"Who holds the American card in Iraq?"

This morning, Mr. Bones, this Halloween morning, we have an editorial twistifier for the Times of Bazzázístán who thinks he's got Rancho Crawford figured out exactly and in full:

It is not difficult for any analyst to find out how the U.S. tried to ally itself with almost all Iraqi factions with their different hues in the past five years. The alliance with these parties has usually come as they were seen by the U.S. to be at the apex of their power. The ultimate aim has been to appease almost everybody as a means to extricate itself from the Iraqi debacle.

Ah, that fatal "almost all"! If only thug Party had called to Party thugs at the very outset of the five year period, paleface Bushevik geopols makin' a deal with native Ba‘thí operatives, none of this unfortunate misunderstandin' of a Peaceful Freedumbia would have been necessary. As any analyst can plainly see, should she care to look back that far. Why, in November 2002, even a GOP genius might have detected which faction to negotiate with and extend Kirkpatrician patronage and apologetics to -- the "apex of power" was quite unmistakable.

If "our" Boy and Party did not understand exactly what held His Excellency S. Hussein up there on top of the heap, what would it have mattered? Do the Busheviki know with any accuracy why their Gen. Mubárak does not get toppled from his pyramid, after all? Or indeed, their dynasty petrobuddies at al-Riyád? Do Big Management Party geopols need to know such things about the managers of their local franchises in the Greater Levant?[1] In the unlikely event that one of their bastards gets toppled by his own subjects, there will almost certainly be another bastard waiting for his Kirkpatrick Authoritarian Certificate™ within twenty-four or forty-eight hours. The apex of collaborationism may be temporarily vacant, but it is still there, and much the quickest way to re-establish blessed stability, keepin' gas cheap and Tel Aviv fans quiet, is to recognize and uphold whichever indig gets there firstest with the mostest -- this, also, without impertinently inquiring into exactly what is goin' on that Col. Yuck should now replace Generalissimo Ick. Big Management can usually take it for granted that Generalissimo Yuck, as he now becomes, will be able to maintain himself at the top of the greasy pole. To ask lots of rude questions about so very minor an episode of régime change as Yuck replacin' Ick in Outer Fasádistán would be geostrategically pointless. Party neocomrade Ambassador J. Kirkpatrick might even interpolate from the grave that such an inquistion is quite inconsistent with the well-known fact that Outer Fasádistán is quite as sovereign and independent and constitutional as China or Peru or Wyomin', though admittedly O.F. may a bit less technically democratic than certain other little foreign friends of Boy and Party that might be mentioned.[1]

However the present slave of al-Bazzáz, a certain M. Fátih ‘Abd as-Salám, does not avail himself of the full five years, and starts analyzing only after the aggression of March 2003. That plan leaves the aggression itself hors d'analyse, which is an arrangement more likely to suit a neo-Iraqi subject or exile than those of us who watch events from within the holy Homeland. I quite see that the victims of militant GOP invasionism had their whole mental worlds turned upside down by the advent of vigilante cowpokers, yet if they are to venture upon serious analysis, they ought to be able to appreciate that it was nowhere near so traumatic a deal for Uncle Sam as for the former Iraq. (11 September 2001 was nowhere near so traumatic either, though that is rather another story.)

In any case, M. ‘Abd as-Salám in effect proposes to explain everything after the aggression without explaining the aggression itself, which seems a dubious methodology from any point of view that comes to mind. Naturally his proposed Key to all Mythologies -- "The ultimate aim has been to appease almost everybody as a means to extricate itself from the Iraqi debacle" -- makes no sense whatsoever if retrojected before the actual assault. Houdini might tie himself in knots to have the fun of escaping from them, but Harvard Victory School bigmanagers, however klutzy and narcissistic, are not at all likely to behave like prestidigitators, stagin' debacles for the sheer fun of extricatin' themselves from the rubble by appeasin' everybody all 'round.[2]

How does one go about self-extrication via omnidirectional appeasement, then? Like this, it appears:

Initially, the U.S. implicated itself in the woes of the ethnic and sectarian strife in Iraq by siding and backing one particular group against the other. This policy continued while at least one important part of the country was burning. And not long ago, it realized it had to extend a helping hand to opposite groups, too. So it is clear now that the U.S. is not sympathetic to one sect only. It wants to have a foot in the disparate worlds of Iraq’s uncompromising sectarian, tribal and political factions. Even the groups resisting U.S. presence in the country have come to realize that almost everyone in Iraq now relies on U.S. assistance to maintain its share of power and influence.

If you ignore all context, Mr. Bones, you might suppose that M. ‘Abd as-Salám agrees with Party neocomrade E. Luttwak that the stumblebums of Crawford have somehow fallen into a brilliant triumph of statesmanship by sheer accident. "Almost [every faction] in Iraq now relies on U.S. assistance to maintain its share of power and influence" -- does that not sound like, for example, what Cardinal Richelieu more or less achieved in his German policy? Perhaps the extremist Busheviki should not be awarded any points for it, considering that they never deliberately aimed at anythin' of the sort, but still, if they had aimed, would this alleged coup not be worthy of many, many points?

But once we bring in some context, we are obliged to wonder what colour the sky looks to M. ‘Abd as-Salám, for of course there remain a number of factions and factionoids and factionettes in the former Iraq that do not "rely" on the militant GOP for anything more than target practice. I suppose if the TwentyPercenter shootists had no paleface Party operatives to shoot at, their "share of power and influence" would shrink still farther -- if that's possible -- but in any case, M. ‘Abd as-Salám describes the current correlation of forces in an exceedingly peculiar way. What next?

Therefore, Iraqi resistance has wisely chosen to ignore the Iraqi government and any other group whose existence depends on America.[3] If they want to talk, these groups say, they will only talk to the U.S. This shows that both friend and foe in Iraq see the U.S. as the common denominator. Without U.S. occupation troops, the government cannot survive.[4] The tribes now need U.S. support to maintain the surge in their standing, influence and power. Resistance groups need to talk to the U.S. and explore a diplomatic and political avenue to achieve their target of driving its occupation troops [away] without shedding more blood.

When the likes of Bazzáz go soft and squishy and sentimental about the effusion of blood, it is difficult not to speculate that maybe they think they are losing. So perhaps M. ‘Abd as-Salám remains on speaking terms with the former Real World to some extent after all? However, he will have to address himself to it a bit more frankly than this, admitting in particular that noneffusion of blood is not quite the TwentyPercenters' whole "target," any more than it is the whole target of militant Republican Party extremism either. "Let's be serious, please, O gentlethugs! A deal between two such parties as you would be esthetically and ethically appropriate, and it may even be attainable, but only if you'll both cut out all the silly bullshit first."

M. ‘Abd as-Salám declines to talk turkey, however, and refuses to spell out exactly what the Big Party invasionites would get in return for undoin' most of what they have mischieved in the former Iraq and restorin' some facsimile of the former Sunní Ascendancy. On the contrary, he only subsides into softer and deeper bullshit:

This shows that the only option the parties in Iraq have including the resistance is talking to Washington on how to end its occupation and at the same time making utmost benefit from the massive capabilities of the world’s most powerful economic power to reconstruct their war-torn country. In other words, they will need to persuade the U.S. to turn its formidable occupation army into an investment to rebuild their imploded state. America has destroyed the foundations of Iraq and it is under moral obligation to have them rebuilt.

Who down at the ranch gives a hoot about "their war-torn country" or "their imploded state"? Except insofar as these very peripheral things might cast luster or the reverse upon Boy and Party, or threaten cheap gas, or alarm the fans of Tel Aviv? M. ‘Abd as-Salám, like most political thugs, seems not altogether lacking in nous, so presumably he knows that it is really pretty absurd to pester the Big Party invasionites about "moral obligation," quite as absurd as for them to pester him or the late Saddám with such manifest claptrap.

On the other hand, our self-proclaimed analyst may simply be so unaware of the quirks and quiddities of local colour here in the holy Homeland that he genuinely thinks he can make an impression on the cowpokers of Rancho Crawford and Castle Cheney simply by waving the word "investment" at them. Morality, whether considered as claptrap or more warmly, tends to be universal, whereas the salient peculiarities of our Harvard Victory School MBA classes are provincial and parochial and not to be predicted by outsiders a priori. M. ‘Abd as-Salám requires to know what the Party perps themselves look for in an "investment." It appears from this scribble that he does not know, and further, that he has not the faintest clue that his knowledge might be deficient.

