"Serbs are heroes, Croats are lawyers" Revisited

Should one happen to be Rudyard Kipling, one would naturally expect a mutual respect to develop between two such virile military races as the extremist Republicans of Rancho Crawford and Rio Limbaugh and the unspoiled bedouin of the former Iraq. St. Rudyard seems to have remarked that he had never met an Englishman engaged in the occupation of India who radically disliked his Muslim subjects -- leaving it to be understood that both militant Mughals and virile Victorians had not much use for the more, well, "cow-friendly," sort of imperial subjects.[1] The equivalent of subcontinental cow-friendlies is not far to seek in the Peaceful Freedumbia of August 2007:

But in this patch of north Babil province, colored in green hues and crisscrossed with irrigation canals, marshes and fish farms, the tribal and sectarian landscape is more complex than in Anbar, which is homogenously Sunni. Babil's battle lines blur easily. Hundreds of local Sunni tribesmen have aligned themselves with al-Qaeda in Iraq or other Sunni insurgent groups, such as the Islamic Army. Shiite tribes are weak because loyalties to clerics are stronger than allegiances to sheiks.

To borrow my own terminology, too many turbans spoil the bedouin.

One particular oddity of this odd passage would probably have put off St. Rudyard. Not the implied slight to religionism, for Mr. Kipling had none of that to be offended on behalf of, but because in his own day "loyalties to clerics" must have seemed almost as dangerous as "allegiances to sheiks," at least potentially and on occasion and outside the central regions of neo-Hindustan. Take the Sudan, for instance, or the absurd exaggeration of Ottoman caliphate and jihád for Germany in potboilers like Mr. John Buchan's Greenmantle. If not Kipling personally, than at least other certain Brit imperial racketeers that Kipling must have been aware of, were almost as autoterrorized of "loyalties to clerics" as Mr. Anthony Blair was to be autoterrorized later of Saddam's forty-five-minute specials.[2]

The oddity that puts me off, however, is quite different. The daydream in question is all very well (?) for those who actually belong to a virile military race, but what is to be said when one daydreams it from outside any band of fratricidal brothers in sight? Rebecca West did this with her vicarious Serb heroes, as we have remarked before, and now here is Mr. Sudarsan Raghavan, an employee of the Washington Post Company, daydreaming along those lines as well. What can he be up to?

Whatever it is, he's a bit "blurry" about it, like his own reported "battle lines." The Twelver turbans ought, I should think, to be especially good at advising their bedouin exactly whom to backstab next under existing bushogenic circumstances. Some of their lay sheep -- or lay wolves, rather -- might not understand why faith-craziness of the al-Qá‘ida sort cannot ever be appeased or negotiated with. A secular sheik might be tempted to err in this matter, so the presence of a professional ideology-baser at his elbow ought to stiffen his resolve and thus indirectly strengthen the whole tribe, not weaken it, as S.R. alleges to be the case.

Since S.R. diagnoses a cause-and-effect sequence without divulging any grounds for believing in it, one must fall back, not without a certain distrust, upon his merely factual claim that Twelver tribes are indeed weaker than their Orthodox bedouin brethren in that "patch of north Babil province." Maybe so, maybe not, who can tell for sure through the Rhagavanian blur? It would be nice to begin with mere demography, with accurate, or at least not incredible, census figures, but of course there will not be any for that patch, or for any other patch, of the former Iraq. If implausible or incredible Ba‘thí numbers are available, they are bound to overcount the Orthodox, bedouin or settled, and undercount the Twelvers, a consideration which points in a direction other than that S.R. seems headed in.

But if nobody can count heads out in the Big Management Party's bloodsoaked quagmire, I can at least count eleven instances of "Sunni" (or related forms) to seven of "Shi‘í" in the article at hand, and go on to notice that all the instances of the latter except that one in the quotation under discussion refer to the Green Zone collaborationist pols or to Peaceful Freedumbia as a whole, not to the "patch" Mr. Sudarsan Raghavan of the Washington Post datelines from. [3] The local Twelvers on that patch, tribal or settled, might as well be not just weak but nonexistent, despite S.R.'s insistence that northern Bábil is quite different from al-’Anbár, in which governate they really are nonexistent, for all practical purposes of occupation policy. Thus the Rhagavanian blur goes farther out of focus still, since he has not told his corporation's customers of any other reason than the sectarian demography why these two patches must be considered as apples and oranges.

