His Guess?

My guess? Dismantling the Baath army and the professional bureaucracy was intended as a way of ensuring there were no obstacles to putting corrupt financier Ahmad Chalabi in charge of Iraq (that was the Rumsfeld- Wolfowitz- Feith plan). What they didn't know was that Bremer had been charged by his old boss, the State Department, with derailing the Chalabi conspiracy and ensuring that the US ruled Iraq directly for a year or two. The combination of the Neocon plot to install Chalabi and destroy the Baath institutions, and the Powell-Blair plot to destroy Chalabi and ensure that Iraq was properly administered for a while, resulted in the worst of all possible worlds-- Bremer trying to run Iraq without an indigenous army or professional bureaucracy. Feith personally blackballed even seasoned Republican Arabists, depriving Bremer of even minimal expertise. Bush's inability to choose between Rumsfeld and Powell led to a muddle. Apparently W. now thinks he wasn't even informed of the decision to get rid of the army. This recollection is faulty, but it is proof that he did not make the decision.

Ah, this bard noddeth not! After not encountering M. le Dr. Tchélabi for whole months and fits and cantos, listeners must be pleased to meet him properly decked out in his characteristic sub-Homeric finery, "corrupt financier"! Why, 'tis as if he'd been present all along in the thoughts of the tale-singer! Aren't stereotyped epithets great, Mr. Bones? "Steward, make sure Dr. Cole gets an extra large slice of roast pork next time he performs at court!"

No Iliad is Ann Arbour bloguscript JC-1, the so-called Peaceful Freedumbiad or Commentariolus Eruditissimus, but you are to recall that the composer of the former had somewhat more liberty to make up guesses about the Trojan War, with four or five centuries of not-well-recordedness intervening between himself and Agamemnon, king of men. Prof. Dr. Juan Cole, the Greatest Area Student of All Time [1], is here making stuff up about only one percent as long ago.

What's that, sir? ... Well, yes, as a matter of fact I do think he's just making it up, not that that has any bearing on the literary merits, mind you. Look, Mr. Bones, Prof. Cole operates much like Dr. Wright in his Arabic Grammar: when he informs one that some usage is common, that means that it is rare, and when Dr. Wright ventures to call something "rare" himself, one would need three lifetimes to come across it once outside a book of grammar. With JC, everything opinionated that is left unmarked (and can't be readily confirmed elsewhere) is a guess, and when the GASoAT knows that he's guessing, well, "he's just making it up" may not be the most tactful formula, but I'd suggest that's the way you ought to bet, Mr. Bones.

Besides, we have less circumstantial evidence in this particular case. Examine the above anecdote carefully and you will notice that the tale-singer claims the invasionites' State Department won a round from the invasionites' War Department as early as May or June of 2003, successfully (sort of) slippin' a stick through the spokes of little neocomrade Jerry's trainin' wheels. Sultan Bremer, as he then was, scribblin' in self-defense the other day, seems never to have heard of this human event, however, even though it would have been admirably suited to his own buck-passin' project, and not excessively disloyal to Boy and Party either, insofar he could claim that that was the bad old State Department under neocomrade Gen. Powell, not neocomrade Dr. Rice's spiffy new lean-and-mean aggression machine. It is antecedently improbable that it happened at all, and retrospectively improbable that if it did, little Jerry would not allude to it, at least darkly, so as to get himself off the hook.

However it is not altogether clear exactly what tale our songster sings: "derailing the Chalabi conspiracy and ensuring that the US ruled Iraq directly for a year or two" is doubly ambiguous: (1) Do the two parts of the alleged counterconspiracy necessarily go together? No doubt (many of) the wimps of Colin did want to avoid empowerin' M. le Docteur, but that is not the same thing as insistin' on direct rule of the Party's semiconquered provinces from Rancho Crawford. (2) In any case, did the Foggy Bottom stumblebums intend the derailin' and/or ensurin', or is that only what actually happened? [2] It is plain enough that little Jerry was determined to be a direct ruler, but his intentions are nothing to the present point, what we need to know about is the intentions of the anti-Bremerite faction. [3]

It is probably no accident that as soon as we hear the dear old strains of "corrupt financier" the not so welcome tune of "Neocon plot" follows right behind. As you'll see from my last footnote, Mr. Bones, there are problems about guilt by association in the Colean bardery, although in this problem one can't tell whether JC wants to tar the Dread Neocon Cabal™ by association with Dr. Tchélabí, or the other way around.

