| US reliance on tribes is also supported by others who have already written off the possibility of seeing a strong central Iraqi government emerge. "I've been pushing for four years to deal directly with the tribal leaders," said Sen. Joseph Biden (D) of Delaware ... in Washington Thursday. The US, he added, has to "give up on … the possibility of having a strong central democratic government trusted by all the major constituencies.... It's simply not capable of occurring." |
If he has really been "pushing [tribalization] for years," he must have been pushing very quietly. Did he tell Herr Dr. Gelb of the Conspiracy on Foreign Relations about his Bedouin dreams before they vouchsafed to the world their joint proposals about occupation policy? I fail to recall it. The occasional cultivated despiser of colonial decentralization who has mentioned that performance subsequently always talks as if the twosome scheme to carve up the former Iraq into two or three chunks, not one hundred and thirteen.
Biden-Gelb pills™ have yet to match the widespread appeal of Murti-Bing pills. The comparatively unsuccessful marketing campaign may be why the Senator has started tinkering with the secret magic formula retrospectively, perhaps even unilaterally and gelblessly! There was not much substance to Biden-Gelbism in the first place, so reconcocting and redecorating the previously released partition product to suit this week's newspaper headlines is not difficult. There is no danger of having to eat many of one's own previous words in this case.
What's that, Mr. Bones? . . . Oh sure, I'd insist on the "retrospectively." But no, that doesn't make Biden a "liar," even though what he said last week may not be strictly accurate according to the truth. We have agreed that even Little Brother himself can not sustainably be claimed to have lied to get himself his aggression. How much less Joe Biden! And after all, sir, crescit eundo, not even Mr. Donkey Foreign Policy began by knowing everything he knows now about the stumbles of the Big Management stumblebums and the local colour of their neo-Iraqi subjects. Don't you think that he must have known rather less about tribes and tribalism in the former Iraq on 21 June 2003 as opposed to 21 June 2007? If he missupposes himself to have always known what he knows now, or thinks he knows now, well, who is to throw the first stone at that? Let us not raise the bar so high that nobody alive can vault it. That game is especially unworthy, sir, when we ourselves sit in the stands safe from ever being called upon to leap at all. At very least, Mr. Biden owes it to his post-January position as the Upper Chamber's majority expert on invasions and conquests and occupations &c. &c. to have some sort of prepared speech about Peaceful Freedumbia always at hand, and to keep it reasonably up to date with developments amongst the neoliberateds.
What he really thought or said or pushed four years ago matters little. Nobody cared then, and nobody remembers now, practically speaking. Once we put it on the record that he has been gilding his lily and fudging his ingredients a little, let him be granted a complete amnesty and a blank slate to scribble on. What is Mr. Joseph Biden's recommended occupation policy for the former Iraq NOW? If we, too, start from scratch, forgetting we ever heard of Leslie Gelb and a' that, we know only two things about it:
(1) Negatively, and much more importantly, all paleface planmongers must "give up on … the possibility of having a strong central democratic government trusted by all the major constituencies.... It's simply not capable of occurring."
(2) Positively and comparatively peripherally, all paleface planmongers must "deal directly with the tribal leaders."
Score the man 500 points (out of one thousand) for his global negativity, then subtract twenty-five points for his tribalization malarkey. That comes to 47.5%, or an unmistakable 'F-', unless I've forgotten my school days altogether.
Without affecting the mark allotted in any way, Mr. Bones, you may annotate the margin of this candidate's blue book with the observation that there is an ingenious occult connection between his two points. Skipping over poor M. al-Málikí to negotiate with assorted shaykhs of the TwentyPercenters directly must tend to make the existing Green Zone neorégime even less capable of strength and centrality and democracy and government and trustworthiness than the GOP geniuses have rendered it already. This is not exactly a self-fulfilling prophecy, for Mr. Biden's global declaration of incapability is not a prophecy about the future, it sounds far more like an eternal axiom. Perhaps he would maintain that the weakness and irrelevance and autocracy and anarchy and "sectarian" unreliability of the current native neorégime at New Baghdad have already reached the point where making these bad things a little worse yet would have no significant impact. (And perhaps he is quite right, so let none of this affect his score.) Nevertheless, the plain tendency of his one positive suggestion is to aggravate what he presumably accounts evils.
It also aggravates other things that some of us account evils, though Sen. Biden perhaps disagrees. To deal directly with the tribal leaders undermines the Sovereignty and Independence and Constitutionality of poor M. al-Málikí's quasigovernment. (Mr. Biden got the undermining of Democracy in himself, I notice, which comes third in my standardized list of these four horsemen.) In addition to that, or perhaps as a consequence of that, to deal directly with the tribal leaders grossly violates the goose-and-gander principle. Fancy the Senator's reaction to foreign powers dealing directly with our own "tribes," say the AFL-CIO or the NRA or the AEIdeologues or the Heritagitarians or dozens of other. Would he not instantly advise them to forget about that sort of direct dealings and go speak with Dr. Rice's people as the sole authorized representatives of Uncle Sam?
