Instead of frankly commencing with "Like most conservative tank-thinkers, this AEIdeologue wonders . . . ", Spook puzzles and distracts with "Among certain Arab elites." Oddly enough, he never does get around to specifying exactly which of the leaders of the benighted heathen he thinks he is ventriloquizing. No sooner are the elitist heathen mentioned than they vanish while Spook takes a few Boy-'n'-Party whacks at Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, then closes in on the main target. He takes an orthodox Wall Street Jingo view of the donkey in question, naturally: if "President Obama" lives down to his campaign promises, he will at least bomb somebody, so he's not all bad. (RMG: "[BO] reminds foreigners that Democrats can start, as well as avoid, wars.") [1]
In passing, Spook offers an interesting, though scarcely new, insight into the hormone-based invasionite mindset:
| America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which began as demonstrations of indomitable will, . . . . |
Not being a complete unreality-baser, Spook concludes that sentence by in effect admitting that Indomitable Will is not sufficient in isolation. Not having abandoned his mind to Rio Limbaugh partisanship altogether, he makes no serious attempt to show that what went wrong for Boy and Party despite their Indomitable Will was the fault of the Democrats, although needless to say he does not discuss the competence of the Harvard Victory School MBA's either.
Of course from the AEIdeological standpoint, Obama won't really do. The poor lamb, despite occasional fits of "bellicosity," simply does not understand enough about Globoterror to be adequately globoterrorized of it:
| For Obama, fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq is almost counterproductive, while fighting al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan is good. Al Qaeda in Iraq was born in sin because it "didn't exist before our invasion." Al Qaeda in Central Asia and the subcontinent has, for the senator, a cleaner pedigree, traceable directly to Osama bin Laden. But what in the world do the circumstances of birth have to do with counterterrorism? Let us leave aside the controversy over whether al Qaeda had training camps in Iraq while Saddam Hussein ruled. Could it not have developed such camps since? Could they not develop even now in the Sunni zones of Iraq, especially if the United States withdraws and the Sunni-Shiite clash intensifies? |
To touch the filth of Republican Party extremism and rehearse the current Boy-'n'-Party line so vehemently as that has detectably corrupted Col. Spook, who ought to, and probably does, know enough about the Greater Levant to avoid weird and wonderful estimates of the correlation of forces:
| Until recently--until the surge--the Sunnis of Anbar Province did not do particularly well at corralling, let alone killing and exiling, Iraqi and foreign members of Al Qaeda in Iraq. The Sunnis of Iraq--the now vaunted anti-al Qaeda tribes of Anbar Province--are barely more unified than the Shiites. Al Qaeda has done rather well in Iraq precisely because many Iraqi Sunnis have been sympathetic to its methods and tactics, against both the Americans and the Arab Shiites. |
Spook's own personal spookery took place farther east, to be sure, in Afghanistan agaist the Soviet Union and in general against the Islamic Republic of Iran. He may in fact not know very much about the "certain Arab elites" of the former Iraq or about components of the Sunnintern other than the Wahhábiyya. All the same, it is dotty to accuse the Sunnis of Peaceful Freedumbia of being more united than anybody at all. Yet a sort of Boy-'n'-Party corvée requires Col. Spook to talk that way, because if he did not, what would become of the Big Party's Globoterror angle? If he spelled out clearly the utter disarray and ruination of the former Sunni Ascendancy in "Iraq," he'd only be aiding and abetting the Senator from Illinois. I don't know who, if anybody, talks to Barak Obama as an expert or "expert" about aggression and occupation policy. For all I know, it may be only a lucky guess that leads the Senator not to be globoterrorized of the local Mesopotamian al-Qá‘ida outlet. One can be right for the wrong reasons or without any reasons at all.
Spook's ostensible reasons for being wrong, or pretending to be wrong, are unimpressive. "Could it not ...? Could they not ...?" The proper place for that baloney is one of their Neocomrade T. Clancy's thrillers. Hadn't the militant GOP better grab Patagonia and Ruritania before globoterror breaks out there too? For after all, who can deny that it could! Yuck.