Still, in theory it is possible that this twistifier considers himself to be only opening negotiations with the militant Crawfordites and therefore under no obligation to reveal how much he understands of their weird manners and mores. On balance this possibility seems to me unlikely, however, because M. ‘Abd as-Salám deploys both "appease" and "investment" in ways that he ought to have avoided if he really grasped how the Big Managerial mindset is likely to react. On top of which, and even worse than verbal infelicity, is the latent implication throughout that all the cowpoker vigilantes want at this point in their aggression against the former Iraq is to be shown the egress.

That is about as wrong as wrong can be, I'd say. But God knows best.


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[1] As regards scientific interrogation and so-called "rendition," it seems positively an advantage for Boy and Party not to know for sure exactly what their native collaborationists are up to. Bushevik operatives testify much more plausibly under oath to their ignorance when they really are ignorant. Sort of.

As regards the general political structure of the Greater Levant, this is no doubt a minor point, but it is worth reminding the Busheviki of it from time to time, because I suspect it goes against the Big Managerial grain to allow their "allies" even that small space for autonomy. Nevertheless, it would be counterproductive for the Harvard Victory School MBA's to place so many surveillance cameras in Outer Fasádistán that they cannot but know for sure about t*rt*r* and all that. By Big Party lights, management has a right to assure themselves that their little foreign friends are not in violation of the contract with Rancho Crawford, and especially that the LFF are not secretly scheming to replace Generalissimo Ick with some intolerable troublemaker like Dr. Mosaddeq or Col. Nasser. However they do not need to know exactly what is happenin' in every last official cellar and dungeon of Outer Fasádistán in order to be reasonably secure against that major sort of violation. This is fortunate for the whole Greater Levantine racket, as presently carried on, since our HVS MBA classes are not in fact very good at installin' and maintainin' figurative surveillance cameras in Party protectorates so remote linguistically and culturally as Egypt or Sa‘údiyya or Outer Fasádistán.


[2] Sad to say, the way M. ‘Abd as-Salám brandishes the word "appease" raises instant doubts in advance that his Crawfordology can really be half as good as he accounts it. "Appease" is almost exactly contrary to the natural downhill flow of the HVS MBA mindset, unless it is diluted almost out of existence, as it would be, for instance, should anybody claim that the executives of ordinary private-sectorian corporations engage in continual "appeasement" of their customers and their employees and their nominal owners and directors. It would be intelligible to talk that way, no doubt, yet anybody who possessed a proper grasp of Big Managerialism and then went on to talk so would clearly be trying to annoy in addition to -- or instead of -- trying to analyze.

When "appeasement" is really the mot juste, with no sarcasm anywhere in sight, the object of appeasement is at least half outside the sphere of Big Management to begin with. Considering Bazzázístán and the TwentyPercenterdom of the former Iraq as a potential object of Big Party "appeasement," M. ‘Abd as-Salám probably means the word ingenuously, but when he suggests that heretics and hillbillies have been, or are to be, "appeased" also, a gap begins to open up between word and thing.


[3] Presumably the TwentyPercenter shootists do not, in fact, ignore themselves, as would logically be entailed by M. ‘Abd as-Salám's Blakean generalization.


[4] The slave of Bazzáz might actually get us forwarder a little if he discussed whether any neorégime at New Baghdád could survive without money, and probably bodies, from Crawford. Could a strict TwentyPercenter neorégime manage it at this point? Could even the late Saddám have pulled that trick off, once all the infrastructure that held up the Ba‘thí "apex" had been dismantled and discarded?

Wasdom-of-the-East Dept.

* Resurgence of Rumi and Hegelian philosophy Ali-Asghar Mosleh professor at Tehran’s Allameh Tabatabai University, participating in the congress, delivered a lecture on the theme “The Resurgence of Rumi and the End of Hegelian History”. “According to Hegel, humans have experienced all cultural and ideological developments and events in the course of European civilization and elements belonging to premodernist cultures are no longer perceptible. Consequently, the world will never again witness the revival of traditions and elements observable in the premodernist eras” he said. Mosleh rejected Hegel’s ideas by referring to the rise of global interest in the thoughts of Rumi and the abundance of commemoration ceremonies which are now underway in the world for this Persian poet and Muslim mystic.

As you recall, Mr. Bones, Prof. Hegel of Berlin was a great champion of Creative Destruction, that grand key to all 2007 Big Management Party ideology, yet M. Mosleh is of course quite right to insist on "no longer perceptible," for literal destruction of the world's former career is not possible. Blow all that history bunk to invisibly small smithereens, yes, but make the smithereens not exist? No way. Militant stumblebums, like third- or thirteenth-rate spoofies, can make it impossible to recover exactly what "humans have experienced," yet the experience happened for all that, and it had the consequences that it has had.

Any spoofy, or tertiary-academic hanger-on to the dervishs' coattails, who can confuse Dr. Hegel with Neocomrade F. Fukuyama is not exactly an opponent of stature for the Wicked West. What does the Dismantler of the Prophet say about the A. A. Moslehs of that alien and bewildered world of theirs?

By the eve of the revolution the core of the Iranian government was stiff with "doctors." There were thirty-one "doctors" in the last Consultative Assembly before the revolution . . . Thousands of others ... returned with their Ph.D.'s from wonderfully obscure American universities to occupy ... posts in no way connected with the learning, however limited, that they had picked up in the West . . . . &c. &c.

By now is the time is perhaps 1515 hours on the day after the revolution, and presumably most of the "doctors" (shudder-quoted in honour of M. Mossadegh, the CIA's old buddy) have fled to Orange County CA or thereabouts, with only a few stout spirits left around in the heat of the ideological afternoon to travesty Hegel on behalf of the Reformed Rahbariyya. M. Mosleh's flimsiness is nicely encapsulated by "rejected Hegel’s ideas by referring to the rise of global interest in the thoughts of Rumi and the abundance of commemoration ceremonies," which would be sad stuff even if one never approached nearer unto Geist an-und-für sich than high-school logic or rhetoric. To commemmorate some nomen clarum dead eight hundred years does not require anything at all in the way of actually agreeing with the late lamented's particular notions. Even on the supposition there are nowadays genuine Rúmí wombscholars around who piously adhere to something not altogether unlike the Urveröffentlichung, that is scarcely a proof of their own intellectual or ethical seriousness, let alone of the merits of their Master's doctrine. I daresay "Doctor" Mosleh has not a wide variety of mud and straw to pick and choose from for making his ideological bricks, and therefore appreciate why he is tempted not to scrutinize the credentials of Rúmí Revivalists very closely, lest there be almost nothing at all to fall back upon in the way of "Look, even in the Wicked West, some see that we of the Wunnerful East know better!"

Still, "Everything is what it is, why should we wish to be deceived?" "Doctor" Mosleh would be in a far more secure dogmatic position if he wrote off about 99.37% of the Global Rúmí Revival as mere froth and scum and New Age trendiness.[1] It's not going to hold up if he puts any pressure on it, so he ought to cut it out himself before somebody else does so and the Mosleh Doctrine begins to look perhaps unnecessarily bad in consequence. His Dream Palace of the Qommies will have to be much smaller than he'd like, yet what's the use of counting all that ramshackle Rúmí Revival "global" slum as part of it, when it is so plain that the Big Bad Wolf can blow it all down without even breathing hard? [2]


Wherever it may have come from, "the world will never again witness the revival of traditions and elements observable in the premodernist eras" is a beaut! One your right hand, Mr. Bones, you may behold militant GOP extremism revivin' and neotraditionalizin' and wombschoolin' like mad, and ditto to the left with extremist neo-Muslim militancy, yet here along comes a "Doctor" A. A. Mosleh to assure us that what is happening all around is in fact a thing that can happen. Let's thank him politely for his news, of course, and not mention that we could almost certainly have worked it out for ourselves.

