That's the invasion-language aviary that I speak of, to be sure. If he had had the bad taste to write such a book in Arabic, things would be rather different. Fortunately his taste is exquisite. He's such a perfect facsimile of Ayatollah J. H. Newman's British gentleman that the genuine article might as well withdraw from the unequal contest at once. Anyway, ‘Alí has definitively mastered the lesson about never offending anybody unintentionally.
Before we get to those whom Mr. A. offends deliberately, we need a little OB, however:
[1] ‘Alláwí, ’Ayad (not "Iyad", no article on the surname) is the former caudillo
[2] al-‘Alláwí, ‘Alí is today's hero, author of The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace
[3] al-‘Alláwí, Hasan wrote Al-Shí‘a wa l-Dawlat al-Qawmiyya fi-l-‘Iráq.
[2] must assume either that [1] is not going to prove a once and future caudillo, or else that [2] will be well out of New Baghdad when the [1] coup happens. Ali's almost as deliberately offensive about no-relation Ayad as he is about the late Sultan Jerry, who is definitely never coming back to do more damage, as well as treated with deliberate offensiveness by a number of his Party co-conspirators against peace. Being nasty about the GOP's Neocomrade Paul Bremer is so safe and easy that it is scarcely worth the effort, but painting a moustache on Dr. Ayad Allawi's posters and posturings takes a bit of nerve. Yet needless to say the pluperfect replica of a Anglo-Saxon gentleman cannot be an effete wimp! The claws may be velveted, but they are there all the time. All our paleface planmongers for the provinces of the former Iraq had better keep a careful eye on this guy, at least if there is some slight chance that their preferred occupation policies will actually be attempted to be implemented. Ali stopped taking notes for the book about a year ago when he will have started writing it, but now the book is written and its author can pay full attention to all the latest neostumblebumisms. Rear-Col. Freddy Kagan, among others, should consider himself hereby caveated.
Back on the literary side, it seems pretty clear why all the birds and all the bird-brains swoon over Ali. He does not, at bottom, like anybody very much, but he is also very circumspect about his disrelishments except in a few special cases like Jerry and Ayad, where he lets himself go. The doves perceive that Ali doesn't much care for the chickenhawks, but the idea that anybody might disrelish the doves is so alien and offensive (to the doves), that they manage to overlook certain pretty plain tip-offs. And of course over there down across the road a piece in Chickenhawk City, it's the same contract, only doubled, redoubled and vulnerable: eight times the self-autonarcissism means eight times as much unattentive reading. Bremer the invasionites no longer care about, and apart from Bremer, Republican Party extremism is handled very gently and gentlemanlike indeed. Ali usually just refers to "the superpower," which Godzilla of Yale is bound to take as a compliment. I shouldn't go quite so far as to maintain that Ali means "the superpower" only as a sneer -- "Look what an almighty pigsty of an 'Iraq' you have created for yourself to wallow in, Mme. Superpower. (And now you say you want to wallow for fifty years, as if in South Korea? Wow!) Golly, it must be nice to be omnipotent like you are! Could you maybe give a humble beginner like me some pointers about how you did it, ma'am?" --, yet if you don't appreciate that sneering is ONE of the active ingredients in this panaviary-acclaimed intellectual cocktail, you are not doing Gentleman Ali full justice for his mixological skills. (Plus furthermore you miss most of the available fun for yourself.)