And then Spook's "precisely because" is very imprecise indeed. The faith-crazed brand of resistance / insurgency / terrorism / guerilla is distinguished from all the other TwentyPercenter smithereens by its ability to draw dinars and suicide artists from abroad. It is simply not to be imagined that Dr. Reuel Marc Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute is unaware of that distinction. [2]
Skipping over a great deal more self-servin' Party tendentiousnesses at the Senator's expense, let us consider Col. Spook's Big Picture, which is at any rate not mere Wingnut City boilerplate:
| Senator, go visit the many Internet houses of Peshawar in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province, and you will find young men everywhere surfing porn. They are free to view other glories of Western civilization, but they choose to focus on young women. Many of these men are faithful Muslims, who think more highly of bin Laden than they do of the United States. They thought this way before the invasion of Iraq. They were surfing porn before Saddam went down. Open "America Houses" and we will surely increase the knowledge of such Hollywood entertainment more than we will of the Founding Fathers or the lifestyle of Muslim Americans. The "American Dream" is alive and well in the Middle East, but it is vastly more complicated than Obama seems to realize. To the senator's credit, he sees that Iraq and al Qaeda do not define Muslims and Islam. What he does not seem to grasp--and the Bush administration is no better--is that America is the cutting edge of a modernity that has convulsed Islam as a faith and a civilization. This collision will likely become more violent, not less, as Muslims more completely enter the ethical free fall that comes as modernity pulverizes the world of our ancestors. |
Golly. Perhaps the distinguished inventor of American Clashism, Mr. Huntin'ton of Harvard, ought to sue for patent infringement!
No, I beg your pardon, that's not fair: Massa Sam does not share Colonel Spook's gusto for "a modernity," Sam likes his Western Civistan best ripe but not rotten, as it was on the day before it definitively succumbed to lousy liberalism (a.k.a. "ethical free fall"). That day is now far too remote in the past to be accused of being what a mere journalist like Spook would label "modern." Furthermore Spook is a neo-Manichee, radically uninterested in Massa Sam's "civilizations" in the plural, in Confucians and wetbacks and Eastern Orthodox and so on.
Spook is zealous solely about the alleged Weltkampf that stars US, the cutting edge of militant GOP extremism, globoterrorized of THEIR convulsed faith and pulverized ancestral world. This attitude is thoroughly becomin' in an AEIdeologue, I daresay, [3] although perhaps some of the verbal vividities might have been spared.
Is the real world much like Planet Gerecht? Obviously not. The whole psychodrama makes little sense after one notices that a very solid majority of the human race are neither neo-Muslims nor rabid Republicans. Both those packs account themselves cuttin' edges, to be sure, but Dr. Emmanuel Todd has wisely predicted that neither of them separately nor the great ideobattle of Tweedledumb and Tweedledee is likely to be the central wave of the future. If Barak Obama would seriously prefer for his Uncle Sam not to get suckered into that sidewater, well, hurrah for him! [4] Meanwhile, Col. Spook ought to be pressed to explain how it happens that those convulsions and pulverizations can profoundly affect militant Mammonites like himself and his Party Boy on the one hand, and faith-crazed globoterrorists like M. Bin Ládin and Dr. Zawáhirí on the other, yet allow less abnormal or specialized folks to get on with life as usual even after the Big Bang, making a few minor police arrangements and maybe buying a little extra casualty insurance just in case.
Gerechtian Cuttin'-Edgeism is not just hooey, I fear, it's hooey on stilts.
To borrow an idea, what do you suppose "certain Arab elites" make of such grandiose neo-hooey as Spook's, Mr. Bones? They are certainly not any of them unqualified admirers of either the AEI/GOP Tweedledumb or the salafí/takfírí Tweedledee. Whether barracks-based republicans or cardboard kings and princes themselves, they can hardly help but feel that both these stalwart heroes are more part of their own problems than any solution to them. Messrs. les altesses royales du Ryad outdo themselves in ambiguity, being able to see positive points of affinity with both Lord Mammon and the neo-Muslim faith-crazies, yet at the end of the day they cannot simply side with either extremism against the other. Smaller fry with fewer oil wells tend to dither instead of supporting both cuttin' edges against themselves in between, which seems a much more sensible policy although perhaps one rather lacking in la gloire.
None of the "certain Arab elites" has much authentic continuity with an unconvulsed Islám or with their own prepulverized ancestors, as how should they, when Lord Mammon's edge has been cuttin' itself into the Greater Levant ever since Buonaparte in 1798 at the latest? One could almost be sorry for the Arab Palace OnePercenters, except that they tyrannize over their subject street Arabs so relentlessly and selfishly. Nobody wants "stability" more than the cardboard kingdoms and barracks-based republics, yet no decent political adult can examine what squalid rackets they propose to stabilize and not sympathize at least a little with both the AEI/GOP extremism and the salafí/takfírí extremism that would pull down all the Arab Palaces, "dream palaces" included, and sew the rubble with salt before trying to start reconstruction from scratch. Yet considering that reconstruction on both the lines of Reuel Gerecht extremism and Ibn Taymiyya extremism simultaneously boggles the mind, the palaces are probably safe enough for the foreseeable future.