Prof. Hegel is as remote from the likes of a "Doctor" Mosleh as the moon from a moth, but still, it's kind of fun to imagine what he'd make of it all from Down There Below, could some intrepid journalist come asking for comment. I am not quite sure what he'd say. He might consider a Global Rúmí Revival no more pertinent to Weltgeist than Herr Krug's pen, and perhaps that is most likely. Still, he might take the line that a world full of Global Rúmí Revivals and suchlike trendy rubbish is excellent evidence that he was working along the right lines all the time. Hegel's own age was not without a sort of first draft of GRR-like phenomena, after all. It is usually referred to as die Romantik. Did not the brothers Schlegel go all swoony and moony -- but yet remaining sufficiently akademisch as well -- over unheard-of far-fetched Aryan stuff? True, theirs was the "wrong" Aryan crew, the Sanskrit crew, but I can't see why the Masnaví mightn't have done as well had they stumbled over that first instead.of Vedas and Upanishads.[3]


There's not much more to this dog-and-pony show -- "the international congress held to commemorate the 800th birth anniversary of Molana Jalal ad-Din Rumi" -- that is up to even "doctoral" standards, except perhaps the following:

* Rumi’s unfavorable view towards philosophy “Molana Jalal ad-Din Rumi had a limited knowledge of philosophy,” Nasrollah Purjavadi, philosophy professor at the University of Tehran said during the session on wisdom and philosophy held on the sidelines of the congress. Studies reveal that Sufis, including Rumi, harbored a chronic dislike for philosophy since the 11th century AD, when a division arose between Greek philosophy and the wisdom of the Quran. Although Rumi alludes to some philosophical notions in his works, he condemned philosophy in Fíhi Má Fíh, [M. Púrjavádí] concluded.

Now here's some Secret Spoofy History for you, Mr. Bones! Evidently in Centuries I-IV/VII-X "Greek philosophy" and "Qur’án wisdom" were good friends, but then one party or the other said something unfortunate and the relationship broke down. Even a short summary ought, it seems to me, to explain which party uttered the Deplorable Word, even if it doesn't actually quote it. [4]

It appears that 1 Muharram 401 fell in August of A. D. 1010, which is not exactly an obvious discrimen temporum for unmystical annalists. Perhaps the Saljúks may pass for especially Qur’án wise, yet they did not show up for another generation.






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[1] Certainly I'd be glad to dispense with 99.37% of the silly things that grave anti-idealist philosophers, and cheap political twistifiers, and cocktail-party twits, and innocent victims of Big Party wombschoolin' have said about poor Prof. Hegel. However "Doctor" Mosleh would be perfectly entitled to find that a bad exchange, seeing (1) that most of the tripe and baloney I can spare him is anti-Hegelian, and (2) pretty well all of it exists inside the pale of the Wicked West. Apart from Russia before 1850 or 1860, it would be hard to find any Lesser Breeds Without who have ever taken much interest in Hegel either pro or contra. To find even a single LBW who ever proposed to make the Berlin philosopher so grand an Emersonian "representative man" as "Doctor" Mosleh wants to make of the Konya adept is more than I can manage. Evidently there are limits to this species of tomfoolery: "The trouble with them in the Wicked West is they all think like Hegel" is so utterly baseless a claim that even the ideological con artists pass it by.


[2] That is mostly the ought of M. Pascal: "Doctor" Mosleh should first essay to think better, that's the principal thing. (My suggestion that shoddy thinking tends to discredit one when it becomes generally detected is admittedly a bit vulgar and subpascalian. Still, that does seem to be the case, does it not?)


[3] Professional spoofies almost invariably claim in every age and clime that their Magic Way is a universal way, a grand "spiritual" panacea. Like most of what they claim, 'tis a very doubtful business. Prof. Hegel might have accommodated Muslim Spoofery under die Romantik to a considerable extent, but precisely on the grounds that it was not the sort of thing any decent Old Euro was at all likely to meet on the streets of Jena in the year of disgrace 1806/1221.

Even the shallow flimsinesses of "Doctor" A. A. Mosleh of Tehran’s Allameh Tabatabai "University" could be used as a stick to beat Hegel with, should they ever fall into competent hands. The accused was undoubtedly a bit too sure that he had enough materials at hand to be able to hegelize to some purpose, whereas nowadays anybody this side of Wombschool Normal U. can point out serious lacunae with the greatest of ease. If the charge is rarely brought, I suppose that silence mostly indicates that scarcely anybody wants to hegelize nowadays in the Wicked West, "we" are all quite content to regard History as Junk, so to speak, as a heap of miscellaneous unsorted and unsortable lumber, a wilderness of local colours with not much in the way of line and design. (I speak of those of "us" who get past the Big Management Party's dogma, of course, of us who would never sink to a cheap and trashy "That was then, but this is now," let alone to Their Ford's original wordin'.)


[4] "Qur’án wisdom" seems decidedly an instance of gharbzadegí to me. But God knows best.

And Yet They Have Lost They Turks!

What can the difficulty be with the Big Management Party, that all its Harvard Victory School MBA techniques and Rovean flim-flam do not work a tenth so well east of Suez as they do southwest of Succotash City TX?

One Moonbat journalist diagnoses as follows :

If there is one idea that Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, share on how to fight the war on terror, it is that we need to reach out to and win the hearts and minds of the moderate, modern, peaceable, more secularist Muslims and empower them to defeat by both persuasion and other methods the radical, violent fundamentalists in their religion. That would be a very, very good idea. But consider the Turkish experience in the past six years. The Turks are the moderate, modern, peaceable, more secularist Muslims. Moreover our countries have been close allies for a half-century. And Turkey has had extensive friendly commercial relations with Israel. They are Turks, not Arabs, and are therefore less susceptible to the emotional plight of the West Bank Arabs under Israeli occupation. And yet we have lost the Turks almost as badly as we have lost the angriest fundamentalist Arab Muslims. If we can't keep a fair share of their friendly attitude, how do we expect to win the much vaunted and awaited hearts and minds campaign?

Señorito Blankley nicely illustrates his own faction's Levantine problems, as it seems to me, Mr. Bones. Mark how the lunar laddie goes to work: "Consider the Turkish experience," it begins, -- which might be a very, very good idea -- and then Master Tony considers . . . the Turkey experience of Master Tony! "Head stuck up its own bellybutton, as usual," diagnose I.

The closest reference to any experience by the Turks is ruinously remote, that detestable "therefore less susceptible to the emotional plight of the West Bank." Master Tony knows that scrap of knowledge about Oriental susceptibilities out of ethnography textbooks, hopefully, rather than out of toplofty contempt for lesser breeds without. But setting "hopefully" aside as merely our own emotional plight, Mr. Bones, anyone can see that Señorito Blankley is no empiricist. It takes its Turks the high a priori way, a congeries of essences "moderate, modern, peaceable, more secularist." Go read for yourself the passage where the specimen reports that it sought out a Truly Typical Turk. Naturally it had no trouble findin' itself "a superb student of Turkish culture and politics, a secularist, a friend and admirer of America and a Turkish patriot." [1]

Oh well, one sees chiefly what one is prepared to see, no doubt, all the more so when one writes as a salaried Moonbat for wombscholars and the Niedergedümmten. Along Blankleyan lines, it is clear that what's wrong with Turkey can only be that the joint is overrun with false and untypical Turks. Unfortunately no very satisfactory policy recommendation can be made on that basis. To restrict "democracy" so that only True Turks run the joint would be entirely congenial with Big Party ideology, and congruent with the rest of Big Party behavior in the Eastern Mediterranean, yet one is not actually recommending anything to the GOP geniuses by saying so without detailed advice on implementation. Peace and freedom might even break out in Peaceful Freedumbia, provided all false and untypical neo-Iraqi subjects have been detected and put out of circulation. The proposition is so true it borders on tautology, but how does one go about it, exactly, assuming one is a pious cowpoker vigilante and sincerely supports the Cause? I'm always glad to speculate how the Boy-'n'-Party stumblebums might play their cards better, but 'tis a difficult hand, the former Iraq. And Turkey is even worse to practice upon still, for in it there are not tens of thousands of Big Party military operatives to do all the detectin' and kidnappin' that would doubtless be required. [2]

But I'm getting ahead of myself, because there is more TB diagnosis to consider before talking about cures:

And yet, we have lost the Turks almost as badly as we have lost the most angry religious, fundamentalist Arab, Muslims. If we can't keep a fair share of their friendly attitude, how do we expect to win the much-vaunted and -awaited hearts and mind campaign? While I hardly have the answers to that question, one lesson can be learned from the Turkish debacle (or near debacle): while we cozied up to their arch threat — the Iraqi Kurds — we kept telling them not to worry and trust us. We did little to allay their fears that the Iraqi Kurds were giving the PKK terrorists succor and sanctuary in Iraq. We didn't pressure our allies the Iraqi Kurds to pressure the PKK. In the future, we are going to have to earn each ounce of friendly relations based on what we actually do for the object of our desire. Good intentions and common visions of the future are not likely to be readily available.