If this pluperfect facsimulation of a Newmanoid English gentleman is as good as I confidently expect it to be, it will extend as far as "Actually, I don't really like myself that much either," the utterance being perfectly sincere and maybe even heartfelt. Unfortunately one cannot judge of this matter from the book. Gentleman Ali is not so vulgar as to write in the first person, nor yet quite so imperious and _systematisch durchgeführt_ as Julius Caesar when he writes in the third. Yale University Press prints Ali more suo with lots and lots of footnotes. Although of course Gentleman Ali is a gentleman rather than some tertiary-educationalist pedant, nevertheless, or maybe accordingly, whenever one seriously wonders "How could Gentleman Ali know that?" or even "Did that ever really happen?", the nearest footnote seems always to be eight paragraphs back or six paragraphs ahead. In a very few cases there is no doubt at all, however. Consider page 211:
| In a conversation with Bremer about the significance of the Sadrists as an expression of the disempowerment of the Shí‘a poor, Bremer angrily retorted that he 'didn't care a damn about the underclass and what they [the Sadrists] represented!'[14] |
Note [14] to page 211 reads
| Bremer exclaimed this to the author during the April 2004 crisis with Moqtada. |
It takes a little working-out that we are in First Personal Singular country here, but proceding via back-of-the-book detours we do eventually arrive at last. Unfortunately this exception only goes to illustrate what seems to be Gentleman Ali's general rule. Only flagrant jerks abandoned to their flagrant jerkishness require that Gentleman Ali be fully present, if only in an endnote, to officially announce the abandonment. That faint cloud of disrelishment that lingers over pretty well everybody else involved in or about the provinces of the former Iraq is to linger still, it seems. Perhaps they -- any "they" you like, O aviary! -- have not YET revealed that they are only so many flamin' jerks, but the revelation is expected to come at any moment, and so please stay tuned!
On the back flap of its momentary masterpiece YUP scribbles
| Ali A. Allawi is senior advisor to the Prime Minister of Iraq. Since the Coalition's invasion of Iraq, he has served as his country's first post-war civilian Minister of Defence, was elected to the Transitional National Assembly as a member of the United Iraqi Alliance, and was appointed Minister of Finance under Dr. Ibrahim al-Jaffari. He divides his time between London and Baghdad." |
Gentleman Ali must find that stereotypical claptrap quite as funny as I do, although our exact occasions of mirth may not overlap altogether.
The "Minister of Finance" angle I have indeed overlooked. Once Gentleman Ali is off and running in THAT technical direction, as he is for brief spurts in the masterpiece in question, he leaves you and me in the dust instantly, Mr. Bones. Yet why should not the pluperfect Brit facsimile be that of J. M. Keynes, after all? ("What do you want instead, a xeroX of Enoch Powell?")
Between London and Baghdad he divides his time, then, Gentleman Ali does. Can a time divided ever hope to stand?
But seriously, Mr. Bones, the pathos of this _shtik_ is that Gentleman Ali is both far too Baghdad for London and yet . . ..
Who shall explain to thee, O Bones, what Gentleman Ali, this Yalie-published Newmanoid facsimile, encountered when it first went "back home"? Allow me to attempt an analogy, sir: suppose you had graduated from some no-'count wannabe prep school (much like our own LFA, Bones) years ago and never thought of secondary educationalizing again until you began to grow old and sentimental and attended "your" fortieth or fiftieth reunion and then suddenly discovered that it is now more like an idiot school that you've been a lauded alumnus of all these years.
The facsimile returned to its "native" neo-Iraq far better equipped than we might return to our neo-LFA, hopeless to think that after so many years we should become at once "minister" of this, or "elected to" that, nominally Headmaster or Overseer or Corporaton Member whatever. (OK, sure, sir, I conflate my tertiary Harvard with my secondary LFA! You wanna make somethng about that?)
The facsimile returned, 11 September 2003, to its native Mesopotamia as recently neo-Crawfordated and was appalled by pretty nearly everthing in sight, as well it might be. "THIS is HOME? HERE is the _marji‘_ ever to be returned unto?"
What a hero was the JHNewmanoid facsimile, our "Gentleman Ali," that it did not just puke and flee the Shock-'n'-Aweful spectacle of the militant GOP's Peaceful Freedumbia instantly, but actually attended his umpteenth class reunion and really tried to make the idiots act more like proper alumnuses and less like idiots. _Niyya_ is ever precious, no doubt about it! And other people's _niyya_ is never to be hastily inferred from what Yale University Press is pleased to print on book jackets. Yet is even that the whole story?
God knows best.
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