Under these circumstances, the idea of Rear-Colonel M. R. G. Spook of AEI ventriloquizin' the Arab Palace dwellers borders on the ludicrous. They know their faith-crazy enemies far too well to blur them into some mishmash of "global terrorism." That Boy-'n'-Party bogey may do to canvass votes at Crawford TX, but at Cairo or ‘Ammán or Kuwait City or Riyád, the OnePercenters understand that the real problem is the faith-crazies aren't much interested in "global," they are interested in imposing régime change specifically upon Egypt and Jordan and Kuwait -- even upon the Great Cardboard Kingdom itself! It only adds to their difficulties that the AEI/GOP neocomrades have made certain noises about "régime change" as well. To be sure, nothin' has come of that noisemakin' so far, and almost certainly nothin' will any time soon, but all the same, no sane Arab OnePercenter can be in cordial agreement with the Gerechtian hooey on stilts. That product was clearly designed for a North American niche market and is not likely to sell widely elsewhere.
The partisan neo-hooey climaxes as follows:
| Barack Obama's newly devised "Mobile Development Teams," which will bring together "personnel from the State Department, the Pentagon, and USAID . . . to turn the tide against extremism" are unlikely to make America more attractive to devout Muslims who know that America is the leading force in destroying the world that they love. The senator can leave Iraq, shut down Guantánamo, apologize for Abu Ghraib, and build "secular" schools all over Pakistan, and he will not change this fact. This is the deep well from which al Qaeda draws. |
That is the fairy tale that Rio Limbaugh and Wingnut City crave to be told, and Spook ought to be thoroughly ashamed of tellin' it to 'em. The beauty of the Party fiction is how it panders to the rightists' fathomless self-esteem and assures them that nothin' they ever did, or are doin', or will do hereafter is ever goin' to make THEM stop hating Wunnerful US. Spook is not himself a cheapjack jihád careerist, determined to have himself a Long War that ideally would never end at all, but he panders to that sort of brain damage.
Needless to say, Spook cannot offer Senator Obama, or his own Little Brother, or anybody else concrete advice about invasion and occupation policy on the basis of that tripe. If the consequences in the Greater Levant are bound to be the same no matter how Uncle Sam behaves, then Sam might as well flip coins as listen to experts and "experts," Spook included, who profess to know actual Levantine facts. For the purposes of AEI/GOP extremism, Little Brother might as well just keep tryin' to satisfy Rio Limbaugh and Tel Aviv, I suppose, since ex hypothesi he is never goin'ta satisfy THEM. Should the Senator from Illinois be so foolish as to take Spook at his word, presumably Rio Limbaugh would be dropped and replaced by Cook County or Manhattan Island as the Homeland constituency to be pandered to.
Should Spook take Spook at his word, he'll agree that that is OK, too, at least as far as "certain Arab elites" go. The AEIdeologue can reconquer the former Iraq, set up a thousand Guantanamos, torture his kidnap victims as brutally as he likes, and impose 'secularism' from Zakho to Fao on schools and pols and everythin' else in sight, and he will not change his own "fact" that nothin' at all is "likely to make America more attractive to devout Muslims who know that America is the leading force in destroying the world that they love." [5] Yuck.
____
[1] I should think that at the moment the lesser breeds without are more likely to be worried about the ability of anybody at all in the holy Homeland to finish Uncle Sam's aggressions and semiconquests and occupations and countersurges. To make an end of them win, lose or draw. (That last indifference, however, does not apply to "certain Arab elites," who distinctly care how it all comes out in the end. Plus the Tel Aviv statelet.)
[2] His more ignorant neocomrades like to fancy that the evil Qommies are playing the same game at about the same level as the orthodox faith-crazies. Spook's unworthy compliance with Boy-'n'-Party prejudices balks at that, because he happens to know enough about Twelvers to be able to take them seriously, a rare accomplishment indeed in aggression-friendly circles, and one he shares only with Neocomrade Prof. F. ‘Ajamí amongst the more vocal dubyapologists. (Spook can even do that trick without actually being a Twelver!)
[3] Certain neocomrades who share Spook's tastes have been heard to speak of "creative destruction."
[4] Probably a "President Obama" would succumb to Responsible Nonwithdrawal sooner rather than later, but the reasons for expecting that event have little to do with Spook's stuff.
[5] One does not want to break this journalistic Party butterfly on the wheel, but as a matter of fact it is very questionable whether "devout Muslims" possess any "world that they love" nowadays. The Arab Palace OnePercenters, plus perhaps certain Telavivistanis, seem the only local folks likely to care much for the Greater Levant as it actually exists at the moment. The belovèd world that Spook rhetoricizes about to amuse Rio Limbaugh perished long ago, as he damn well ought to know very well.
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