The señorito seems to speak from another planet at times, perhaps Luna or ChristoKorea: where is this "much-vaunted and -awaited hearts and mind campaign" of which it speaks? The noisiest vaunters in the ranks of Boy and Party are, even as I keyboard, havin' themselves a jolly "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week," which is all very well in the neocomrades' lemmin'ly sort of way, no doubt, but scarcely conducive to touchin' hearts and winnin' minds and washin' brains. Little Brother, along with most of his Party base and vile, does not seem to find the D. Horowitz circus very edifyin', but certainly they are conducting no equal and opposite campaign of their own. If there is any such campaign at all, it is very sotto voce. [3]

Master Tony then abruptly switches to the Free Kurds, as if that were the whole megillah. When it comes to tellin' the wombscholars what moral to draw, the señorito could do with some pronoun assistance:

[O]ne lesson can be learned from the Turkish debacle (or near debacle): while [the extremist GOP] cozied up to [the Turks'] arch threat — the Iraqi Kurds — we kept telling [the Turks] not to worry and trust [the GOP]. [Republicans] did little to allay [Turkish] fears that the Iraqi Kurds were giving the PKK terrorists succor and sanctuary in Iraq. We didn't pressure our allies the Iraqi Kurds to pressure the PKK.

The prose is such a botch that I took Master Tony to be addressin' the "worry" and "fears" of Free Kurds rather than True Turks until I scrutinized sharply. After a fashion, though, the misreading is instructive, for are not both parties little foreign friends of the GOP? The Turks are formally allies of Uncle Sam, if not necessarily of Little Brother and the Big Party, by virtue of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and that is rather more than the Free Kurds can point to.

The sense is a botch as well, even after one nails down who "they" are. Undoubtedly this is only an unconscious or subliminal botch, though, for one can scarcely imagine even Neocomrade A. Blankeley of America's Moonpaper reflectin' to himself with full awareness that to become an ally of militant GOP extremism means to invite "pressure" from the direction of Crawford ever after. The señorito might, by its own apparent principle, equally well have barked that the Turkish Palace people should have been pressured into not bein' troublemakers and firmly advised that they had better in future keep their paranoia about "arch threats" to themselves and not bother Harvard Victory School MBA's with such poppycock durin' business hours ever again.

Erected on this quicksand, the proposed moral seems headed for quick subsidence. "In the future, we are going to have to earn each ounce of friendly relations based on what we actually do for the object of our desire." Once again, "That would be a very, very good idea," but only if implementation falls to somebody more competent and less señorito-like than T.B. To pay in full for both Turkish ounces and Free Kurd ounces would be worthy of Honest Abe, but to be blind to one creditor and even sacrifice him to the interests of another? That's only Party-of-Grant business as usual, after all. [4]




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[1] Also of the female persuasion, though gender is presumably only a semi-essence of Turkicity at best.

[2] Some neocomrades who get closer to the nitty-gritty of aggression and occupation than Master Tony ventures have in effect suggested that the existing Turkish military might be mustered into the Big Party's Kiddie Krusade without too much trouble on Rancho Crawford's side and perhaps even with enthusiasm amongst the heirs of Atatürk. However TB probably disagrees, if he ever thought of so advanced a question at all, for is not "peaceable" one of the essences?


[3] Neocomrade K. Hughes is presumably still tryin' her best, hearts-and-mindswise, but it's not a very good best, and there is only one of her, so it's not surprising that there is little to show for her efforts, apart from havin' joined with Neocomrade C. Rice to persuade their Little Brother to cut out the "Islamic fascism" baloney in public because it seriously interfered with their handlin' of the lesser breeds without. That was only a defensive victory at best, and it may have been only temporary as well, since there have recently been signs of the pup returnin' to jihád careerist vomit.

Crawfordology is no exact science, but I'd guess most of the empowered perps don't see any need for that tiresome old hearts-and-minds shtik. Mention of it is only too likely to remind everybody of Secretary Kissinger's War as inherited from Secretary MacNamara. Beyond that, Big Party invasionites who matter suppose one of two things, either (1) that Shock-'n'-Awe can do everythin' H&M ever could, and do it better, or else (2) that there is no need to do much H&M therapy at all, because "in their hearts" the invadeds and occupieds of the world, actual and potential, already "know he is right" -- "he" being in this case either Little Brother or Uncle Sam, suit yourself.

The latter, or Barry Goldwater, school of GOP aggression seems to have more effect on the stumblebums' actual behavior, although needless to say the other crew hold a much more realistic-sounding doctrine. Counterterrorizin' might very well work, at least sometimes and to some extent, whereas pretendin' they've already arrived when they have yet to set out seriously is mere tomfoolery and has earned the wages of tomfoolery in the semiconquered provinces of the former Iraq.

One must also bear in mind that our GOP geniuses do not manage the lesser breeds without on a retail basis, they are wholesalers who work through middlemen, in the Greater Levant all those cardboard kingdoms and barracks-based republics. Turkey is not exactly a Mubárakistán, to be sure, but nevertheless the cowpokers have no more alternative to workin' through the Turkish Palace people than through the Arab Palace people. The idea of a direct contact between Rancho Crawford and Castle Cheney on the one hand, and street Arabs or statistically typical Turks on the other, is only fantastic. (And ditto for Pakistan.) Strictly speaking, the Moonbat señorito should have moaned "And yet we have lost M. Erdogan," and then have explained how much popular opinion in Turkey had do do with their loss.


[4] Except by sheer coincidence of interests, it is unlikely that Little Brother and Big Party are goin'ta start askin' their little foreign friends what "we" (Uncle Sam) can do for them instead of vice versa. When the situation is like this one, with two different LFF's already at odds, such coincidence is quite impossible.

'Twas The Night Before IFAW

(( No, not "International Fund for Animal Welfare," Mr. Bones, it's the other acronym crew I refer to. ))

Big Party neocomrade D. Horowitz explains -- logically and lovin’ly -- why certain mad dogs have undertaken to bark against his campus caravan:

Obviously, the attacks on Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week by liberals such as Colmes and radicals such as the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Muslim Students Association are based on reasoning that is absurd. Their only logic is emotional, and the character of that emotion is hatred -- hatred for those who want to raise awareness of the threats we face from radical Islam. This hatred has only one purpose, which is to put a metaphorical bullet in the head of those who oppose the jihad. The purpose is to silence them.

Naturally the Martin Luther of jihád careerism does not propose to be tamely muzzled, not even figuratively, and what genuine lover of diversity in human events would wish him to be? Hath not neocomrade D. Horowitz and the whole 'Phobe Parade been prophetically foretold?

The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we can all be as happy as kings.

Palaeocomrade I. Babbitt of Harvard quoted that couplet for much the same purpose that D. Horowitz -- formerly of Trotsky State in Manhattan, at present a propagandist in residence at Wombschool Normal University -- carries on as he does two generations later, namely as a hostile diagnosis of Wicked Liberalism. Professor Babbitt did not wish to be as happy as kings himself, and indeed, that dharma-tinged humanisme of his could easily be explained in terms of a wish not to be happy unlike kings either, all happiness of any sort being decidedly infra dignitatem babbittensem . A fun guy was ol' Irv!

However ol' Irv was a gentleman -- insofar as it was ever possible in the holy Homeland for anybody indigenous to resemble a Newmanoid gentleman -- whereas Big Party neocomrade D. Horowitz is a mere clown. Here's more diversity still, sir, clowns and gentry! and I ask you to applaud it, Mr. Bones, and welcome it. But bear in mind that we do not apostasize from Robert Louis Stevenson, or foreswear all hope of quasiroyal bliss personally, when we prefer some spots in some phases of the kaleidoscope over others, as for instance Harvard Square gentility over WSU clownin' and grandstandin'. [1]

==

The neocomrade's free mass psychoanalysis is perhaps not pushed quite as far as it might be, however. Ought he not have gone on to explain why wicked liberalism wants to hear no words uttered about Islamophalangitarianism and Islamophobia other than its own? Presumably such a "why" must be thoroughly emotional and illogical, yet all the same, does not a diversity of sentimentalities and fallacies exist also? Do the patients of Dr. Horowitz irrationally love silence for itself? Do they irrationally love jihád for itself? Do they illogically love either silence or jihád as a[n unworkable] means to some other absurd and gland-based objective? Could knowledge of their toilet training help account for their strange behavior? Or how about Jungian archetypes? Are the irrationalities and sentimentalities of radical patients and wicked-liberal patients and Muslim or neo-Muslim patients uniform and interchangeable?

