| His emphasis on the influence of political philosopher Leo Strauss is both bizarre and cheapens Allawi's works. Certain passages read [like] a highbrow version of Lyndon LaRouche or other conspiracy theorists. His footnotes enhance such inaccuracies, often expanding tangential narrative rather than providing source material. He disparages both Iraqi and U.S. officials--often without self-criticism or introspection--and warns that time is running out. |
Authentic LeoStraussianity is so exceedin'ly high-falutin' that it can't exactly "cheapen" anybody's narrative. But it does tend to leave monkeys who borrow it to adorn a tale without understanding it looking very like monkeys. A reviewer who wants to be helpful to readers rather than neocomrades would have observed more generally that M. al-‘Alláwí pays a good deal of attention to Washington and Crawford up to September 2003, when he returned to "Iraq" himself, but after that essentially none at all. Karl Rove's War, probably the most important campaign of all for grasping the Big Picture, is scarcely present. Acordingly this can not be the definitive account of the aggression and occupation, no matter how good it is on those human events that it does not leave out.
The AEI señorito complains with justice about M. ‘A's footnotes, but should have added that when one really wonders "How does he know that?" or even "Did that ever happen at all?" even the nearest tangential footnote tends to be several paragraphs removed. The work is readable -- though not 100% proofread, O Yale! -- but it is certainly not citable. If M. al-‘Alláwí wants future historians to rever his name, he should prepare a shorter account, perhaps one hundred pages, strictly in the first person singular, so there is never any doubt what authority is being invoked.
"He disparages both Iraqi and U.S. officials--often without self-criticism or introspection"? Indeed he does, indeed he does. That M. al-‘Alláwí does not like anybody very much is the first thing any reviewer ought to mention. However there are a few faint traces of self-criticism and introspection and there might have been more in a first-person account. The para-British gentleman is quite capable of mumbling, "Well, actually, I don't like myself all that much either." His censoriousness about his partial namesake, Dr. ’Ayád the Interim Government quasipremier, looks like a case of two of a trade failing to agree. Their common trade, however, is not what the AEIdeologues would prefer, since neither of them has much use for "democracy," let alone democracy.
He "warns that time is running out"? Actually he doesn't. Having no crank panacea to vend, there would be no point in his doing so. The observation is interesting from the señoritoly side, however. Evidently the neocomrades are not to believe that time is running out, and indeed, perhaps it isn't, as viewed from the editorial offices of The Weekly Standard and the ramparts of AEI. However if the day is saved from that point of view, there will be no reason for mere neo-Iraqi subjects to take an interest in a salvation that won't be theirs. M. al-‘Alláwí writes as if "neo-conservatism" has had a stake driven through its heart and can never rise from the crypt to make still more trouble. This matter is located west of the Atlantic where his expertise is inadequate, though, and the señorito faction may have the last laugh yet, which would certainly be no joke for wretched "Iraq." Notice that all three of the victims he really dumps on are presumed to be gone forever, a presumption which seems entirely safe only in the case of Neocomrade P. Bremer. (As I recall, M. Rubin has dumped on P. Bremer himself, which may help explain the four stars. Like me, the señorito prefers in general not to waste time talking about what he agrees with already.)
Like me, the señorito finds that the book suddenly gets better once Sultan Jerry has vamoosed:
| Allawi is at his best on coverage of events during his ministerial tenure with valuable perspective about Iraq's reconstruction, the April and November 2004 battles against Sunni insurgents and Shi'i militias, the debate over elections, and the growth of corruption networks. Juxtaposing his account with U.S. newspaper coverage underlines the superficiality of the New York Times and Washington Post. |
As often, there is some question exactly whom the neocomrades chiefly crave to be at "war" against. Part of the four star award must be due to M. al-‘Alláwí's providing handy ammo like this against the intellectually respectable press. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." In fact, though, the former quasiminister is not especially hostile to the NYT and WP; he cites them frequently without any lamentations about superficiality. The closest he comes to MSM-bashing is not very close:
| The New York Times in a vitriolic editorial [of 2 April 2006] demanded that Jaafari be driven out of office. [p. 443 and fn. 21] |
Aunt Nitsy's best friends can occasionally be troubled by that editorial vitriol of hers, and in any case editorials are licensed to be superficial, unlike news stories. Presumably the señoritos agreed with her on this particular occasion. Like the NYTC, but unlike M. al-‘Alláwí, they wanted M. ‘Abd al-Mahdí of SCIRI as quasipremier of the fourth or "permanent" invasion-based neorégime. I believe that pol was regarded as especially in line with economic AEI-think. Instead we all got poor M. al-Málikí of Da‘wa, but the consequences of that curious affair fall outside the chronological scope of the book.
As one would expect, Neocomrade M. Rubin reads the work omphaloscopically, so there are large swaths of it that simply do not interest him. Among these is what I should account the theme of the whole pudding, namely that "sectariarianism" is no delusive appearance, but a real thing not to be explained away by handwavers and bullshit artists and partisan Scandanavian academics. Enough time has now passed since the GOP aggression for M. al-‘Alláwí to be able to offer a sort of developmental theory of sectarianism, a move which must be sound conceptually and in general even if the details need to be revised. He dates the trend towards neoreligionizing in the former Iraq well back into the days of the Ba‘th, and that, too, can scarcely be a total mistake. Naturally he has no truck with Sunnintern fantasies that the paleface invasionites somehow introduced sectarianism along with their bayonets and Humvees into provinces that were entirely innocent of it before.
