The principles of those who shoot and bomb armed agents of the GOP as often as they can do not lend themselves to the exercise, however. The present state of the former Iraq is quite as unsatisfactory to them as to the Rancho Crawford mob: the Sunni Ascendancy has not been restored, and the Caliphate to come (which only some of the shootists crave, though all insist on the Ascendancy) has certainly not arrived yet. To be satisfied with the quagmire as it sogs means that one would prefer that these bad Twentypercenter ideas were not implemented, and equally that aggression should not pay for Republican Party extremism.
At this point there is a temptation to cheat by inventing a set of quagmire-friendly principles, some supposedly general rule that would never have entered one's head except in order to derive one particular application of it. During Secretary MacNamara's War, for instance, some amateur geopoliticians discovered that Commandment XI reads "Thou shalt not fight in another's civil war." That brainstorm was perverse as well as illogical, for where would the holy Homeland be now without M. de Lafayette and General de Rochambeau (and a few thousand untitled assistants)?[1]
So, then, one could consider the Sunni Ascendancy as constituting a subspecies of aggression and therefore to be condemned by the same criterion that condemns illegal forcible entry into other people's countries by the militant extremist GOP. On that basis one might relish the quagmire morally because it shows that "Aggression Doesn't Work!", or at least that sometimes it doesn't. To ascend to a higher level and relish it politically also would be problematical. One must lose at least a few points for allowing oneself to be perceived as happy enough that the former Iraq should be victimized indefinitely by a Sunni-Bushie struggle in order to point the anti-aggression moral and thus adorn one's tale. (Adorning the tale with parallels between the vigilante cowpokers and the resistance / insurgency / terrorism / guerrilla is easy enough, as for instance, both teams are afflicted with faith-crazies, and both take fathomlessly for granted that they are Natural Masters, endowed with a mastery that vote counting must never be allowed to impede.)
Yet the whole business remains shaky, for one did not in fact equate domestic tyranny with international aggression before just this minute. Obviously the two tend to travel together. It's certainly not an accident that the same perps who marched into Mesopotamia uninvited and strictly self-credentialled should be eager to snatch unheard-of powers of domestic surveillance and control for Boy and Party too. Or conversely, that the Ba‘thís extended their repertory from oppression at home to snatch-and-grab against their immediate neighbors. Nevertheless, tyranny is one thing and aggression another. Everybody talks that way, and everybody is quite right. To pretend that one's principles require one to talk differently is humbug, rather like announcing that better prenatal care is a matter of national defense. Naturally everybody wants strong and healthy Hessians, so there really is a connection, but trying to pass connection off as identity is unworthy of a rational creature.
At a less grandiose level, those who genuinely believe in the "Roach Motel" paradigm of the former Iraq ought to be gratified with the way things have been goin'. (I'm not sure that any such Kiddie Krusaders really exist, but certainly that line has been talked.) Should Dr. Gen. Petraeus attain an authentic Success and Victory for Boy and Party, then the motel would be closed down and very likely the roaches would all go infest Kansas City instead of New Baghdád. Wouldn't want that to happen!
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But the obvious folks with preëxisting general principles that should lead them to rejoice in the spectacle of Peaceful Freedumbia just exactly as it stands now live on Planet Dilbert and call themselves "libertarians." (As a minor epicycle to them, there is the National Rifle Association: the former Iraq has got to be the Promised Land of gun noncontrol!) The good folks at Slogger City have a real treat for the devotees of Miss Rand of Petrograd and Mr. Nozick of Harvard this morning:
| The Lebanese al-Akhbar daily reported that a “semi-official” autonomous government was announced yesterday in Southern Iraq. The paper said that “over 40 tribal chiefs from the provinces of Basra, Nasiriya, Amara and Samawa” have signed an agreement announcing the birth of a “self-ruling government” in the Shi'a-dominated southern provinces; and released a statement signed by “the administration of the autonomous government of the South.” The new “government” elected ‘Abd al-Muhsin al-Shalash at its helm, and announced its commitment to the Iraqi constitution “at the present time,” adding that the “government” intends to amend the constitution in the future. The newspaper did not add further details regarding the local support to the new council, or whether the founders of the “autonomous government” have links with the major political parties. But al-Akhbar pointed [out] that the current constitution allows an Iraqi province (or a number of provinces) to form a “region,” which, if approved by a popular referendum, would be acknowledged by the government and would be granted a large measure of autonomy, including a regional government and parliament. The paper said that the founding of the “autonomous government” may be a first step in entrenching “Iraqi federalism ... which, is (currently) applied solely in the Kurdistan Region.” |
Golly, Mr. Bones, a semi-official autonomous self-ruling government of the South! Who'd 'a' thunka that? [2]
Whole-hog Nozickians and Randites will not be entirely happy with the Baní Shallásh, I daresay. "[C]ommitment to the Iraqi constitution 'at the present time'" falls well short of "Smash the State!" On the other hand, have the principles of Planet Dilbert ever been put into terrestrial practice to the same extent elsewhere? If so, I do not recall the instance.
