Harvard Victory School MBA At Work

REPORTER: I'll ask you about Iraq ... How is [the political dynamic] changing your level of frustration with the lack of political progress? And how long can Americans reasonably expect you to wait before you take some kind of action that really forces the Iraqi government's hand to reach the goals of reconciliation that you've set for them? BUSH: In my speech, I made it clear that there has to be a change in security for there to be reconciliation. And I also said that progress will yield fewer troops. In other words, "return on success" is what I said. There are two types of reconciliation. One is the reconciliation that -- very visible reconciliation that happens with the passage of law. In other words, it's reconciliation that shows the Iraqi people that people from different backgrounds can get along and at the same time that government can function.[1] Clearly, there needs to be work there. In other words, there needs to be the passage of law ...

The little laddie from Y*L* sure has some cute ideas about Pol. Sci.!

Let's see, Mr. Bones, what you really need for reconciliation is either to pass a law about it, or, alternatively, to pass a law about it. 'Tis a very subtle and interesting notion for the seminar room to squabble about, no doubt, but meanwhile the (former or pre-Rove) Real World does not quite seem to work that way. If it did, the bloody bushogenic quagmire would have been drained and planted with crops and orchards long since, for what was Khalílzád Pasha's "constitution" as bequeathed to the lowly but neoliberated subjects of Boy and Party if not a serious stab at makin' reconciliation happen by scribblin' legislation towards that end? It's positively unkonstitutional in the former Iraq not to be reconciled, for Pete's sake! [2]

The Party of Grant occasionally looks a couple of presidencies further back for its Ur-pedigree, and there is an apposite joke or shaggy dog story attributed to A. Lincoln, Esq., of Illinois that I suppose you will remember, Mr. Bones, the one where the punch line runs "Calling the tail a leg doesn't make it a leg"?

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But seriously, sir, the Brat seems obsessed with the notion that the GZ quasideputies must pass some new laws if there is to be any reconciliation in the former Iraq or any serious HVS MBA class rejoicin' at Château Kennebunkport and Rancho Crawford and Castle Cheney. We all know the list of bills the petulant Brat wants to see enacted at brave New Baghdád, well enough -- a petroleum bill, a reba‘thization bill (so to call it), a provincial elections bill. Well, suppose them all enacted just exactly as Big Party neocomrade Proconsul Crocker might dictate them unilaterally and preëmptively to poor M. al-Málikí himself in a simpler old-fashioned "gunboat diplomacy" world where "right of conquest" still remained an intelligible expression [3], would reconciliation (domestic reconciliation amongst the occupied indigs) be thereby significantly forwarded? The agitprop benefits in the holy Homeland to militant extremist Boy and Party of such enactments are obvious, but what's in it for the former Iraqis, exactly, for all or for any of 'em? Apart from the direct beneficiaries of the Big Party's, admittedly not uningenious, Bribe-a-Tribe™ scheme, why should any neo-subject of Rancho Crawford be much interested in reconciliation as alien exotic invasive GOP genius conceives of "reconciliation"?

You and I, Mr. Bones, seem to be very sad and exceptional wimps. A little bit of disorder in the streets, sir, and we'd be for JUST PEACE in a flash, "reconciliation" at any cost, Neville Chamberlains willing to surrender even our very trademark umbrellas to Petraeuses and Crockerians invadin' from Mars, even, lest umbrellas be accounted weapons of unmassive destruction. That, however, is only us, O Bones. The Big Management Party's aggression-based Peaceful Freedumbia marches to a different drummer, obviously, and I daresay "The Arab Mind" must figure prominently in what seems actually to be happening out in the semiconquered Boy-'n'-Party boondocks. Fifty-four months of the Mesopotamia aggression, we've had now, and I have yet to see any sign whatsoever amongst the Big Party-occupied indigs of any JUST PLAIN PEACE party developing. Of course they (almost) all verbally deplore the DOD/GOP-imposed unpeace and all the "creative destruction" and "collateral damage" sequellae thereof, but they never propose any alternative except to reverse black and white like in chess and so now let's suppose instead that THEY win for a change.

