| It is also undoubtedly true that Maliki is widely viewed — by Iraqis of various sectarian labels — as an often excessively enthusiastic ally of Iran. This is no surprise, since his Dawa party evolved from an infamous Iranian-backed terrorist group of the same name. |
How can it be that George XLIII of Kennebunkport-Crawford has missed that undoubted truth? You don't have to answer, though, because His Eminence has already worked what's wrong. Little Brother does not pay enough attention to the local press in his colonies:
| General Petraeus’s job is constantly made even more difficult by the actions of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and often in ways reported — so far as I know — by the local (that is, Iraqi and other regional) media.[1] Take last week, for example, when a major powwow among the Iraqi political leaders was abruptly terminated. It had been expected that the usual suspects, ranging from Kurds to Sunnis and Shiites, would meet in Baghdad to sort out their disagreements about ways to amend the Constitution, distribute oil wealth, and so forth. Everyone from Moqtadah al Sadr to ex-PM Iyad Allawi was going to come. Prime Minister Maliki was under great pressure from Washington and from Petraeus to make some political progress to match the military successes of recent months, and hopes were fairly high that something worthwhile would come out of the talks. But, according to Az-Zaman: the breakdown occurred when the Iranian government “officially” requested that ex-Prime Minister Iyad 'Allawi be excluded from the talks, a request that was rejected by the Sunni IAF. As a result, the paper added, Kurdish leader Mas'ud al-Barazani may no longer travel to Baghdad, as was expected, to participate in the dialogue. Now Az-Zaman is just a local paper, and even the best paper gets it wrong, so this assertion may well be wrong in one detail or another. |
Now of course the Times of Bazzázistán is in no useful sense a local fishwrap native to brave New Baghdád, it's only a recent acquisition of, or accession to, the Anglo-Arabian Press Trust, a "pan-Arab" organ of the Intergalactic Sunnintern. Since Ayatollah Bin Ledeen takes money from customers of tertiary education for knowin' all about the Greater Levant, the chances that he does not know this fact are zero. But why should he mention it, or even allude to it (except maybe by that odd tutorial shuffle of his about how the one particular extract might conceivably be impugned,), when Ledeenianity and the Sunnintern happen to agree? The great thing is to see the Qommie Menace clearly and distinctly and then be scared [w]itless. Perhaps the AAPT doesn't see quite exactly what His Eminence sees when they gaze at the black dawnin' in the East, but so what? They're obviously terrorized of it and they hate the Safavid monsters who put them in fear, and that's quite enough to be gettin' on with. Obviously the urgent task is to make Little Brother and the GOP geniuses and perhaps also the Big Party base-and-vile as terrorized of and venomous against as the Sunnintern already is! "Details can be sorted out afterwards, people, please. Qommies are worse than Nazis, after all! Would FDR and Stalin and Churchill have hesitated to accept the (significant) aid of anti-Hitlerites in 1942 just because their primary reason for fear and hatred of Adolf was the man's Satanic vegetarianism? [2]"
And yet Little Brother seems not to agree with Chicken Little and Ayatollah Bin Ledeen about the Qommie Menace! He's now actually talkin' to 'em, sort of, by way of Proconsul Crocker! Day by day, Little Brother shows more and more signs of lapsin' wholesale into the Hambaker or ISG heresies. In that case, why not Little Brother just resigns, plus Oilslick Dick too, and then poor Sam's Executive Branch is handed over to a "bipartisan foreign policy élite" that wants to coddle Ultimate Evil and cuddle up with Qommies?