And so on, and so forth.

Ah, well, Mr. Bones, perhaps the Big Management Party neocomrade has crafily abstained from addressin' these very issues so as not to encourage anybody to stay away from the Greatest Show On Campus under the mistaken impression that she knows all about it already? You can not deny, sir, that that plan would be strictly logical and unsentimental!


____
[1] This preference is admissible only in foro interiori and as regards private-sectorian affairs, however. The regulations for public human events in a wicked-liberal democracy necessarily differ. In addition to being diverse, Public Square diversity is required to be in some sense representative as well. Being a palaeocomrade, good ol’ Irv mostly disregarded these police regulations and abstained from playing fkat-out politics, whereas Big Party neocomrade D. Horowitz is notoriously obsessed with the notion that his (currently) preferred bits of the kaleidoscope are grossly undercounted and undervalued, chiefly due to pointy-headed professors and shameless mainstream journalists.

That is why it seems to D. Horowitz & Ilk that there is a cryin' need "to raise awareness of the threats we face from radical Islam." For a wonder, the neocomrade words himself with a certain precision at a crucial juncture here: awareness is far from being the same thing as knowledge. Ms. Chicken Little is assuredly not called upon to be able to explain what has kept the firmament in place up there the last six thousand years before she undertakes to make agitprop on behalf of, ta-Da! Skyfall Awareness Week. One might even applaud the Big Party (very briefly) for sidin' with awareness rather than oblivion: it makes a change from the prescribed dogmas about climate change and Absolute Free Trade and what the Executive Branch is up to as regards Heimatlandversicherung, among various other matters not difficult to discern.

Diverser and diverser still human events get, sir, the deeper one looks into them! "The more one cultivates one's ‘awareness’ of human events" you might even say, sir -- although doubtless D. Horowitz would not care to second such a motion. Life being unfair, though, you and I must definitely second his "metaphorical" motion that diversity is one thing and a Public Square equality of things diverse quite another.

So it is perfectly OK to like some bits of diversity better than others, Mr. Bones. It is even in accord with the axioms of Wingnut City and the lovin' logic of Rio Limbaugh. Diversify your "awareness," sir! After concluding that X is nicer than Y, you must, if possible, carry on to become aware also that Y happens to be a thousand times more popular than X, unless in a case where X and Y have no general implications whatever, there being no urgent need to make sure that everybody loathes M. Rousseau and Mr. Stevenson as ferociously as I. Babbitt of Harvard used to, or prefers the quartets of sensuous Boccherini over those of cerebral Haydn as we ourselves do.

I totter on the brink of De gustibus non disputandum, plainly, and it occurs to me as I scribble that the venerable maxim does not altogether apply to a wicked-liberal democracy. At very least, there must be a certain amount of disputation an hoc sit ex gustu or whether it spring rather out of what Big Party neocomrade D. Horowitz calls "reasoning" and "logic." His ideobuddy or soulmate C. Little considers that the heavens are "objectively" about to collapse on our heads, after all, and such seems to be the Horowitzian stance about Islamophalangitarianism as well. We are not exactly called upon by either alarmist to decide policy about her pet peeve by plebescite and referendum, as if all the holy Homeland were darkest Schwarzeneggerland. On the other hand, neither C. Little nor D. Horowitz is willing to consider Firmament Change or Kiddie Krusadin' a matter that is strictly ex gustu.

Neocomrade D. Horowitz, at least, paints himself into a curious corner somewhere in between. The Neo-Muslim Menace is considered 100% objective at Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh and FPM, quite as objective as Copernican astronomy or Calvinist theology. To request a show of hands about "Islamo-Fascism" ought therefore to strike the neocomrades as absurd, yet plainly it does not. The sweet puppies of neorightism are forever complainin' that their point of view is inadequately represented -- deliberately hushed up, even -- which borders on the ridiculous if they speak of their policy position, since their Little Brother very firmly refuses to allow the ignorant vulgar to influence His schemes of aggression and occupation even when the ignorant vulgar happen to be Senators of the United States and suchlike nominal worthies. George XLIII is insufficiently anti-Islamophalangitarian by many puppies' lights, but the notion of influencin' Himself with campus teach-ins is merely dotty.

But it is equally dotty, is it not?, to attempt to sway what sort of real or alleged Wissenschaft is purveyed at our colleges or universities, whether old-fashion scholarly or newfangle wombscholarly. To adopt such means implicitly treats the whole "Islamo-Fascism" fandango as a mere matter of taste and not "objective reality" at all. The Baní Velikovsky have never, that I know of, attempted to force their own product into the tertiary educational marketplace with such measures as Big Party neocomrade D. Horowitz now champions. It is not difficult to understand why not: if they won that way, they'd lose; Velikovskianity would cease being objectively correct physics and celestial mechanics and become at once a mess of ideological pottage. The Baní Velikovsky do sweet-puppyize about their plight to a certain extent, or at least they used to, fancying conspiracies to prevent most folks from knowing that their stuff is available. Since they never ascended to the radiant rhetorical heights of "put a metaphorical bullet in the head of those who oppose," I am inclined to guess that Velikovskians are rather more firmly persuaded of the objective correctness of their product than Horowitzians are, with the latter protestin' rather a bit too much . . . .

But God knows best what either crew is subjectively sincere about.

The Town Behind The Gown

Apart from being about dear old Mullah City, Mr. Bones, [0] this scribble interests a certain former traffic analyst technically: it looks from the dateline as if Ms. Rubin, definitely one of the weaker journalistic sistern up to now, may actually have got out of brave New Baghdád to have a look at the boondocks in person. Golly, what next?

And even if the lady in fact just sat in her hotel reworking invasion-language copy by that "Iraqi employee of the New York Times from Najaf" the same way she usually dresses up the press releases of Petrolaeus and Crockerius and the Green Zone Officers Club, at least it is interesting to get somebody else's spin through her for a change. Neither the Republican Party line nor the War Department line will have asked for anybody to descant upon the woes of the Twelvers, that being an impediment to the nifty scheme of engenderin' "national" "reconciliation" in the former Iraq via gobs and gobs of Affirmative Action™ for the poor oppressed TwentyPercenters, innocent little lambkins that they are. True believers in the fashionable dementia might well regard Ms. Rubin as a dangerous arsonist, pouring kerosene on troubled waters and then playing with matches. [1]

The War Department line is particularly affronted by one particular scrap of anecdote, viz.

When asked if he would consider moving back to Baghdad, he spoke of a dream, not a plan. “If we were to go back we would sell the house and move to one of the predominantly Shiite neighborhoods,” he said. “All that has happened — it does something inside you. Besides the fighting and the killing, even when that is over, it will leave something behind. Those around you have lost many family members. You have lost people you love. You cannot just forget that.”

What can the Big Picture behind that be, if not that invasionism's brave New Baghdád has been ethnically scrubbed even despite Petraeo-MacNamaran counterinsurgency? And scrubbed by the very baddies that militant Big Party operatives have been surgin' against! It's almost like reading the Daily Onion, it is, Mr. Bones, to find the expected labels reversed to make an Oscar Wilde joke: "Divorces are made in heaven," or how about, "Shí‘ís are losers in Peaceful Freedumbia"? [2]

M. Haydar Jawád, the protagonist of that anecdote, spares Ms. Rubin or the Unknown NYTC Employee some pains, perhaps, by tossing in a hefty swig of editorializing, hopefully without any prompting. However it is not top-grade editorializing, I fear, and especially problematical is "You cannot just forget that." Clearly oblivion all depends on who "you" are. Geese must forget what ganders cherish up forever, or least mere geese must act as if they had forgotten. Were this not the case, clearly "national" "reconciliation" would be impossible altogether, and then where would aggression-basin' be? [3]

==

Also fort mauvais from an orthodox GOP/DoW perspective is that Ms. Rubin's fifteen hundred words don't contain a single syllable about the evil Qommies.[4] Can there be evil in Mullah City and Iran hath not done it? Surely not! ’Astaghfiru 'lláh!



