| US policy, outlined in the famous Hadley memo of November 2006, has been to move its Baghdad client, in various ways, toward a position more acceptable to its other Arab clients in the region, ahead of potential confrontation with Iran, but the Baghdad process has been at times difficult to follow, on account of a number of factors, the main one being that as the US cozies up to armed Sunni groups, Maliki becomes apparently less, rather than more, amenable to compromise with the Sunni parties in parliament, so the process has been a zigzag. Which shouldn't completely obscure the fact that the US political/military strategy since fall 2006 has been unidirectional in a pro-Sunni direction. The second confusing factor is the US domestic focus on the theme of "withdrawal", and here too the debate itself is a little misleading. The debate is about the degree to which "withdrawal" masks a mere re-organization of US forces in Iraq and the region. But the other point is that the US forces currently in Iraq are not merely fighting the bad guys and getting ready for a withdrawal/re-organization. Rather, they are involved in much the same way that the militias are said to be involved: Applying military force in the interests of a particular sectarian outcome. |
The usual chief defect of conspiratorialist analysis is impossible to miss, namely making the bad guys out far more clever than they are. What appears to Mr. Bones and me as mere obvious stumblebumism and opportunism on the part of Boy and Party gets ingeniously reconceptualized at Mu’ámara Central as "a number of factors" that might even tend to "completely obscure," had one not expert conspiratorialist advice at hand to make all things as plain as day. (The advice is perhaps not perfectly worded, however, for even at Mu’ámara Central "zigzag" must clash with "unidirectional" at least a little bit, no? However this egregious boo-boo is probably a slip of rhetoric rather than of substance.)
These "factors" evidently "number" precisely two (2.0), of which the second is more immediately retrievable from the murk of conspiratorialist elucidation : Confusion Factor Number Two is that the extremist Republicans have definitively taken sides in the former Iraq's civil war and now desire "a particular sectarian outcome." That is entirely mistaken, in my judgment, but at least it is readily intelligible.
Confusion Factor Number One is far more difficult to get at. Somewhere near the heart of it lies the proposition "[A]s the US cozies up to armed Sunni groups, Maliki becomes apparently less, rather than more, amenable to compromise with the Sunni parties in parliament," which might pass muster factually chez nous, did only it not include that weasel word "apparently." "Apparently" is after all the very foundation of all conspiratorialist analysis, almost invariably with the Platonizing ideological implication that appearances are deceptive or even flat-out false. Yet one hesitates to believe that even at Mu’ámara Central anybody can seriously suppose poor M. al-Málikí is "really" becoming friendlier and friendlier to the quasiparliamentary wing of the former Sunni Ascendancy. [1]
I really can't grok Confusion Factor Number One at all satisfactorily, I fear, and perhaps it would be more like medical diagnosis or impertinent psychoanalysis than political analysis proper to suggest that at least the mad antigeometry of unidirectional zig-zags might be resolved by rashly supposing that poor M. al-Málikí is not a wholly owned subsidiary of Rancho Crawford. The MC folks could then go to have a virtually unidirectional GOP ziggin' on the plausible supposition that it simply does not matter very much how the native collaborationist pols zag from time to time. [2]
However let the record show that my own view remains that both zigs and zags are the work of incompetent management by the Harvard Victory School MBA classes, the ripe or rotten fruit of Kennebunkport-Crawford Dynasty and Party stumblebums prepared to accept pretty well any sort of Success and Victory in the former Iraq, no matter what it materially consists in, and certainly regardless of which set of sectarian indigs it favors. I don't believe in "toward a position more acceptable to its other Arab clients in the region," and I am not even quite altogether sure about "ahead of potential confrontation with Iran."
To diagnose or psychoanalyze Mu’ámara Central frankly, the conspiracy scenario they fantasize is certainly not without its abstract merits. If militant extremist Republicans were as smart as Mephistopheles and not just equally malignant, they could scarcely come up with a better conspiracy than the one MC attributes to them. A few months back, it even looked to Mr. Bones and me as if the Big Party stumblebums might actually stumble into something like it accidentally, with the vast post-Khalílzádian occupation policy void between Master Dubya's ears being filled by a temporary collaboration between the Green Zone Officers Club and the Sunni International. Not being conspiratorialist analyzers, though, nor ideological Parmenideans, Bones and I thought of that odd alliance as something the stumblebums might do in the future, not as what they have been covertly up to all along.
