| `What is a Caucus-race?' said Alice; not that she wanted much to know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that somebody ought to speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything. `Why,' said the Dodo, `the best way to explain it is to do it.' (And, as you might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will tell you how the Dodo managed it.) First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle, (`the exact shape doesn't matter,' it said,) and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there. There was no `One, two, three, and away,' but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out `The race is over!' and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, `But who has won?' This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said, `everybody has won, and all must have prizes.' `But who is to give the prizes?' quite a chorus of voices asked. `Why, she, of course,' said the Dodo, pointing to Alice with one finger; and the whole party at once crowded round her, calling out in a confused way, `Prizes! Prizes!' |
Despite the suggestion from Mr. Carroll or Lady Dodo that caucus-races are a winter sport, there's really no reason they can't be conducted all year round. Or even year in and year out, as has been the case in Peaceful Freedumbia. In any case, the current Big Party quagmire is not exactly like a caucus race, no more than Little Brother would claim that it is exactly like the Saigon Sweepstakes of yore. Since the SMFI contestants has not yet heard from the fat lady, the worst failure of this analogy -- who's to play Alice and award all those masterful strugglers suitable prizes? -- can be passed over altogether.
Meanwhile, over at Rio Limbaugh they're quite sure that Team Hyperpower has finally broken away from the pack. In the Arabophone districts of the Thames estuary, though, and in Arab dream palaces everywhere, they all know the same about Team Sunnintern.
The cheerleaders for those two crews of thugs make more noise with barks and bellows and bombs and automatic weapons than all the rest of the zoo combined, but as you'll recall even poor M. al-Málikí has been suffering from delusions of adequacy lately:
| "These statements do not concern us a lot," Al-Maliki told reporters while he was visiting Syria. "We will find many around the world who will support us in our endeavor." |
I suppose that zinger brings us to the evil Qommies, for who else could His Excellency be bluffing about? As with the Jewish Statist cheerleadership, one rarely hears from the evil Qommie cheerleadership directly, but we are quite often informed by (hostile) critics that in their hearts both Tehrán and Tel Aviv are snickericking with glee about neo-Iraqi developments.
Last, and probably least, comes Team Withdrawal, under Senator Harry and Speaker Nancy, plus the invasion-language MSM and circumjacent "high-traffic blogs," just-peaceniks and informed commentarians and other such riff-raff.
The Free Kurds, having already won their caucus race, are not in the running. The only other faction that might be considered to be seriously struggling for Total Mastery of the bushogenic bog is Uncle Sam's celebrated bipartisan foreign-policy community. However, if the Free Kurds have already retired from the fray, the CFR/ISG gentry rather resemble Party neocomrade F. Thompson, having not yet quite declared their candidacy for the Dictatorship of Mesopotamia. For the moment they remain only fellow travelers with the militant extremist GOP, not separate players in their own right. As such, they have no cheerleaders, and even when they do finally jump into the caucus race, they probably won't hire any. As one sort of conspiracy freak understands clearly enough, the bipartisan international Power Élite prefer to dictate from back rooms that most of their subjects do not even know exist. [1]
Now the nominal puzzle is how Crawford and Londonstan and Najaf and Tel Aviv and Qom and even us donkeys can all be achieving secure mastery of the former Iraq simultaneously. Such an outcome is not altogether impossible, but the only manner of possibility that comes to mind involves alliances amongst the predators and a partition of the prey. Yet not one of the caucus runners admits that she is not 1000% devoted to the sacred territorial integrity of the former Iraq. In a couple of cases there are specious reasons to doubt the sincerity of this avowed unitarianism, but most of them really and truly and quite unmistakeably want to grab it all. Even that outcome might be possible, if there was to be a Grand Universal Coalition of Mesopotamian Jackals, something like the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of August 1939, only three times gaudier to accord with the jackal count. But that's ridiculous, obviously, because it would require the equivalent of M. Beck adhering to the earlier coalition. And a number of the other jackals would scarcely have any ‘identity’ left at all, should they ever make a deal like that.