"DNC" is another of my own stock epithets, JC doesn't have one of his own verbally, although he certainly could use it. When his guesswork about the former Iraq goes all ahoo, overestimating the rôle of Jewish Statism and the relevance of the Palestine Puzzle is usually to blame. If there were a single improvement in the quality of the IC product that one could obtain by just wishing for it, I believe I'd wish for getting rid of that "Neocon plot" Leitmotiv. Still, if Don Juan wants to keep it, he ought to justify how he deploys it. It would be dementia to suppose that Dr. Tchélabí is a Jewish Statist personally, although the Greater Levant being what it is, he's probably been called one several million times. At Mu’ámara Junction, they may seriously think so, but at Ann Arbour he is presumably only held to be a useful tool of the JS mob, and presumably Prof. Cole would allow that the tool's usefulness expired long ago, though still quite a while after the events guessed about this morning. To the slight extent that any Dread Neocon Cabal™ actually exists or existed, it seems doubtful that the installation of Dr. Tchélabí in particular after the supralegal régime change was accomplished was ever very important at all, before, during, or after the aggression. Something like "Anybody but Saddám!" seems far more like the cabalsters' dream to me. If that seems less likely to Prof. Cole, that may be because he does not give the Jewish Statists proper credit for sincerity: I fear they really did believe in Mr. Blair's terror-tipped forty-five-minute specials. So add five points for sincerity of autoterrorization and subtract twenty-five points for lousy judgment, Bones, and then you'll score the "Neocon plot" folks about right. [4]

==

As an implicit generalization about Pol. Sci., it won't quite do to commentize

Apparently W. now thinks he wasn't even informed of the decision to get rid of the army. This recollection is faulty, but it is proof that he did not make the decision.

The Harry Truman buck still stops the same place as ever, and therefore dismissin' the Ba‘thí military was Little Brother's decision even supposing that "he did not make it." And furthermore Little Brother almost certainly did make it. The properly worded objection would be that the Yale laddie didn't know what he was doin' when he decided. As nobody can deny! although admittedly Party neocomrade P. Bremer took a good loyal whack at denyin' it. BGKB.


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[1] "GASoAT" is our own private fixed set of wingèd words for Don Juan, but admittedly there's so much of it that it would capsize any hexameter it was launched in, and it is pretty clunky in prose as well. Accordingly we don't often use it, though it is indeed ever in our thoughts.


[2] As Dr. Wright might say, one can't tell from a nomen verbi whether it corresponds to a purpose clause or a result clause.


[3] Well, more exactly, little Jerry's intentions do matter to the Colean guesswork, since we are informedly commentized that he "had been charged by his old boss, the State Department" with the said derailin' and ensurin'. I seem to be warping the songster's intentions in the direction of less improbability than he desires. If we apply a prose standard of accountability to this passage, both neocomrade C. Powell and neocomrade P. Bremer deliberately aimed at both no Dr. Tchélabí and no pretense of indig self-government. A set of two variables with two values each leads to to four separate cases: Powell wanted no Tchélabí, Bremer wanted no Tchélabí, Powell wanted no self-rule nonsense, Bremer wanted no self-rule nonsense. The last one is as well established as anything in politics and warmongering can be, but the other three are not established at all.

Anybody may guessworkize, so why not suppose that little Jerry wanted to install Dr. Tchélabí -- strictly as window-dressin', of course -- when he first arrived in his satrapy, but after a couple of sessions with him learned to take a more Colean and jaundiced view of the C.F. gentleman? There is even a jaundiced but quite un-Colean possibility here as well: how if Dr. Tchélabí made it plain to Sultan Bremer, stout patriot for the former Iraq that he (Tch.) has always been, or has systematically pretended to be, that he'd rather be nothin' at all than mere window-dressin' for Boy and Party?