____
[0] Perhaps what they need is an Al Vellucci , sir?

[1] It's picturesque that the Affirmative Action™ product has been known to produce a majoritarian backlash in holy Homeland circles as well as the Big Party's semiconquered provinces, notably the circles of Rio Limbaugh and Wingnut City. Can our GOP geniuses be tryin' to export democracy and a' that in an over-literal way, as if they could get disagreeable political stuff out of here by dumpin' it over there?


[2] Sometimes an anecdote is only an anecdote. I don't insist that there exists any Big Picture to be seen from here, only that if there be one, that is it.


[3] Spotting exactly who's a masterful gander and who's only a silly goose is admittedly not always easy. Manifestly Rancho Crawford and Château Kennebunkport and Castle Cheney are ganders who can never for an instant forget 11 September 2001 and must maintain their viscera in a permanent state of uproar about that impertinence. It is somewhat less clear why the former Sunní Ascendancy of P.F. should be accounted ganderlike at the moment, with everything done before the aggression of March 2003 to be forgotten immediately, and everything suffered since to be carefully treasured up for purposes of Affirmative Action™.

Still, though M. Jawád (and you and I) may think that a somewhat arbitrary arrangement, Mr. Bones, where on Gore's green earth would the Big Party's semiconquered provinces be if every last neo-subject remembered all her grievances, and intended to get even sooner or later?


[4] Fortunately for the Aggression Fan Club, "Iraq" is rather in remission at the moment, and Ms. Rubin's deviations can't do Boy and Party, or the violence pros, much damage unless they are stubbornly persisted in, which seems unlikely.

Whether this type of story ever has much impact is also questionable. No evil Qommies and no heroic paleface Party operatives either, only tedious neo-Iraqi subjects wherever one looks -- is that formula likely to play well in Peoria?

"Ae Fond Kiss" Department

Let's have the whole most salient stanza, shall we, Mr. Bones, if only for Scot. Lit.'s sake: [1]

Gazing on my precious treasure, Lost in reckless dreams of pleasure, Thy unspotted heart possessing, Grasping at the promis'd blessing, Pouring out my soul before thee, Living only to adore thee, Could I see the tempest brewing? Could I dread the blast of ruin?

Ah, woe! Only "Had we never looved sae kindly; / Had we never looved sae blindly" &c. is Robert Burns; the rest, only Mrs. Anne Grant. [2] Yet that's all right too, I suppose, because the gentry of Mu’ámmara Junction are still in their initial swoon, even though it has been neared five years than four since the former Iraq got itself formerized. Well and deeply swooned -- "reckless" is indeed un mot juste -- are the mu’ámmariyya, to be still talking about "First Steps" even as the Blast of Ruin looks to be hard upon them!

The way the infatuate misreckon ex-Iraqi things marches to a very different tune,

. . . the Petraeus show and all that indicates by way of American failure [3] . . . the pattern of unremitting failure in occupied Iraq, from the collapse of any popular respect for the new political class, to the hollowness of the "reconciliation" schemes by the likes of Hashemi, and the approaching collapse of the Kurdish quasi-separatist dream . . . .

Today's linkage communiqué is triple-barreled, aimed to blow away not only Free Kurds and traitor Turks, but also that [exp. del.] "new political class." Bliss or Nancy or Dulcinea or whatever the damsel's name be called distinctly reminds me of Cicero on the bosom of Clodia, "a well-traveled thoroughfare only occasionaly available to birds." Yet love is blind, -- did nobody ever tell you that, Mr. Bones? -- and no doubt "Thy unspotted heart possessing" is subjectively sincere enough amongst the impervious gentry.

Speaking of other folks' "reckless dreams of pleasure," I don't quite see why the Free Kurds should be accounted lukewarm half-and-halfers and quasis, separationwise. What's left of Free Kurdish integration into the former Iraq is rather a Crawford or Ankara or Turtle Bay idea than anything they set much store by themselves. Yet perhaps that may change, should the traitor Turks actually invasionize their Beulah Land. More likely, supralegal vigilante invasion would throw them straight into the clutches of militant GOP extremism without so much as a rest stop at brave New Baghdád. Political Willy Suttons go where the Weltmacht is, or at least they very plainly ought to.

The Free Kurds haven't done much for poor M. al-Málikí, and certainly he cannot do much for them. Up to just now, both the mu’ámmariyya and Dr. Righteous Virtue have mostly left the Free Kurds out of their lovely ideodaydreams about the aboriginal unsectarianism of "Iraq," but that fantasy too might conceivably change. The FK's may not be very pious, but technically speaking they have every right to be represented at the Sunní International.

On the other hand, so do the traitor Turks, especially with M. Erdogan and M. Gul firmly ensconced at the top of the greasy pole. The Blast of Ruin can be rather distinctly heard howling right outside the dream palace of Mu’ámmariya Junction, as it seems to me: how come neither Free Kurds nor traitor Turks are keen to ride to the rescue of the TwentyPercenters, so remarkably unkeen that they even feel free to quarrel with one another whilst Bliss and Nancy and Dulcinea stand in gravest peril? Love seems to be quite as deaf as blind. [4]

And now enough of that, though feel free to recycle note [1] again, Mr. Bones, as a sort of dal capo al fin.


___
[1] "Not very elegant prose for the expression of such high concepts, you may say. But let's forget for a moment . . . ."

[2] Cf. on "Fairwell Bliss, and Fairwell Nancy" Hess 193 WoO 152 #20.

[3] Evidently it is intended to augmentate the vernacular by importation of the má ... min gizmo, for there is no reason to believe the paragraph that I pluck a few gorgeous feathers from was originally intended in any language but English. Perhaps we are being humbugged that the gentry have been translating chickentracks so long that they cannot think without an imported mental and lexical toolkit?


[4] As usual, Bones, we raise no question about the subjective sincerity of the blind and deaf and dream-ensorcelled. Even the most speculative discussion of cynicism would be absurd with the factious swains of Mu’ámmara Junction and Historiae.Org. Undoubtedly they cannot "see the tempest brewing," for what sane cynic would have any motive to pretend to believe their beliefs or affirm their affirmations?

Their faction and facticity runs not at all in our own direction, but why on earth should it? Consider Mr. B. and Dr. R. V. a splendid enhancement of the multiform diversity of human events, Mr. Bones, try to keep the aesthetic side of their show uppermost. You might as well, sir, since at the Willy Sutton level these gentry do not significantly exist in any case, and are not likely to start existing any time soon.

To attempt a moral indictment by charging that if they really cared for Bliss and Nancy and Dulcinea, they'd try to see clearer and hear better so as to get their precious treasure out of danger more efficaciously is tempting, slightly, but it won't do. If hard pressed on that front, they'd almost certainly read us a sermonette about how OUGHTABE trumps IS, falling back on a sort of moralizing that has appealed to many other factions and factiousnesses and facticities than their own in the last couple dozen centuries. To invite such gentry to be what you and I and M. Pascal would call "reasonable," to take pains to think well first and foremost, looks to them like a whispering of Satan. They are not totally unaware of what the political weather is like outside their private pleasure domes, they are sufficiently aware (as I conjecture) to turn their thoughts away from meteorology more or less deliberately.

Ah, well, Mr. Bones:

People in love cannot be won by kindness, And opposition makes them feel like martyrs.

You and I and M. Pascal really are oppositionists for the Xanaduvians and might as well admit that we'd basically like either to woo them out of love with Bliss and Nancy and Dulcinea altogether, or else win them over to a cold-eyed despair that sees how vast the gulf yawns between OUGHTABE and IS. Whether, in the second case, they finally stick with OUGHTABE or defect to IS is not in fact of any great concern to us, yet the infatuates are bound to think that we urge them to sell out as well as grow up.

