalaw and all such contemptible fetters on their free spirits with glee. Judging from mere practical outcomes, the geniuses' anti-request policy may not seem the wisest available, yet perhaps it is incumbent upon them dogmatically all the same. For consider, is it not the proper rôle of Big Management to make requests rather than entertain then? Occasional exceptions may be not only admissible but productive, yet surely such occasions must remain exceptional and preferably markedly so. Otherwise the Lone Ranger will be degraded from HVS superhero to a sort of public utility, therby shaming the glorious private sector and possibly even opening the door to evil socialism! [2]

To be sure, poor M. al-Málikí does seem to be getting a bit uppity: who is he to profess to be able to identify "insurgents" better than Big Management can? One is not to side with him just because he is a neoliberated underdog, after all. The geniuses will automatically suspect some low "sectarian" motive behind this request, making it even easier for them to disregard it.

From ten thousand kilometers distance one hesitates to pronounce about which crew possesses the better insurgency detectors. It would be desirable to have a great deal of very local knowledge before venturing upon that. And even if one had such knowledge, what if these "Sunni tribes in Anbar" are not themselves altogether sure what they are up to? Might they not be behaving as Big Management has behaved on the USA domestic front ever since the Pentagon/WTC attacks, heaping up as much power as possible for themselves without possessing any clear idea what they will use it for? Anybody who's anybody in "Iraq" nowadays has some sort of armed band at her beck and call: the Crawfordites have the biggest, SCIRI has one, the Sadriyya have one, the Kurds enjoy their pershmerga. Even poor M. al-Málikí commands an armed band, sort of. No doubt it would be more philosophical and judicious of tribal chieftains in al-’Anbár not to run off after the latest fashionable status symbol like witless Gadarene swine, yet surely all those "Arab mind" deepthinkers at Wingnut City can not have misjudged the Bedouin mentality altogether? They assure us that such a temptation is bound to be especially tempting to these people, that the particular sort of status that possessing a militia can bestow is the nomadic Bedouins' very favorite sort and always has been. "Philosophical and judicious" is not how the Arab mind gets portrayed very often, not even the post-tribal Arab mind, supposing such a thing exists.

Certain features of the Big Picture do not depend on accurate and current HUMINT about the boondocks, however, nor upon ArabMind-reading, and among these is the plain fact that poor M. al-Málikí and his HVS MBA friends down at Rancho Crawford are not exactly in cordial agreement about such a matter as this one. The disarray constitutes a significant problem of success in itself, especially from the BM side. After the great March of Milestones that has constituted Karl Rove's war, the geniuses have arrived at nothing better than this, that their fifth, and nominally final, invasion-based neorégime in "Iraq" [2] makes an obstacle of itself like this, or at least attempts to interfere impertinently with its betters' conduct of operations. Why, one might almost joke "Not milestones, but millstones"!

Speaking of jokes, how about Dr. Gen. Petraeus of Princeton and Proconsul R. Crocker of Crawford giving poor M. al-Málikí a shocked and dismayed glance: "Why, to think that anybody should ever mention "unintended consequences" in conjunction with us!"




_____
[1] Picking on Harvard is always fun, and Father Zeus knows the Party base and vile like to engage in it also!

One really knows better, of course, and imagines the MBA-mongers over on the right wing of the Charles biting their fingernails with chagrin at certain alumnuses' doings and doo-doo. Little Brother's "business career" is also not something the Harvard case method is confidently to be recommended by. It might be kindest to assume that he slept through all his lectures, or rather, all his case studiments, except that the assumption would cast some doubt on the Victory School's quality controls in the matter of awarding degrees. So let us, in charity to all, conjecture that George XLIII learned all the authentic victory stuff throroughly and then forgot it instantly after his last examination. This is psychologically possible, or anyway, it happens in fiction.

A different sort of dogmatist from the HVS / AEI / GOP sort would wish us to reflect seriously whether the Party of Grant's preëmptive retaliation and invasion-basing (and request-ignoring) are not in very fact consequences of what some used to call "late capitalism." On the whole I think not, because the analytical category of Big Management is radically not conceived along their lines. Socialists, and especially scientistic socialists, take for granted that economics trumps everything, whereas I stand with the late M. Maurras for Politique d'abord!