The Baní Shallásh are a bit more dilbertarian than the newspaper lets on, because they are "committed" to the Khalílzád Konstitution after a fashion that is thoroughly unkonstitutional, there being no provision in the Great Charter of Peaceful Freedumbia for behaving as they have behaved. As often, parallels between Ancient Poland and the brave new former Iraq come to mind, especially in conjunction with the Planet Dilbert side of the bushogenic bog. Are the Baní Shallásh not much like what the lovers and practitioners of zlota wolnosc used to call a "confederation," konfederacja?[3]
To make the parallel perfect, these unwitting (?) fans of Poland-the-Model and Planet Dilbert will have to defend their self-ruling semiofficial autonomy with the sword and the Kalashnikov. They wouldn't have to win, but they would have to fight, and thus the question of how much popular support they have becomes urgent, whether support be connected with major political parties or not.[4]
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[1] That dottiness might make a come-back considering the state of the aggression, although I have yet to see it stated clearly. Perhaps it had some slight influence on the subconscious mind of the invasionites, however, who long resisted anybody referring to "civil war" when contemplating their Party's quagmire. However it is more likely that the bozos rejected the phrase instantly just for soundin' like bad news and castin' doubts on the quality of their bigmanagement.
Ms. Conventional Wisdom's distinction of "insurgency" from "civil war" does not apply very well to either the former Iraq or the former South Vietnam, but as regards the bumpersticker there is no difference of any importance. If you are gung-ho for invasions and occupations, you don't primarily rely on either phrase, you thunder against Global Terrorism instead. (Against International Communism, in the Indochina case.)
Only a universal menace can make the dogma of Preëmptive Retaliation plausible nowadays, in rulin' circles at least. The Party base-and-vile at Rio Limbaugh are another matter, for it is clear that some of them still think like Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg (BH came as close to being a GOP extremist as any mere foreigner can): aggression into Belgium in 1914 was permissible as preëmptive retaliation against a threat to the holy Homeland without there being any need to pretend that it was a threat to Belgium (or to all the world) as well. Like the Right of Conquest, that attitude became decidedly unfashionable in the course of Century XX. We might consider bringing them both back, because all the ill effects happen anyway, only with a lot of pious Pharasaism and tedious twistification tacked on as camouflage.
[2] Perhaps the Jefferson Davis neorégime would have flourished better than it did had it aspired to be only a semi-official autonomous government of the South?
[3] The best write-up of the palaeo-Polonian quagmire in English occurs in a preface to the Everyman edition of Pan Tadeusz. In short, the nie pozwalam! made it impossible for the official government to get anything done, and thus there had to be semi-official self-ruling autonomous governments as well, "confederations" in which policy could be decreed by a majority rather than a total unanimity. The policy decreed had then to be imposed upon the whole Commonwealth by force. All of this was considered by the writer to happen within the (unwritten) Polish Constitution rather than outside it.
Peaceful Freedumbia with Zalmáy's tripe and baloney written down is not 100% parallel, but in practice things were often so quagmirish in Poland and Lithuania than even an extremist Republican might recognize the resemblance. On the other hand, the anarchy was entirely indigenous, there is no figure in the annals of Poland equivalent to Khalílzád Pasha imposing the anarchy for utterly exogenous reasons of Boy and Party.
[4] I'm too lazy to describe the Planet Dilbert side of the former Iraq in detail at the moment, but surely Randites and Nozickians cannot have failed to notice and applaud the approximation to "competing governments" involved in the rise of the Sadr Tendency and, indeed, in the phenomenon of the Lebanese God Party as well. As with the Baní Shallásh, there are various admixtures of "sectarianism" and the like in the Rev. Muqtadá and the Rev. Fadlalláh that St. Petersburg or Harvard Yard purists are bound to deplore. They ought to consider, in my opinion, that their cup of bliss is half full rather than half empty. Planet Dilbert is after all very far removed from Planet Earth, and to expect an instant and total conversion of muddled earthlings to the True Antistatist Faith is not only impatient and hasty, but positively unreasonable.
On the other hand, if they prefer to be gloomy Gusses about it, they are not without grounds to adduce:
(1) The promising potentialies in the former Iraq would not exist at all except for the exertions of that particular Wicked State that is ruled from Crawford TX. Congressman Dr. Ron Paul, also of TX as well as of Planet Dilbert, is well aware of this angle.
(2) It seems undeniable that a great many muddled earthlings, especially in Greater Texas, recidivated seriously from the True Antistatist Faith on the occasion of the Pentagon/WTC attacks and will now require to be reconverted.
How this second setback is accounted for on Planet Dilbert, I have not inquired. My own amateur speculation would be, first, that "Smash the State!" and "Smash the Terrorists!" are emotionally equivalent and, secondly, that most of the strayed catechumens had never advanced to a rational rather than sentimental apprehension of the True Antistatist Faith. Dilbertarianism is an extremely high-and-dry acquired taste for most muddled earthlings, so it is not a great surprise to me that many of the former faithful should defect from Glenlivet to Mogen David, as it were.
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