| Asked by a reporter in 2005 to explain his expansive views about presidential power, Mr. Cheney replied, “If you want reference to an obscure text, go look at the minority views that were filed with the Iran-contra committee.” “Nobody has ever read them,” he said, but they “are very good in laying out a robust view of the president’s prerogatives with respect to the conduct of especially foreign policy and national security matters.” |
It looks like the Senator from Nebraska has not read the Ollie Papers either, or perhaps he did read them and found them alarmin' and deplorable from a Big Party standpoint. The fringe zealots may care about Big Management in the abstract, or about the interests of the Tel Aviv statelet, or even, conceivably, about vindicatin' the principle that international thuggery works. None of these causes are identical with the cause of the Big Party and can therefore conflict with it, which seems to be about the point that the militant GOP has actually come to. I daresay fringe zealots, too, think wishfully about somethin' or another. A sudden divine intervention on behalf of neocomrades Petraeus and Crocker would be come in very conveniently for them, but politics being the art of the possible, we shall restrict ourselves to those who wish more thoughtfully for some happy turn of events that is not completely unreality-based.
That exclusion brings us to their Senator Hagel :
| An international mediator, under the auspices of the UN Security Council and with the full support of the Iraqi government, should be established. The mediator should have the authority of the international community to engage Iraq's political, religious, ethnic and tribal leaders in an inclusive political process. In letters last month to President George W. Bush and the UN secretary-general I urged them urgently to consider this initiative. |
That wishfulness is not on a par with the North Atlantic turning to soda water by the end of the month, it's like wanting a blizzard for one's August picnic down at Rancho Crawford. Once a millennium or so such freakish things actually happen. The gross improbability of it is, needless to say, not that such a mechanism could not be set up, only that it would actually satisfy Neocomrade Hagel's expectations, which include, lemme see, "political reconciliation" and a "turn away from sectarian violence" and "[r]eversing Iraq's slide into chaos" and - golly! - "a sustainable and constructive comprehensive regional security framework" and . . . . But that's quite enough to be getting on with! (Parenthetically, however, one may notice that all of the sugar and spice is expected to have some tendency to save the Big Management Party's face as well as be relished for itself. There is no need to suppose that the neocomrade is tryin' to hide the Party angle; doubtless he only felt it would be of scant interest to customers of The Financial Times.)
At the other end of the Wishful Thinker's Five Foot Shelf of Books™, so to speak, we encounter the following bookend, which is discussing the New York Times Company's weekend exercise in paleface planmongering:
| One important point where the editorial-- unlike the ISG report and much current thinking in the US political elite-- mirrors the thinking I have always articulated about the diplomacy required to negotiate this speedy and orderly withdrawal is that it calls explicitly for a UN role. Not only in the section excerpted above, but also later on where it says: The United States military cannot solve the problem. Congress and the White House must lead an international attempt at a negotiated outcome. To start, Washington must turn to the United Nations, which Mr. Bush spurned and ridiculed as a preface to war. It also, like the ISG, myself, and all informed realists, recognizes that Iran and Syria must be fully engaged in this diplomatic effort. |
Doubtless Sen. Hagel qualifies for admission to the select band of "all informed realists," even if he would not dump on his Little Brother with any of that "spurned and ridiculed" stuff. And naturally he reveres the Gospel According to Hamilton and Baker as much as any other self-selected bandit. The Times editors, to their credit, admit an occasional flicker of common sense to temper their Panglossianity, for instance in the sentence above, where they speak only of an "attempt" and do not blithely suppose that "a negotiated outcome" is already as good as in the bag if only Dick Cheney could be got around. [1]
Since the Senator's wishful thinkin' is twofold, perhaps we should add a little more from the opposite end to address the native politics aspect as well as the collective security aspect:
| Also, quite honestly, once the US commits [itself] to a firm date for a total withdrawal, the entire political dynamics within Iraq will change. The motivation for Iraqis to give any sustained support to the rootless agitators of Al-Qaeda would be diminished considerably, if not completely. This whole idea of the US needing continuing permission to operate inside Iraq "to combat the terrorist forces" is a dangerous canard. |
"Quite honestly" is a bit peculiar: why should Dr. Pangloss suppose that anybody doubts the sincerity of his unlikely prognostications? [2] Far be that from us!
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Incidentally, both parties have a tendency to talk kinda funny: 'canard' does not seem to be quite the word to match the intended meaning, viz. "major mistake," and Mr. Hagel uses "mediator" as if it were the name of a thing rather than a person. The FT editors set him straight, calling his piece "A less American face for mediation in Iraq." That is not the ideal formulation either, though, since it absurdly suggests that what the Big Management Party has been up to in Mesopotamia since March 2003 is to be classified as Yank-faced mediation.
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[1] The NYTC peacemongering is not altogether unequivocal, although the primâ facie way to take it is as only more Panglossian informed realism. However an alternative cynical interpretation is possible, I believe, namely that that sort of thing is proposed as a sort of going-through-the-motions, a necessary concession to decency or decorum that is not seriously expected to have much effect on the bushogenic quagmire. In any event, it was amazing to read the following paragraph in the Times:
| Iraq’s leaders — knowing that they can no longer rely on the Americans to guarantee their survival — might be more open to compromise, perhaps to a Bosnian-style partition, with economic resources fairly shared but with millions of Iraqis forced to relocate. That would be better than the slow-motion ethnic and religious cleansing that has contributed to driving one in seven Iraqis from their homes. |
Not only does the passage sound as if the NYTC just hired Ambassador Galbraith, to recognize that a ruthless and cold-blooded plan like "millions forced to relocate" can actually work at times smacks of the wicked old uninformed Realpolitik.
(Of course what is really going on there could easily be only that the editorial was written by a committee.)
[2] The self-defensiveness might be a sort of flip side to the (possible) cynicism of the New York Times. That is to say, Pangloss may be worried that some will think he, too, does not much care what happens in the former Iraq as long as it stops being manifestly Uncle Sam's fault. Nobody acquainted with the vast corpus of his scribbling would think that low thought, however.
Unfortunately the vast corpus does not (yet) contain a discussion of Hagel's piece, so one can't tell whether it would be prognosticated that the pol's approach to savin' the face of his Party must fail, as regards the natives and their region, because it does not involve a total withdrawal of GOP troops.
The Senator, for his part, did not so much as mention the words "terror" or "terrorism," and that omission cannot be merely a matter of considering the tastes and interests of UK readers. Nevertheless, it is a near certainty that he would not consider it a "canard" to propose to retain some Republican Party forces in the former Iraq for purposes of counterterrorism, quite possibly even without askin' for permission continually.
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