| The tragedy is that Escobar is right about everything he says , but that virtually no one in the Washington power or journalism elite will probably ever read his important piece. Some nonentity who wouldn't know the Dulaim from the Jubour will declaim some nonsense at NRO, and that will be what the Repub[lican] staffers on the Hill believe, having fed the nonentity the warped info[rmation] in the first place. |
Ah, el sentimiento trágico del periodismo! Or indeed, de la panditería, for tertiary educationalists who are very sound on tribalism in the former Iraq don't have much genuine impact on the Big Management Party señorito element. The good news, in context, is that Televisionland and the electorate and the congressscritters and even the august Senatorial Solons themselves have scant influence with the señorito element also. "Tail wags elephant" seems to be the Zeitgeist all around, although the tail in question is at least a little bit more extensive than "staffers on the Hill." It certainly won't do to overlook all those AEIdeologue and Heritagitarian and Hoovervillainous señoritos of all ages who have struggled so fiercely to implement the Vision of Rove, to devise and enforce an imperially engendered neoreality that need scarcely be connected with the reality of the vulgar at all except at the very apex of the Executive Branch. [1] Wirklich wir leben in finsteren Zeiten!
Before we turn to some plebeian Pepe, Mr. Bones, I'd have you mark how our dolorous-countenanced Knight of Ann Arbour has recently discovered or invented a "journalism elite." That seems so commonplace a conjunction of words that one is retrospectively amazed that Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh didn't grab it and patent it whole eons ago, [2] yet as far as I know nobody stumbled across it before Don Juan did just now. "Mainstream media," MSM, monopolizes the hot-air waves of EIB almost exclusively, apart from such obvious inbred jeux d'esprit as "drive-by media." When the Big Management Party's base-and-vile set out witch- or snark-huntin' for an "elite" to pick on, they do not typically begin (or end, or sojourn in between times) anywhere near the Jungle of Journalism. Even krusader kiddies, it appears, don't take the Fourth Estate very seriously.[3]
Taking Pepe Escobar as journalistic Sancho Panza to Don Juan Cole of the toney tenured and academically free Sulks and Sorrows is sound enough as far as Pepe steps soundly:
| Abu Risha is not, and never was, a Salafi-jihadi. He considers himself an Iraqi nationalist. He's not in favor of a caliphate. But he's definitely in favor of restored power to Sunni Iraqis. (...) What matters for all these players, most of all, is restoration of Sunni power (...) The Dulaimi tribe and sub-clans, armed by the Americans, as soon as they have a chance, will try to topple the US-sponsored puppet government in Baghdad (...) [L]eading groups such as the Jaysh Ansar al-Sunna, the 1920 Revolution Brigades and the Islamic Front for the Iraqi Resistance make it very clear their enemies remain the US occupation, the Maliki government and al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers. |
When Sancho Pepe diverges at last from soundness
| Petraeus has not been able to seduce or bribe Sunni guerrillas. (...) This summer, three of these groups - the 1920 Revolution Brigades, Ansar al-Sunna and Iraqi Hamas - formed the Political Office for the Iraqi Resistance, a public political alliance basically to throw out all of Petraeus's troops, block any collaboration with occupation-endorsed political institutions, and declare null and void any agreement between the US and the Iraqi government. By this time, way into the "surge", Petraeus had certainly figured out that Anbar was not a relevant war theater anymore. He can use it to spin the "success" of his counterinsurgency methods, but he knows the three really relevant, internal wars in Iraq, for the near future, will be in Baghdad (between Sunnis and Shi'ites), in Basra (between Shi'ite militias, to see who gets to control the oil) and in Kirkuk (between Kurds and Arabs/Turkomans, for the same reason). So why not spice it all up with some extra divide and rule - to justify an eternal US presence? |
Sancho Pepe is far more simpático than his figurative or wannabe boss, the Greatest Area Student of All Time™, the (alone?) Informed Opinionator, can ever be, yet "sympathy with" is not any recognition of the "verity of," O Bones! And then even to embrace Verity Herself does not instantly assure any trashy Big Management Party or Harvard Victory School triumph instantaneously and automatically. Let's wait and see, shall we, sir?
Sancho Pepe sees one large portion of the GOP-posed aggression-basin' puzzle clearly and vividly and admirably, that the former Sunni Ascendany wants its old own back very ferociously and wellnigh unanimously. And Sancho Pepe perceives this important fact more or less disinterestedly from the remote fastnesses of Eastasia, not the least bit complicit in wishing for it too like the muddleheads at Mu’ámara Junction, who crave and almost slobber even as they idly submurdochize about "impartially" reportin' and decidin'. So far, so good, but "so far" is by no means the whole long march. Sancho Pepe runs off the rails and disappears into the Gulf of Petroleum - glub, glub! -- before his good work is done Unless some other down-to-earth inheriter of the Escobarian Torch be found, it won't ultimately matter that poor Pepe scanned the former Iraq 37% or 48% or 59% right on Pass One. Unless there is some effectual Pass Two subsequently, all the preliminary good work will be forgotten, or even worse, it will become mere footnote fodder for cloistered Ann Arbourites hereinafter.