They have not, in fact, done it. In the real world, "David" (Dr. Gen. Petraeus of Princeton and West Point) seems to have occupied the whole vast and vacant cerebral property, and "David" is obviously no Sunninterni and, much less obviously, not exactly aligned with the Green Zone Officer Club consensus either. After all their zigs and zags and stupid stumbles, it's basically "David"'s War now in the former Iraq, and whatever "David" may be up to in the path of Self and Boy and Party and Self, "Applying military force in the interests of a particular sectarian outcome" is definitely not it. Certain celebrators have celebrated "David" as if he really were the braniac equivalent of Mephisto, which is rather exaggerated, to put it mildly. Even "David" is not quite best and brightest enough to properly perceive the excellent merits -- in the abstract -- of Mu’ámara Central's scenario. [3]
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[1] This sort of fever-swamp dottiness presents itself as a challenge to those of us endowed with the flashy-trashy gift of imagination. If we take Dr. Johnson's advice and abandon our minds to the quest, can we come up with an anti-WYSIWYG scenario (yet one not actually insane) according to which poor M. al-Málikí is indeed behaving like that?
'Tis not all that difficult. Begin by supposing conspirationis modo that the man is much more intelligent and far-sighted than appearances mislead the ignorant vulgar to account him, and specifically that he is well aware of Confusion Factor Number Two. "OK, then," says poor M. al-Málikí to himself, "It is clear that the GOP geniuses have decided to hand their semiconquered provinces back to a renewed Sunni Ascendancy. I'm far too weak to contend against Hyperpower, so obviously I ought to join it, and therefore the only serious question is how to jump on the inevitable bandwagon. Positioned where I am, the only domestic TwentyPercenters I can decently talk to are the Arab Sunni quasideputies, and to them, accordingly, shall I turn. Who knows? maybe they'll even let me continue to be addressed as 'M. le Président du Conseil des Ministres' after they enjoy their own again, so as to cast a decent veil of obscurity over the revival of minoritarian rule! Even if that is too much to hope for, yet it remains no small thing to join the winning side at least a little bit before the end of the day."
All purest Cloudcuckooland, of course, yet I daresay one could believe it without much danger of being pronounced clinically demented.
[2] On the other hand, "plausible" may be the very kiss of death on Planet Conspiracy.
[3] Our own private judgment, Mr. Bones's and mine, does not find the Big Party's "David" all that celebratable on the braniac side. "David" and the New Way Forward seem to be only recapitulatin' the former stumblebumism: bribin' every tribal shaykh in al-’Anbár was certainly not quite what Rear-Colonel Freddie Kagan of AEI originally intended the Ever-Glorious Surge of '07™ to be mainly about, but it now momentarily appears that bribin' the tribes works better for "David" and Boy and Party than anything else in sight works for them, so Bones and I take for granted that the invasionite perps are bound to centralize shaykh-bribing and ballyhoo it as their alone Original Intent all along. Why, they invasionized Saddám's Iraq only in order to assure that tribes and shaykhs got their proper due, did they not?
Yuck.
The aggression faction are very shameless and very short-sighted opportunists, all WYSIWYG appearances point to that conclusion, and point to it accurately.
Yet if ideology- or partisanship-sodden Parmenideans and Platonizers at Mu’ámara Central want to pass off "what they obviously should have done" as "what they are secretly up to," there need not necessarily any harm in that. To sally forth like Don Quixote on behalf of WYSIWYG and Aristotle is so needless as to be laughable. It looks like the invasionites and occupationmongers are losin' ground in the former Iraq, Messrs. Pollack and O'Hanlon to the contrary notwithstanding, and for the moment, that's enough to be getting on with for Bones and me. As to
| The debate is about the degree to which "withdrawal" masks a mere re-organization of US forces in Iraq and the region. |
well, here again the Mu’ámara Central gentry use the present tense where Bones and I would use the future tense. Doubtless there will eventually be some such debate, and almost certainly it will be resolved in favour of "Responsible Nonwithdrawal" as Bones and I call it, "a mere re-organization" &c. &c. But that will be then, whereas now is only now.
Timing seems to count for nothing at all at Mu’ámara Central. And that makes deep sense too, of course, for would it not be great victory for Parmenides and Plato and conspiratorialist analysis to smash all the clocks? What could any clock ever indicate that is not mere shallow appearance rather than Reliable Reality? If the clocks of appearances agree with the Sun of Reality, are they not superfluous? And should they disagree, well, surely we all remember how Caliph ‘Umar dealt with the Library of Alexandria!
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