One of the great noncartoonist kibitzers of our epoch starts off admirably, displaying ten times more familiarity with Crawfordology, and even with US politics generally, than most of his pen-deployer peers:
| These are points Qalamji has made before, but he thinks this is the time to re-emphasize them: What the Democrats are out to defeat is the Republicans, not the project for control of Iraq. The expression "withdrawal" is merely a cover for re-assigning troops so that the troops themselves are safer; Iraq will still be occupied. It is difficult for some to face this situation, and there is a temptation to cling to fantasies about an easy victory, an early withdrawal, or at least the idea that what Bush and the Democrats are focused on is finding a way to make an honorable withdrawal. |
Hardly anything there is exactly right, except the words emboldened, yet with one exception it is all within shouting distance of recognizable reality. Oddly enough, the most Cloudcuckooland stuff happens to be the rest of the same sentence that contains the most nearly reality-based stuff, i.e., "the project for control of Iraq." The Saracen rhetor himself intended an antithesis, obviously, but not exactly between sanity and dottiness.
It is difficult for some to face a situation in which the former Iraq has been turned inside-out and upside-down, with thousands lawlessly killed and tens of thousands kidnapped under pretext of "arrest" and hundreds of thousands forced to flee from their neo-liberation by the forces of invasion, without there being any Master Plan of Control behind it all. Sweet puppies -- Mr. William James's "tender-minded" sentimentalists-cum-philosophical-monists -- are appalled by such a ghastly spectacle, as indeed every decent adult must be. But not every decent adult feels that such a spectacle so threatens her preferred Weltanschauung that what she apparently seems to see must be instantly explained away as not really there to be seen.
However it were better we humble should confine ourselves to apologizing for, say, Sen. Clinton versus Mr. Wolfowitz rather than attenpt the Aristotle-v-Parmenides litigation.
OK, then, sure! M. Qalamjí is quite right at a certain level, the next "President Clinton" is not likely to move ALL the armed forces deployed by the militant extremist GOP out of ALL the provinces of the former Iraq. This prospect is very deplorable -- and I hereby put in on the record that I deplore it! let GOOGLE be my witness!-- but all the same, the Dragon Lady To Come will be quite as innocent of any Master Plan of Control as George XLIII and his Party co-conspirators are at the moment. She'll be innocent in a slight different way, innocent like a donkey rather than like an elephant, but innocent all the same. (In both cases I mean "innocent of any masterful control planning," of course, not innocent simpliciter. There's utterly no question of the latter.)
M. Qalamjí seems not to have enjoyed the West Point sort of education. "[R]e-assigning troops so that the troops themselves are safer" is a curious military maneuvre quite apart from what label one attaches to it. What would the former MacNamara or the now Petraeus make of that, I wonder, counterinsurgencywise? Not a hard question: the braniac twosome would surely say that counterinsurgency is to be abandoned in favour of something else. And I'd venture to gloss that answer by pointing out that MacNamaran counterinsurgency really did more or less purport to be a Master Plan of Control. Extending my gloss, should there be enough margin to scribble in, I'd note that as regards the GOP aggression against Mesopotamia, "counterinsurgency" and "Master Plan of Control" are mutually interchangeable notions, and both of them interchangable with the notion of the ever-victorious Surge of '07™.
Important consequences follow at once, notably
(1) From March 2003 to (roughly) March 2007, the GOP geniuses, the neo-politicized MBA's from the Harvard Victory School, didn't have any Master Plan of Control for the former Iraq whatsoever.
(2) Now that they've finally got one, the object of Control is not the former Iraq as a whole, but only the last-ditch Sunni shootists.
M. Qalamjí is by way of being a last-ditch-Sunni-shootist fan:
| The thing everyone should keep in mind at this point is that when the Americans talk about an honorable withdrawal, their idea is to convince the resistance to lay down their arms, and by joining the political process and joining in the governing authority, actually help ratify the occupation [by the Americans] who, when they first came, came to stay, and not to leave voluntarily. If we put these discussions [about negotiating and joining the political process] to one side, and take up instead the language of reality, then what we hear from the American politicians with respect to Iraq is the exact opposite of what is actually happening, because the American forces, on the one hand, while continuing to talk about withdrawal, are in fact launching ever more violent attacks against Iraqi cities, using the worst weapons of killing and destruction, including banned weapons, . . . . |
(( Mr. Badger's [bracketeering] is, -- ah, well, but that's only Mr. Badger with his bracketeering, after all! ))
"Launching ever more violent attacks against Iraqi cities, using the worst weapons of killing and destruction, including banned weapons" does not sound much like what the MSM report lately. It sounds rather suspiciously like noises we heard months and years ago. The "banned weapon" that Dr. General Petraeus seems in fact to be mostly deployin' at the moment is simply neo-MacNamaran Counterinsurgency, the mere actual possession of, and the seriously attemptin' to implement, some Master Plan of Control, though it be only narrowly conceived. Maybe masterful control plannin' is quite as inhumane as poison gas or "waterboarding," maybe there ought to be an International Law against the use of it in war, but still, at the moment there technically ain't any such law.
Swing back left, O pendulum! I trust I am not be to accounted a factious accomplice of Dr. Gen. Petraeus simply for refusing to become factiously complicit with M. Qalamjí and his attendant badgers, surely! Come home, O pendulum, and help us find the Via Media!
Not all that hard, really, at least on the negative side. The braniac Petraean neo-MacNamarianity comes far too little and way too late. Ms. Conventional Wisdom's professional figures of rhetoric don't often agree with my homebrew ditto, but in this case Sappy is right: the clock will run out for the Kennebunkport-Crawford Dynasty's Party's Boy's occupation policy in the Holy Heimatland no matter how much progress Dubya's ole buddy "David" makes somewhere out there in the negligible boondocks of the world.
Yet the cause of M. Qalamjí (and all his consociated quadrupeds) is even more hopeless still, for there will never be any neo-neo-liberated "Iraq" comparable to the "Algeria" that emerged after the FLN's deal with De Gaulle, no "victorious insurgent resistance" sort of a neo-neo-Iraq such as Qalamjís (and Badgers) obviously crave.
"President Hillary," as I conjecture or scenario-ize, won't much mind that both the militant extremist GOP and the extremist militant Sunnintern have alike discredited themselves over the former Iraq. She'll withdraw all the GOP's witlessly misdeployed troops to safe havens, not "so that the troops themselves are safer" but only so that they are properly poised to strike at real, rather than imaginary, enemies, if and when such strikes should become necessary in order to _____________
And there's the Blank of Blanks!
Easy enough to fill it in with cheap cynicism or even cheaper trashy Party Spirit, whether Crawfordite or Sunninterni, but perhaps if that virgin blankness can only be left blank, we may outlive our symptoms of decline even yet?
Alio modo, "What is it you want to rule the world FOR this week, O Weekly Standardizers?"
BGKB. KECEKE.
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