"It is admirable that you want it, only don't think you are ever going to get it" is decidedly an adult flavor of moralizing. The young at heart, plus almost all inveterate and subliminal Platonizers, find it scarcely intelligible, let alone palatable. "Idealism" in the cant or journalistic sense is really connected with Father Plato and Grandfather Parmenides, but it goes wrong by greedily and impatiently wanting its Dream Palaces right here and right now, here and now where we can have no abiding Xanadu, as Gloomy Gus wisely remarked. That is the main reason why our dreamy neogentry find Gus such a wet blanket. It is certainly no accident that M. Pascal was affiliated to an Augustinian conventicle. One does not require the Eastern Mediterranean Monotheist jenseits to make platonizing intellectually respectable and keep it from going bad, obviously, for the juggernaut got started centuries before EMM came in, yet Idealism does need some sort of jenseits, and a better quality product that one commonly finds nowadays. To platonize and parmenidate about nothing lofter than a restoration of the former Sunní Ascendancy in "Iraq" is bad thought as well as bad taste. There is no law against rooting for that team if it takes one's fancy, hovever, de gustibus non disputandum: the bad thinking proper starts when one tries to make an "ideal" out of such an extremely diesseitige agenda, and gets worse when it collides with a more nominalist assessment and starts feeling itself martyred, as the poet well diagnoses the Xanadu syndrome. Bad thought culminates when the Xanadu crew lose track of the distinction between "find" and "invent" altogether and start behaving like Hans Christian Andersen's emperor, announcing that there is no need to continue our pilgrimage because -- as everybody pure in heart can see at a glance! -- we have already arrived.

The mu’ámmariyya signalizes "our" happy homecoming as follows:

[W]e could say the dead end and the midnight of the occupation's dismemberment-scheme for Iraq signals the dawn of a new sovereign and unified Iraq.

No doubt "we" could say that, if "we" chose, but "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is briefer, no harder to enunciate, and has the advantage of being considerably more pertinent to the present state of the former Iraq. Allow me to recommend it, Mr. Bones, should any mantra at all be indispensably necessary.

(( But God know best what mantras the lovelorn should mumble! ))

Who Is Jim Holt?

(( Moderation in Mu’ámariyya! What next after that, Mister Bones? ))

Having no notion of this teller, we must perforce start with the tale, the tale as anyone may find it at the London Review of Books. ('Tis a sadly tame and unconspiratorial commencement already, begorrah!)

Suppose I were to quote very briefly indeed,

One can’t say for certain that oil supplied the prime motive. But the hypothesis is quite powerful when it comes to explaining what has actually happened in Iraq.

, already the wimpishness is manifest. "War for oil" is in itself a sadly rational business, or at least seems so here on Lord Mammon's Planet. Really fun conspiracies feature extraterrestrial (extramammonian) invaders from Utterly Elsewhere, faith-crazies or race-crazies -- or best of all, sheer evil-crazies, like those apocryphal comic-book "mad scientists determined to destroy the Universe for ends of their own." As soon as the Mu’ámara Junction gentry and all that ilk are presented with hypotheses about secret manipulations tending towards ends that might conceivably be their own, their interest wanes, their attention wanders, they resume talking about other folks' alleged ‘cartoons.’ [2]

And if "War for Oil" is wimpy already, what word suffices for the wimpicity of "War for Oil" being advanced only as "the hypothesis ... explaining what has actually happened in Iraq"? What chance have we complacent Hypothesis People against all the ravenin' hordes of Conspiracy People?

It's a nifty appeal antecedently, that one, but as a description of How The World Works as of 10/15/2007 08:02PM , is it not rather a misleading one, O Bones? Are not we Hypothesis People fundamentally in charge at present, with the Conspiracy People reduced to smashing other people's airliners into other people's skyscrapers just to get a paragraph in the press for themselves, perhaps occasioning a slight uptick in casualty insurance rates, thouh scarcely life insurance rates, for others?

But that's only me as usual. Here's unusual Jim:

The costs – a few billion dollars a month plus a few dozen American fatalities (a figure which will probably diminish, and which is in any case comparable to the number of US motorcyclists killed because of repealed helmet laws) – are negligible compared to $30 trillion in oil wealth, assured American geopolitical supremacy and cheap gas for voters. In terms of realpolitik, the invasion of Iraq is not a fiasco; it is a resounding success.

Is that not moderation and proportion and a sense of measure, Mr. Bones? What's the point of our Uncle Sam being the Grand Exception from Mere Mankind, the One Indispensable Nation, the Sole Remainin' Hyperpower, if "a few billion dollars a month plus a few dozen" deaths either deters Sam or encourages? Maybe the Peaceful Freedumbia now created by the militant extremist GOP was a good idea, or maybe it was a bad idea, or maybe it was only an idea of its time -- why should it concern us first and foremost to sort all that out, Mr. Bones, as long as it's all only a matter of spare change in Weltpolitik rather than of basic solvency?

But you may have noticed, sir, that Jim Holt (who?) and I are not broadcasting on exactly the same wavelength. Jim says "resounding success," I speak of "spare change." Not quite the same thing, though of course our Sam must have had some very resonant and well attested successes in his CV to be able to spare the change now, to simply soar far above the whole Bin Búsh v. Bin Ládin historic sideshow and all Greater Texan or Outer Khurasánian backwaters of history whatsoever.

Eventus probat acta, what I myself like best about Jim Who is his literal bottom line:

Still, there is reason to be sceptical of the picture I have drawn: it implies that a secret and highly ambitious plan turned out just the way its devisers foresaw, and that almost never happens.

Just so. Reflect upon that, Mr. Bones, mark it well and deeply digest! Are we Hypothesis People now become Weltherren und Weltherrscher, BinBushies or BinLadinites, thanks to some "secret and highly ambitious plan," some emanation or ebullition from the Tanks of Thought? Possess we anything to write a sure-fire best-seller about, like The Managment Secrets of Attila the Hun -- "You, too, can make your own country as great as Greater Texas is, just send $139.95 to learn exactly how, call toll-free . . . ."

Surely not. Wince! Yuck!! SURELY NOT!!!


_____
[1] "Jim Holt writes for the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker."

No doubt he does, and since both organs of trendiness are well worth avoiding, we usually avoid them and thus is no great mystery that we have not heard of him before.


[2] Why is a ‘cartoon’ not like a comic book? Not a hard question: at Mu’ámara Junction ‘cartoon’ is a technical term, a muSTalaH, whereas I have just spoken of comic books merely literaliter et vulgariter.

As to the exact nature of the MJ gentry's technicality, I am not altogether sure of my ground, but part of this high matter, at least, must be that one cannot (literally) cartoon a conspiracy and produce a drawing that any editor is likely to buy to grace her corporation's editorial pages. Nine times out of ten the graphics are inadequate -- which makes it a lousy cartoon, me judice -- so labels have to be attached to this or that icon and perhaps a verbal punch line appended. But once that supplementation has been done, what emerges is at best a pictorial representation of Conspiracy Detected, not of Conspiracy simpliciter. Conspiracy Detected must displease the MJ gentry for two reasons, if not more: (1) if it's already detected, MJ may not hope to gain the honour of first detection, and (2) a bit less selfocentrically, naturally undetected conspiracies worry the mu’ámarian mindset worst.

AEI and GOP and Heritagitarians and Hoovervillains might loosely be said to be in a "conspiracy" to advance Lord Mammon's interests and coënjoy them forever with their Master, but now that everybody politically awake and adult has heard that creaky Juggernaut comin' at us for about the last fifteen decades, there are no "missing links" left to trace and scarcely even any serious controversies about exactly how to connect up the Mammonite dots already discovered.

Observe, Mr. Bones, that I have just tried to drawn you a political cartoon -- to the extent that an utter Unpicture Person like me can aspire to do so with mere words. The gentry at Mu’ámara Junction think about ALL ‘cartoons’ the way you (and I) think about my feeble attempt, that's the heart of the matter, I believe. However you must not let it confuse you that the MJ gentry happen to side with, and propagandize for, certain clients in the Greater Levant who happen to theological iconoclasts. That's only an accident, sir, or at least so I unconspiratorially suppose it to be. The MJ gentry invite one to throw away the ‘cartoons’ of Ann Arbor and Times Square and Rancho Crawford not because all cartoons are pictures -- truly a reason for dummies, that one! -- but because what the MJ gentry toploftily despise as ‘cartoons’ are bad pictures, cheap trashy icons and idols far inferior to their own vastly more Rembrandt-like portraits and panoramas.