The original hint for "Big Management" came from Prof. Robert Paul Wolff, if I can reconstruct my own thinking correctly. He observed about American "pluralism" that management and labor are both regarded as equally valid "interest groups" despite gross numerical disproportion. Since Wingnut City had long since already devised "Big Labor" to gnash its partisan fangs against, it seemed easy and obvious to come back at them with "Big Management." The fact that Citizen Wolff had pointed out that in a mechanical nose-counting sense BM is not so big only adds charm and sarcasm to sober political investigation. Alternatively, one might take the figure of rhetoric slightly more seriously and argue that since ex hypothesis labor and management are exactly the same size, each individual Manageritarian must be very gross indeed, each Laborite small and puny. It takes ninety-nine others to weigh as much as a single OnePercenter weighs. Wolff was no rightist, obviously, but he called himself an anarchist rather than any sort of socialist. The socialists presumably would not have admitted him to their club, because the whole affair (like most of RPW's other affairs) is about politics and political sociology or, at worst, about political psychology. Economics scarcely comes in at all.

A scientistic Marxian could maintain that Wolff in effect assumed that the USA had reached a posteconomic Nirvana that the palaeocomrades would of course consider entirely delusive. There is a little bit to that objection, but only a little. Think about how the Homeland of Father Zeus actually works. Dr. Limbaugh, who perverted years ago to OnePercenterism, is always attemptin' to discredit "the Democrat party" with charges of rousing the rabble to class war, a concept he understands more or less as Dr. Marx did, all envy and economics. Nothing could be less reality-based, although perhaps the honourable and gallant neocomrade is not simply the loudmouth and jerk he looks like being, because that stale Cold War tripe does distract his patients from the real case against Boy and Party. In the real world, Daddy Warbucks is not a problem because of his brandy and cigars, and only a containable problem nowadays, usually, because of how he runs his sweatshops. The chief trouble is Warbucks' OnePercenterism, his contempt for nose-counting, for (mere) democracy in the (trivial, unworthy!) sense of majoritarianism. Daddy's tank-thinkers, the AEIdeologues and Hoovervillains and Heritagitarians, are always trying to come up with an antimajoritarian "democracy" product that will blow "the Democrat party" out of the water once and for all, but they have yet to achieve their ambitions completely. I attribute this correlation of forces to the elementary historical fact that Democracy was here first, Capitalism only came in afterwards. Prof. Wolff did not, that I recall, attribute it to anything at all, he just took it for granted. A Marxist may argue that such a taking for granted is disastrous, but she is asking for difficulties by adopting that view: she is likely to end up forced to maintain that not only do Wolff and McCloskey fail to understand America properly, America Herself fails to do so. (Socialists not only may so argue, they actually have and rather frequently: remember all the former rigmarole about "false consciousness" and 'alienation," deployed against the contemporary USA in a manner only superficially resembling Marx and Engels on nineteenth-century Europe?)


[3] Perhaps the brief sultanate of Gen. Garner need not be counted against the perps, in which case there have been only four (4) invasion-based neorégimes imposed upon Peaceful Freedumbia: the Bremer sultanate, the "interim government" under Dr. ‘Alláwí, the "transitional government" under Dr. Ja‘farí, and now at last the post-interim, post-transition whatchamacallit of poor M. al-Málikí.

One might suppose that it high time for the Big Managers to stop travelin' and announce that they have now definitively arrived. Surely poor M. al-Málikí himself must take that view!

Yet obviously it would be rash, or perhaps even absurd, to suppose anything of the sort. It is well known that Big Management wants its own colonial handiwork considerably retinkered: a petroleum law, a re-Ba‘thification law, local elections that it probably expects to use against its own Green Zone collaborationists, even amendments to Khalílzád Pasha's "constitution"! Any talk of definitive arrival is manifestly premature.