Considered politically, Biden's tribal conspiracies would be an infringement of Sovereignty. Considered ethically, which matters less but still does matter, they constitute a violation of equity. His scheme might also be considered legally, which is more important than ethically, though not as important as politically. Strictly speaking, though, Sovereignty is a matter of law and what Biden proposes is flatly illegal. The political violation lies in his failure to bear in mind that upholding Sovereignty is almost always the soundest policy, just as honesty is proverbially the best policy. (This failure is also the major political blunder involved in the original GOP aggression of March 2003.)
The gentleman from Delaware may quite conceivably maintain that the present case is exceptional, that it would be madness for Uncle Sam to attempt to vindicate the Sovereignty of poor M. al-Málikí's neorégime against third parties, or even for Sam to recognize it himself, should such recognition interfere with other nifty plans like "to deal directly with the tribal leaders." Very well, then, a political argument to that effect is certainly not to be ruled out of bounds automatically. Let the Senator actually make the case that Peaceful Freedumbia is the exception, not the rule. In the course of making the case, let him take full note of the fact that Uncle Sam (represented by a certain idiot nephew from Crawford TX) has announced again and again that neo-Iraq is indeed Sovereign, announced the alleged Sovereignty in such a way as to imply a promise to respect it. Let Biden explain why he thinks that his conspiracies with tribalists are so urgently necessary that they warrant the Unites States of America forswearing ourselves.
Again, nobody who believes in Politique d'abord! can disallow such an argument without listening to it and weighing it carefully. Yet the reason a policy rule is called a rule is that there is a presumption in favor of it and a presumption against exceptionality. Sen. Biden evidently considers that the bushogenic quagmire in the former Iraq has now reached a point where two different presumptions are rebuttable. (1) Exceptionally, it is not sound policy to uphold Sovereignty in this one instance. (2) Exceptionally in a different way, it is not the best policy, or even a good policy, to uphold Honesty in this instance either and fulfil our national promises about neo-Iraqi Sovereignty.
Perhaps the Senator can successfully rebut the double policy presumption against his favorite schemes, but he is going to have to actually do so. If he lets the matter go by default, if he refuses to plead, he necessarily loses his case in the Court of Reason.
This is not to say he might not prevail in the U. S. Senate, although that seems unlikely. Witless schizophobia has shown a few signs of decay recently, but nowhere near enough to threaten Little Brother's occupation policy as regards the sacred territorial integrity of the former Iraq. Conventional wisdom depicts Mr. Bush as retreatin' a little bit from complete Kiddie Krusade dementia to more or less the Hamilton-Baker occupation policy. Whether or not that is right, Joseph Biden remains odd man out, since the ISG/CFR gentry are schizophobes too, Dr. Gelb excepted. He is even odd man out in the newspaper story we began with, where most of the occupation policy "experts" quoted think that flirting with tribalism in the Land of Peace and Freedom is a dangerous idea likely to backfire. For instance,
| "Most of these Sunnis who were formerly targeting US and coalition forces and are now willing to fight on our side aren't doing it as a result of some deep ideological transformation," says Riedel, now at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "They are doing it for reasons of financing, to make money, and to control turf in the Sunni parts of the country. It's unlikely they will be reliable allies in the long term." |
Perhaps one could take a kinder view of Sen. Biden than he shows any sign of deserving on the basis of considerations that he doesn't actually contradict. Has he vaguely come to grasp that the basic structural problem in the former Iraq is how the Arab Sunni theocommunity has gone smash like Humty-Dumpty? Of course to go on from that insight to want to deal directly with the fragments because that is all that is left is scarcely the path of wisdom and prudence, yet one may hope that the Senator will gradually get his analysis into sharper focus and revise the proprietory formula for Biden-Gelb pills™ accordingly. No paleface plan to impose partition on the neoliberateds has any chance of actually working if it blithely takes for granted that simply separating them from one another will do the trick and end the troubles without specifying some real and present Powers that will make sure they stay separated.
Probably the international community, not to speak of Big Management and the Party base and vile, would balk at Poland-the-Model, i.e., handing the Wild West over to Sa‘údiyya or some other Sunnintern outlet, abandoning Najafistan to the evil Qommies, and having NATO underwrite the freedom of the Free Kurds -- incidentally guaranteeing that they don't make trouble for Ankara either. That's far too realpolitisch to be real, of course, but it is a valuable thought experiment to reflect that paleface planmongers with no sentimental scruples or ideological intoxications whatsoever could make some such no-nonsense arrangement actually work -- that is, if "work" means only ("only"?) less bloodshed amongst the neoliberateds and more sacred stability for the impositionists.
Alas, not only will the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington never tolerate any imposition that does not include "some deep ideological transformation," Sen. Joseph Biden won't like it either, since it is the polar opposite of "to deal directly with the tribal leaders." Russia and Prussia and the Habsburg Monarchy made a clean sweep, they ignored all the leaderships of the Poles, tribal or other, and dealt directly only with one another. That was then, and this is now, and direct emulation is out of the question, but understanding why it worked in 1772 and 1793 and 1795 and exactly what prevents it even being attempted in 2009 would be analytically helpful. More helpful, at any rate, than
| US reliance on tribes is also supported by others who have already written off the possibility of seeing a strong central Iraqi government emerge. "I've been pushing for four years to deal directly with the tribal leaders," said Sen. Joseph Biden (D) of Delaware ... in Washington Thursday. The US, he added, has to "give up on … the possibility of having a strong central democratic government trusted by all the major constituencies.... It's simply not capable of occurring." |
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