As a matter of fact, most of THEM actually manage to fantasize that they ARE winning!

"Serbs are heroes, Croats are lawyers" appears more than ever the best applicable maxim, Mr. Bones, and of course thee and I are but despicable Croats, worried that there doesn't appear to be any serious Rulalaw at all left west of the Zagros nowadays, as witness the Blackwater fuss, as witness the recent revelations about their Boy-'n'-Party Marine Maj. Gen. Douglas M. Stone!

But we'll see. God knows best!

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[1] There might be some excellent funning here if one pretended to take His Radiant Effulgence's pronouncements seriously and went on to solemnly ponder how, although it is antecedently to be supposed that everybody gettin' along would naturally tend to paralyze or disfunctionalize government, nevertheless in the specific case of an aggression-based Peaceful Freedumbia the general rule does apply, in light of special circumstances SC1, and SC2 and SC3 . . . .

Yet one is not to mock mental cripples, after all.

In context, the Dynasty Brat is probably only makin' up his theory as he stumbles and micawberizes his way through his own wreckage and shambles: "government" in the quagmire context means poor M. al-Málikí, and of course that meanin' must be a wunnerful one, because who but Boy and Party dunnit? On the other hand, is not the Fedguv of poor M. al-Málikí widely regarded as just a tad -- how you Anglophoneys say for tá’ifí? -- just, a little "sectarian"? Not so wunnerful, that, yet not so bad that poor M. al-Málikí needs the Diem Therapy right this minute. Big Party operatives under the inspired guidance of "David" (Dr. Gen. Petraeus of Princeton and West Point) can work around the sectarian Fedguv at New Baghdád without ever crudely repudiatin' it, all they need to do is fan out through the nineteen governates under the boots of the Occupyin' Party and teach the locals how to get along locally in each locality without regard to what the Fibbies of poor M. al-Málikí think in that practically irrelevant "International Zone" that they have to hide their nominally national Fedguv in. This is what the Baní Kagan applaud and propagandize for as a "bottom-up patchwork quilt" approach. More to the point, this is what seems to be workin' least badly for Boy and Party just at the moment, success-and-victorywise.

To ask whether top-down seamless whole and bottom-up patchwork quilt are not predestinately on a collision course is OK for Pol. Sci. in grad. school, but to ask the 566/640 Yalie about it would only be more needless cruelty to Party animals. One can work out what Little Brother means by "In other words, it's reconciliation that shows the Iraqi people that people from different backgrounds can get along and at the same time that government can function" without elevating his murk and muddle to the dignity of a debatable thesis.

And you are to recall that in context BUSH was really only tryin' to get a hostile REPORTER off his case in the first place, Mr. Bones. "David" does all the hard thinkin' about Big Party aggression and invasion policy nowadays, or so we are told. 'Tis rather a pity, I daresay, that REPORTER wasn't a Solon or even a humble Congresscritter who might have addressed the New Iraq Brain of Dubya rather than the decerebrated shell or physical residuum wherein the NIBoD virtually or vicariously or by a legal fiction resides.

Not that the outcome would have any more enlightening: fancy Master Dubya's "David" asked "[H]ow long can Americans reasonably expect you to wait before you take some kind of action that really forces the Iraqi government's hand to reach the goals of reconciliation that you've set for them?"! What possible response to such an uppity enemy inquiry but Tom Lehrer's "'That's not my department', says Werner von Braun"?

Oh, well.


[2] Maybe the natives are really reckonsiled already (though perhaps not reconciled) even as the Big Party's Peaceful Freedumbia is already impeccably konstitutional (though scarcely constitutional)?


[3] Apart from the sadly belated Jewish Statism racket, "right of conquest" seems to have perished more or less with Century XIX. "On 3 June 1898 Salisbury asserted a joint British and Egyptian right of conquest over 'the whole of the Mahdi State'" was the very last gasp of what had once been an impeccable orthodoxy.