Equally naturally, the para-British gentleman does not care for sectarianism at all personally, and one supposes that as "senior adviser to the Prime Minister of Iraq" (cf. the book jacket) he endeavours to woo poor M. al-Málikí, and perhaps Da‘wa as well, away from the poison as much as he can. His exact political identity is never made clear, but most likely he considers himself an independent and a technocrat, so that even Da‘wa is rather "they" than "we." His use of that antecedently dubious word "Islamist" is especially hard to pin down: my best guess is that he regards at least some of the adherents to the U.I.A. caucus as non-Islamists, therein disagreeing with the consensus of paleface analysis. (Speaking of which, it's a wonder that Señorito Rubin passes over how often M. al-‘Alláwí refers to Prof. Juan Cole, sometimes with verbal incense burned to him as well. To be sure, most of these references are of the Schlesinger Minor sort, "As Plato once observed, the sun rises in the east." He who omits footnotes where they are needed sticks them in where they aren't, and that makes a certain kind of sense, I suppose.)
There is more solid information about (Twelver) Islamism in this book than in any other invasion-language work available, but M. al-‘Alláwí's exact relationship to his knowledge demands attention. He seems to have learned almost all of it since September 2003. [1] Before that date he no doubt thought of himself as an ’Imámí Shí‘í but cannot have been much interested in marji‘iyya and wiláyat al-faqíh and so forth. He was perhaps even vaguely antagonistic to such seminary stuff, for he remains a (mild) political Iranophobe still. There probably is not anything in Twelverdom that warrants being called anticlericalism, but if there was, M. ‘Alí A. al-‘Alláwí would subscribe to it at once. This has a bearing on his attitude towards the Damascus Da‘wa, so to call it, which resolutely refused to allow the mullahs a big political role. The consensus and I would regard the Málikí-Ja‘farí Da‘wa as "Islamist" all the same, but it is possible that M. al-‘Alláwí disagrees.
Señorito Rubin at AEI is not interested in any of this, which is perhaps no surprise, but it seems a bit curious that he does not mention M. al-‘Alláwí's sui generis account of the Rev. al-Sístání's political gamesmanship. Such a writer cannot criticize the marji‘iyya directly, and he does not, yet he makes it plain enough that he thinks Najaf more part of the "Iraq" problem than of the solution. On the other hand, the Rev. al-Sístání and Dr. Chelabí are the only two native pols he attributes any political talent to. He greatly exaggerates the former's supposed wheeling-and-dealing in my judgment. His Eminence just happens to find himself in a structural situation where a basically very simple policy -- let all the Twelvers stick together, and then they will rule after the militant Republicans finally go away! -- can be perceived as fiendishly crafty. The al-‘Alláwí account is mostly just a mare's nest. (One might speculate that there were objections from the direction of Najaf about the "technocratic" conduct of M. al-‘Alláwí's various quasiministries that he prefers not to mention explicitly. But God knows best.)
Returning to the theme of the pudding, it appears that the sad reality of "sectarianism" is properly appreciated by one very exceptional Iraqi in every generation, by Faisal I of the Mecca monarchy [p. 17 and 21f.], by the off-beat sociologist ‘Alí al-Wardí [p. 12ff.], and now in the fullness of time by former quasiminister ‘Alí al-‘Alláwí [passim]. Mild-mannered is the last named, yet far from modest! The GOP's invasion-based "Iraq" would be a sad disappointment to him even without its more obvious troubles and problems-of-success. This gentleman gives the impression of having attended his thirtieth or fortieth class reunion only to discover for the first time that he is the graduate of an idiot school.
Under the circumstances he has no positive program to recommend to anybody, neither to the idiots nor to to the invasionites. One could hardly expect him to.
_____
[1] One might even speculate that he was still learning the lore as he wrote about it, although this guess is risky as well as unimportant. Certainly there is a howler on page 27 that never recurs subsequently:
| At the age of eleven, [Muhammad Báqir al-Sadr] left Kadhimiyya for Najaf, where he joined the hawza (the Islamic study circles) of several leading mujtahids, especially the circle associated with Ayatollah Muhammad Rouhani. He later moved to the hawza of the Grand Ayatollah Abu al-Qasim al-Khoei .... |
The quasiminister is also strangely unwilling to translate the Sadrist antithesis of "speaking Hawza" and "silent Hawza" literally, although this may have to do with his determination to make the Rev. al-Sístání out no "quietist." At page 111, he mistakenly claims that the Rev. Muhammad Báqir al-Hakím invented the peculiar SCIRI dogma of marji‘iyya siyásiyya only after returning to "Iraq" in 2003. It is older than that, and originally featured the Rev. Khamene’í, not al-Sístání, as the nonpolitical recursion-point.
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