I am almost as reluctant as Don Juan is to think anything good of this particular perp, but let us be honest with ourselves, Mr. Bones. Anybody who calls out to the militant extremist GOP "Come invade my country illegally so as to put me in power over it!" has placed herself far beneath contempt without offendin' any further, and that is the only charge one can account definitely proved against M. Tchélabí, except of course the ancillary matter of twistin' some of his facts a little to get the lawless invasion he craved. He is not to be pronounced guilty by association with those two crimes of every other perpetration that he might conceivably have perpetrated. Specifically, (1) he should not be labeled "corrupt financier" for legal and political, as opposed to poetic or metrical, purposes without any trial or conviction, and (2) his rootless cosmopolitan "Iraqi" patriotism is probably sincere enough, though doubtless it would yield to his Big-Man-Me-ism if the two were ever to come into direct conflict.

Travaillons donc à bien penser, Mr. Bones! Or as some lesser moralist put it, with slightly different proper names, we are not to conclude from the fact that Tommy is a good boy in general, whereas Ahmad is a nasty brat indeed, that Tommy is right and Ahmad wrong in the next controvery between them. This is not a matter of "giving the Devil his due," Mr. Bones, for the Devil and Dr. Tchélabí have formally nothing to do with this case, only our own desire to think well ought to guide our judgment.


[4] As usual, the mu’ámara-driven mindset is determined to make its enemies out a good deal smarter than they actually are. Still, even on Colean terms, why should the DNC™ thugs ever have wanted Dr. Tchélabí in particular for their Quisling? To suppose them grateful for his twistifications in their cause and resolved to reward him on that account would be infantile. Real world politics is never like that! Yet what other positive qualifications for the post did he possess? To judge by analogy, they ought to have dreamed of a Quisling as close as possible to Gen. Mubárak in Egypt, and Dr. Tchélabí is not very close at all.

Now that some of them are, or are rumored to be, dreamin' of Dr. ‘Alláwí in much the same way, the same question arises again. Can the thugs really not appreciate that a barracks-baser would be far more suitable for their purposes? It certainly looks like that, and perhaps the explanation is once again sheer lousy judgment, in this case the DNC™ gentry's dotty notions about Domino Democracy, taken as implyin' specifically that they could, or can still, install a Quisling with a fair amount of popular support behind him, more support from the Peaceful Freedumbian street than any "patriot" colonel or general would be able to muster up.

The cabalsters really do not seem all that bright, Mr. Bones! You might argue that that unbrightness made them ideal marks for Dr. Tchélabí, a sort of Nobel laureate confidence man, but that's dubious also: were not his worst dupes and (former) ideobuddies located much closer to AEI than to AIPAC? There was not much more of a specifically Political Capitalist "cabal" than a Jewish Statist one, but there were certainly far more marks and dupes amongst the GOP geniuses who would consider Dr. Tchélabí their kind of guy for talkin' about the beauties of Absolute Free Trade, privatization, &c. than for reassurances about the safety of the Tel Aviv statelet. The GOP base-and-vile are entirely the other way around, to be sure, but it was not them that Dr. Tchélabí had to swindle.

Notice, by the way, that to the extent a Political Capitalist cabal did exist, little Jerry Bremer was a charter member of it, havin' been by all accounts much more gung-ho for privatization &c, than for Domino Democracy proper. Very likely the new sultan decided that the Big Management Party's spear-won subjects must not be allowed to govern themselves for a while because they could not be relied upon to instantiate the AEIdeology properly, if at all. (They still haven't.) In that case, Bremer may have seen right through Dr. Tchélabí: although he talked like "their kind of guy," he really wasn't. That was, or would have been, a perfectly accurate estimate, me judice, and yet it is one that can be attributed to Sultan Jerry without attributing any really fiendish cleverness to him and thus lapsing into mindless conspiratorialism. But God know best.