Speculation may rush in where factfinders meet only a vague and slippery blur, however. Suppose yourself a Crawford- allianceable Orthodox sheik in both governates: how might it matter to you that your Twelver counterparts do, or do not, exist in your immediate vicinity? It does not seem a difficult question. In al-’Anbár you may be quite sure that if any indigs ever "win" at all in those parts, there will be a local restoration of the former Sunni Ascendancy. Perhaps a rather trivial restoration, there being nobody much to crow about one's ascendancy over, but nevertheless!

Over in North Bábil, the situation is not quite so promising, or call it even less promising. On the one hand, there would be Twelvers around to practice the ancient Levantine art of dhimmitudo upon and be rewarded with the long familiar psychic gratifications thereof. On the other hand, you might not be able to dhimmitudinize unchecked, for behind the clergy-besotted wimps on your actual patch, there might still remain some ludicrous joke of a heretics-and-hillbillies régime at New Baghdád that would doubtless attempt to spoil your traditional fun. [4]






____
[1] This touching love-but-kill affair may not have been quite so mutual as RK thought it. He was not quite his own Kim, after all, being far more a second-class Brit than a ninth-caste indig, not to mention a thoroughgoing chickenhawk in his own career.

Both his informants and himself may have rather picked and chosen their Muslim subjects, whether by classifying everybody in Bengal under "Babu" with impeccable faith blindness, or by silently discarding all accounts that contradicted the preferred stereotype as emanating from gentlemen who obviously understood nothing about neo-Hindustan at all, regardless of their own official standing in that racket. St. Rudyard was not so much as hatched until after the troubles of 1857, by which time he and his fellow racketeers could sentimentalise about their victims as they pleased without serious danger of any confrontation or contradiction such as a GOP genius can still run into easily enough in most of her Party's semiconquered provinces.


[2] Reports from the e-gutter suggest that the Greenmantle school of imperialist hysteria is with us still. Perhaps in those circles it seems a fine idea for Boy and Party to buy up all the allegianceable sheiks in sight, weak or strong, so as to prepare a bulwark against the Mullah Menace.

(Golly, Mr. Bones, what would become of the Kiddie Krusade if ‘Alí Cardinal Sístání ever fulminated a fatwá saying that it was time for all the faithful to help makes sure that the extremist GOP palefaces go home immediately -- lock, stock and bazooka? They would require quite a stout bulwark against that contingency, possibly a stouter one than bribery and Hyperpower in coöperation could erect. But God knows best.)


[3] The "patch" proper seems to be a recent exotic import from Planet Dubya, however:

FORWARD OPERATING BASE ISKAN, Iraq -- Inside a brightly lit room, the walls adorned with memorials to 23 dead American soldiers, Lt. Col. Robert Balcavage stared at the three Sunni tribal leaders he wanted to recruit. [&c. &c. &c.]

[4] Mr. Sudarsan Raghavan of the "Washington Post Foreign Service" does not altogether overlook the matters here speculated about. As one perhaps ought to have anticipated from the other instances, all S.R. does wrong is to look at them totally out of focus -- i.e., from a GZ collaborationist or militant GOP invasionite point of view -- and not at all the way a sheik on the make in the datelined "patch" (or for that matter, in al-’Anbár) might reasonably be expected to.

S.R. allows himself shudder-quotes around the "concerned citizens" tripe and baloney (which can only have been invented by our inimitable Operation Silly Codename violence pros) and of course he's quite right to expect that sheiks on the make care very little for citizenship in the aggression-based Peaceful Freedumbia of poor M. al-Málikí. Perhaps some Orthodox bedouin remain so extremely pure and unsullied that they disdain mere citizenship in anybody's régime or neorégime whatsoever! (Does the Spirit of al-Shanfará linger still, perchance? Probably it does not, but that's another story.)

The journalist is not bad on what the uncitizens on his patch don't want, it is only what they positively are concerned about that vanishes into Rhagavanian blur and mist.