So far, so good, but Mikey Cardinal Ledeen does not exactly see eye-to-eye with the Intergalactic Sunnintern about the former Iraq:
| Thus, in a paradoxical way, our mounting success on the battlefield makes political compromise more difficult for Iraqi leaders, because the Iranian gorilla is in the conference room even though he does not appear in the official accounts. And that gorilla is prepared to smash all the furniture if he does not get his way. At the moment, things are going badly for him and his terrorist friends, and the gorilla is doing everything he can to prevent his losses from being institutionalized. It appears that the Anbar model is spreading to other regions, and involving Shiites as well as Sunnis. Notice, please, that the Anbar pacification involves Sunnis fighting against other Sunnis, and in other areas we have Shiites fighting against other Shiites. This will surprise only those State Department, academic, and CIA “experts” who have so vociferously insisted that conflict in Iraq is invariably ethnic. It will not surprise those who have spent time in Iraq, and noticed the remarkably high rate of intermarriage between these two groups of theoretically irreconcilable enemies. |
Little Mikey is a predestinate social-scientizer, obviously. I've spent about fifty-eight years (of 61) in the holy Heimatland myself without ever catching so much as a single direct glimpse of any "rate of intermarriage," high or low, -- and that no matter what MBL or anybody else means by "inter-" exactly. (My perceptual betters see things invisible to me, no doubt. Woe is me, I've never actually seen any "rate" at all with the naked eye! By Faith I believe that "rates" really do exist and really do matter, but if I was reduced to relying on mere Lockean Experience, well, who knows?)
Dr. Righteous Virtue, that berserker ideologue Viking somehow cast ashore in Gulf Coast Mesopotamia, would quite agree with little Mikey Bin Ledeen -- and ain't that about the strangest bedfellowship ever! "Theoretically irreconciliable enemies" was not a good way for little Mikey to word it, though, for who among us palefaces had any theories about the former Iraq before the militant extremist GOP rushed in to formerize everythin' in sight? Things change, and in the GOP's Peaceful Freedumbia change has been very, very rapid. Mikey himself says
| Left to their own devices, the Iraqis would undoubtedly have made considerable progress toward national unity, and a representative government worthy of the name. But the Iraqis are not left alone, because the battle that is currently being waged in their country is part of a larger war, in which the most dangerous force is the Islamic Republic of Iran. Until Iran is defeated, Iraqi leaders will always cater to the edicts coming from Tehran. |
Here we arrive at a complete disjunction: little Mikey Bin Ledeen's private ideas of "a larger war" overlap scarcely at all with what the Big Party aggressors of March 2003 were aggressin' officially and on behalf of their Uncle Sam for. Had the GOP geniuses and their Party base-and-vile seen the world through 20/20 BinLedeenian lenses, they should have marched straight to Qom and Tehrán and bypassed Baghdád and Najaf. Once chop out the Heart of Darkness, and soon the veins of Darkness and the arteries of Darkness will cease to throb or matter. The GOP Kiddie Krusade should (as Ledeenianity now preaches -- possibly only retrospectively?) have gone straight for the Jugular of Darkness, not wasted even an instant of time or a smidgen of effort on mere capillaries of Darkness like former GOP ally Saddám Husayn.
Mr. Bones and I don't much care for either disputant in this intramural Wingnut City fratboy food fight between the Grand Ayatollah's "larger war" and the Big Management Party's "long war." We humble don't even want "smaller and shorter" than any crew of militant extremist neo-bozos want, what we want is utterly nothing more of THEIR sort at all. Plus it would be nice, though optional, to get rid of THEM personally as well.
But God knows best.[1]
___
[1] Short of His knowldge, how about Eddie Burke's?
"I flatter myself that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty as well as any gentleman of that society, be he who he will; and perhaps I have given as good proofs of my attachment to that cause, in the whole course of my public conduct. I think I envy liberty as little as they do, to any other nation. But I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind. Abstractedly speaking, government, as well as liberty, is good; yet could I, in common sense, ten years ago, have felicitated France on her enjoyment of a government (for she then had a government) without inquiry what the nature of that government was, or how it was administered? Can I now congratulate the same nation upon its freedom ? Is it because liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of man-kind, that I am seriously to felicitate a madman, who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell, on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty ? Am I to congratulate a highwayman and murderer, who has broke prison, upon the recovery of his natural rights? This would be to act over again the scene of the criminals condemned to the galleys, and their heroic deliverer the metaphysic knight of the sorrowful countenance."
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