We cannot ourselves supply the other 63% or 52% or 41% ourselves, O Bones, and to attempt to do so would be ludicrous, over and above being invasive and imperialist and colonialist. Noli tangere,, sir, Noli tangere!. If the Big Party's neo-liberated indigs can't do the rest for themselves, why then the rest probably won't ever get done at all. Pepe Escobar can't do it for them, Doctor General Petraeus of West Point and Princeton can't do it for them, Mu’ámara Junction can't decartoonize clearly, and even the Informed Opinionator of Ann Arbour fails substantially to assist.
It's only Life, after all, Mr. Bones, this sad malady of fragmentation and incompleteness and endless ideological disappointment that I now must remind you of. Do you want something better than Life, then, sir? If so, allow me to recommend the wiláyat al-faqíh product, available in a remarkably wide variety of styles and sizes even within Muslim Twelverdom, not to mention analogous products from heretical or frankly infidel vendors.
KECEKE! Yet God knows best!!
____
[1] Rather like the pineal gland of the Cartesians, the point of overlap between real world and Rove World may be so very small and vestigial as to be almost dimensionless, yet it remains quite indispensable. Take it away, and 'tis a whole different System theoretically, not to mention less aetherially that the substance of Sole Remainin' Hyperpower is located in the real world and unless it can somehow be connected to and controlled by Rove World, there's no more authentic imperium goin' than the Emperor of Ice Cream posesses. Erst kommt das Fressen, [nur] denn die Moral!
[2] "A week is a long time in politics." An aeon politicum is maybe three to seven years of ordinary kitchen clock time, expandable or collapsable like a rubber band.
[3] What do the Witch Doctor of Democracy and his customers take seriously as a wicked "elite," then? Not too hard a question: "educationalists (especially tertiary ones) and labor organizers and bureaucrats" may not be the whole answer, but it's bound to be 80% or 90% of it. Compared to such malignant fiends as these, journalists are very easy prey for Big Management indeed, mere fish in a barrel -- and with Lord Mammon or His Apostle Rupert ownin' the aforesaid barrel already!
Journalism has no independent basis to resist Mammon and Murdoch from, none at all in practice and even in Cloudcuckooland theory, hardly any. Except for that one isolated and half-exotic offshore Manhattan Island aberration of a "Columbia University School of Journalism," the practitioners themselves scarcely even claim any serious independence or "professionalism."
Pepe Escobar's Eastasia may be different from our own Greater Texas, but I incline to expect it ain't. More likely the distinction is only that immediately offshore from China, the powers that be don't much give a hoot what their semisubjects scribble about any place as remote from immediate adult concerns as the former Iraq is, viewed from Beijing. In a secundum quid way that is indeed independence, and we decent are not to imperiously twist words KarlRovewise or TonySnowwise ever to suggest different. But poor Pepe's is not a professional independence that would have any autonomous Kantian basis to challenge the Powers That Be from in Eastasia if they suddenly decided that they do care about the former Iraq, and care about it in some un-Escobarian way. Don Juan Quixote possesses a very real independence at Ann Arbour that his sidekick Sancho Panza lacks at Hong Kong, he is (rather mystically and mysteriously, as it seems to me) endowed with a penumbra of "academic freedom" that Big Party neocomrade Justices C. Thomas and Á. Scalia could easily demonstrate has no basis worth mentionin' "constitutionally" in the 1787 document either as originally intended or as subsequently amended.
Perversely enough, "freedom of the press" is parchment-guaranteed here in the militant extremist GOP's Greater Texas, whereas no Yank parchmentmonger ever yet thought "academic freedom" worthy of any top-notch mention at all, and yet the latter is securely enshrined chez nous (as security goes nowadays) and the former remains as precarious and problematical as ever. One might even draw a cheapjack Planet Dilbert or Catoholic "libertarian" moral from that incongruence, Mr. Bones! "The ‘right’ of parchmentmongers to bestow ‘rights’ entails an equal ‘right’ to withdraw the allowance as well. Journalism languishes because it exists only by ‘right’ and Academia thrives almost as unchecked as kudzu because it never even dreamed of antecedently asking anybody for permission to be its corporate self."
That is not my own view at all, Bones, though it seems a plausible enough Power Point ™ presentation to be somebody worth workin' up. Like our ever-censorious Aunt Nitsy herself, I have trouble seeing any radical difference between hack journalism and Tertiary Educationalism as practiced in this present year of religionism/disgrace 1428/2007, yet I believe I can make out that there used originally to be such a difference, Mr. Bones. Back in the Bad Old Days Academia heartily and rather admirably despised Modern Times. Maybe it looked for better Above, or maybe for better Before, but "Here we have no Abidin' City" in any case. Whereas Journalism!!! The very nomenclature of the thing discredits it, O Bones, did ye but wit!
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