Still, if one looks at the present state of the invasion-based fiasco from the right angle under suitable lighting, and omits Najaf and poor M. al-Málikí from the predator list, something vaguely similar does seem to be happening. The remaining Gang of Five are far indeed from having coalesced with one another, but they do all seem to think that getting rid of the current neorégime at New Baghdád would be a major step forwards for themselves in particular. (That is a shaky proposition as regards the evil Qommies, perhaps, yet since unity of action is notoriously not the Islamic Republic's strong point, there is bound to be some mad mullah or another who thinks that they can do better than they've presently doing. On Ms. Conventional Wisdom's dubious theory that the Qommies are supporting absolutely everybody and her brother-in-law in the former Iraq, there is at least no reason they should much mind the liquidation of poor M. al-Málikí and the U.I.A. neorégime. If they are mostly playing beard-and-turban politics, it might even seem an excellent thing to them that ‘Alí Cardinal al-Sístání's political troops all mutiny and cut the scheming old man down to size. But God knows best what plots are hatched at Qom!)
There is no doubt at all which set of jackals would most enjoy dancing on poor M. al-Málikí's grave, although that is not at the same thing as profiting from his liquidation:
| ... Bush's flip-flop on Maliki shows Bush doesn't have any alternatives left for continuing the Iraq-occupation project. He concludes by saying that the flip-flop on Maliki will embolden Maliki's his enemies inside and outside of the "political process" and hasten his downfall. He argues as follows: "President Bush's confusion, between withdrawing his confidence from the Maliki government, then renewing it, all in the space of a two-day period, is tantamount to the coup de grace for the man and for the government, because this will push the groups that are in opposition to him, like the Sunni bloc, the Sadrist group and the Fadhila party, to toughen their attitude and augment the level of their demands. Likewise this will give the resistance factions the feeling that their victory is imminent, and that is in fact the case. No doubt President Bush will play for additional time, and wait for the report from General Petraeus expected the middle of next month, which certainly will indicate the failure of the American project for the occupation of Iraq, confirming the defeat of President Bush and his administration. |
Thus spake an ideobuddy of Mu’ámara Junction named ‘Abdul Bári’ ‘Atwán, who, as you can see from the emphasized words, really does believe that Team Sunnintern has already as good as won the Dodo Prize. The usual Greater Levantine ignorance of American politics seems to be the root cause of this egregious error: the man has no adequate notion of what alternatives are available to Little Brother and the Big Managers. Not only was there no "Bush at a dead end," the perps have already swerved their Party line over to one of them in the two or three days since this Sunninterni journalist guessed all wrong.
It was, in my judgment, seriously premature and unclever for Boy and Party to switch from the "Trust David!" zig to the "Prevent Genocide!" zag, but even an apprentice Crawfordologist can seen that eventually they'd have to do that. [2] Whether the jackals of Londonstan ought to be pleased or vexed by this latest discontinuity in GOP aggression and occupation policy seems a point one might argue either way, but plainly they did not see it coming.
You'll understand, Mr. Bones, that by continually referring to the aggression-basers of the militant GOP as "stumblebums" I do not at all mean to suggest that they are the only stumblebums in existence. There are lots of others, as the above quotation substantiates.
In defense of concentrating most of our fire upon Rancho Crawford's stumblebums and purblind narcissists, there are two points to be made:
(1) In general, they are the only ones in sight with Sole Remainin' Hyperpower at their disposal, thus far more dangerous than the other jackal packs.
(2) Parochially, they are our purblind narcissistic stumblebums, the folks whose Boy-'n'-Party mischievements usually get written up as "America did so-and-so." [3]
____
[1] The CFR folks are closer to actually winning the Dodo Prize than any of the declared caucus runners, or so I'd guess at the moment, but their triumph is not going to happen next month or even, perhaps, next year. They radically differ from their stalking horse, Little Brother of Yale College and the Harvard Victory School, in being serious power hogs rather than trashy Rovean glory hogs or crude Mammonite greedies. I presume the only reason they have have not foreclosed on everybody's mortgage from pole to pole is that do not directly control that many dollars, or control any votes at all. Saber no es poder, not really, and that is a lucky thing for us humble and foolish.
[2] Though not what Londonstan journalism would call a "dead end," it is somewhat inglorious and shabby that the invasion-basers have been reduced to "The worse, the better." Busheviks and Bolsheviks can be rather distressinly similar at times, although there is no more a universal analogy of Peaceful Freedumbia with the Russia of 1917-1921 than with the "South Vietnam" of 1954-1975.
[3] In the Greater Levant, one could strike "usually" and insert "invariably." The historical reasons why militant Sunninternis wallow in their own troubles and spare few thoughts for anybody else's are not far to seek, yet to understand is not at all to forgive. Like everybody else they should be held to the standard of M. Pascal, Travaillons donc à bien penser : voilà le principe de la morale.
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