I fear I simply don't like these MJ gentry very much, Mr. Bones, but like Jim Holt, I at least know that I don't. You tell me, sir: am I spoofing MJ too outrageously to accuse it of holding that the only real difference between an ideological ‘cartoon’ and an ideological Rembrandt is how many dots are connected and how many links went unmissed?

The serious -- theological or post-theological or paratheological -- iconoclasm of the Greater Levant must find the MJ gentrification as unsatisfactory as I do, and probably even more unsatisfactory, for after all it's their ideological cargos, not mine, that get shipwrecked or highjacked whenever routed through Mu’ámara Junction. Serious Greater Levantine iconoclasts don't want fewer links missed and more dots connected and better ideological pictures painted, what they want, oddly enough, is simply no pictures at all, not even ideopictures. (Golly, who'd 'a' thunk it, that ‘iconoclasm’ might mean that!)

Lessons From Lessers? Lessons For Losers?

Suppose we start with a sort of snap quiz, Mr. Bones, of a familiar tertiary educationalist kind, short passages on which the patient is to make wise and erudite remarks in order to prove that all those parental bucks for her tuition have not been laid out in vain.

In the upcoming Presidential primaries, Americans will have the chance to choose among candidates who propose immediate withdrawal from Iraq (Richardson), rapid drawdowns (Edwards and Obama), open-ended commitment to the war (Giuliani, Romney, McCain), or a resigned middle ground, notably Hillary Clinton, who acknowledges that the occupation will likely endure well into the next Presidential term no matter which party occupies the White House. The Iraqi people have no such choice, even though it’s their future that is at stake—and even though the creation of a democratic republic, one in which the Iraqis command their own destiny, has been a stated goal of the war. According to President Bush, American troops will leave whenever the Iraqis ask us to. “It’s their government’s choice,” he has said. “If they were to say, leave, we would leave.” But while the Iraqi government is divided and uncertain about the presence of occupying forces, . . . .

If you can't figure out what resides in that terminal ellipsis of mine, sir, I shall be gravely disappointed in you, Bones. That manufactured puzzle is only a very minor part of our quiz, the real first question is what a concerned citizen of the holy Homeland is up to when he begins a "comment" for the New Yorker magazine called "Ask the Iraqis" like that. Where is Mr. Lawrence Wright headed when he marches forth like that? I haven't read ahead myself, apart from the words missed out, which were merely "the will of the Iraqi people has been clear from the beginning: they want the troops withdrawn." However, I really do think we should leave them out strictly in a higher sense, not getting distracted into speculations about the state of occupied public opinion under the yoke of militant GOP extremism. You and I may know a little more about that topic than Homelander Wright does, but certainly we don't know enough to be dictating invasion and occupation policy to our Uncle Sam on the basis of it. In short, let's wonder mostly about asking about the New Yorker gentry, shall we?

Why, above all, does Homelander Wright begin by setting up that particular antithesis of abundant free will for Wunnerful US, but hapless predestination for occupied Them? Doubtless he subliminally swiped it from old books of the former Christojudaeanity, but equally doubtless he does not intend his corporation's customers to think of the Synod of Dort right off the mark. You'll notice a certain arbitrariness about his rhetorical framework, perhaps? Couldn't he have almost as well turned the trope upside down, and congratulated the denizens of the former Iraq on possessing a far more representative neorégime than the holy Homeland, at the moment, anyway, here in the long shadow of Floridagate 2000 and the subsequent Big Bang? Neo-Iraqi subjects of Rancho Crawford and Castle Cheney, or at least their fingers, could rather easily be maintained to be more satisfactorily "democratic" than almost any other set of citizens (or fingers) going nowadays. The actual governance of poor M. al-Málikí has various deficiences that are well known outside the fever swamps of Rio Limbaugh, yet the foundations of legitimacy are, in a textbook kind of way, very formidable. At worst, the GZ collaborationist pols merely ignore the "constitution" bestowed upon them by Khalílzád Pasha, whereas our own rulers are makin' a stout attempt to replace Mr. Madison's moldy antiquarian stuff with somethin' better adapted to Modern Times, and to Long Wars and, above all, to Big Management as authoritatively conceived by the Harvard Victory School MBA classes. O happy neo-subject them, O miserable heimatländisch us!

I lay the reverse English on a bit thick, perhaps, but there is a clear enough surface upon which to lay it. If Homelander Larry wants to begin his appeal by stipulating that Wunnerful US can do anything we have a mind to, he might have worried a little that perhaps US have done our druthers already, and especially to Peaceful Freedumbia. The past is immutable, except for Herr Karl Rove and other Big Party (sub-)Orwellizers, yet an omniscience and omnipotence that always begin just this instant and never last long before before one has to hit the [RESET] button again is not the cat's pajamas either. "Is there evil in the city, and Wunnerful US have not done it?" [1]

Time to be moving on, so let's remind ourselves that Mr. Wright begins by thinking US may do as we please, whereas the wills of our neo-subjects are enslaved and ineffectual. "Life is unfair," so to make up for the unfairness in this case, what US ought to do is whatever the neo-Iraqis want. That's the Form of Larry the Homelander's proposition, and one ought to distinguish it from his notion that what the victims want is for US to vamoose at once -- not so much because it is factually questionable, as because it is mere materia from The Philosopher's point of view. Skipping a great deal of merely factual yimmer-yammer about attempts at public opinion polling under the jackboot of Crawford, we arrive at

One might assume that if American forces could make the country more secure, Iraqis would feel better disposed toward the U.S. presence. Apparently not. American military leaders say that the surge has reduced sectarian attacks to their lowest level in more than a year, and yet the number of Iraqis wanting the U.S. to withdraw has risen by twelve per cent over the same period of time. Anbar Province, which President Bush recently visited because the surge had its greatest success there, has the highest concentration of those saying America should leave immediately. The Iraqi government has a far more ambivalent view of the occupation than its people do. Inside the Green Zone, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and a restive Council of Representatives have been struggling to respond to the sentiments of their constituents while not actually asking the Americans to leave. In June, the demagogic militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr, who heads one of the most powerful Shiite parties in the country, sponsored a resolution requiring the government to seek permission of the parliament before asking the U.N. to reauthorize the presence of foreign forces in Iraq. The resolution passed, gathering support even from Sunni lawmakers, including Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, then speaker of the parliament, who had previously called for the Americans to stay in the country for as long as a decade, or until “they have corrected what they have done.” Yet even Sadr was pressing not for an immediate pullout but, rather, for an unspecified “timeline” for withdrawal.

Homelander L. Wright of the New Yorker magazine unfortunately relies most on what he knows least, and even that he does not press very hard. Somebody more pertinacious could have presented the above material in the form of a lawyer's brief against the fundamental legitimacy of the Big Management Party's Peaceful Freedumbia. As it is, one can't tell whether the man thinks it matters -- or should matter -- what the Security Council resolves. He doesn't think politically enough to entertain the rather elementary suspicion that the quasideputies may have engaged in ineffectual resolving precisely because nothing could come of it. [2]

Next comes a conventionally wise account of all the disasters that will ensue in the absence of Responsible Nonwithdrawal™ that we may pass over to reach the peroration:

Yet the presence of American troops is itself a goad to insurgency, and an impediment to the creation of legitimate civil authority. As long as we remain in Iraq, the Iraqi people will feel themselves to be subjugated by a foreign power. If the Iraqis were to go to the polls, dip their fingers in the purple ink, and actually choose whether or not to allow the Americans to remain, they would have to reconcile their loathing for the occupation with their dread of what might happen without it. As the Republican and Democratic Presidential contenders debate whether we should leave now, or soon, or years from now, they should remember that it’s not just an American decision. We didn’t ask the Iraqis if we could invade their country; we didn’t ask them if we could occupy it; and now we are not asking them if we should leave. Whatever we end up doing, we need to remember that eventually the only people who are going to occupy Iraq are the Iraqis, and that the decision of when we leave, as inevitably we will, should be as much theirs as ours.

Homelander Larry subtly hides his punch line well before the end of his joke or shaggy dog story, so I have been emboldened to embolden it above, lest anybody overlook. Since exactly the same "solution" occurred to one of the cheapjack señoritos of National Review, we may first congratulate Mr. Lawrence Wright on his bipartisan instincts, Mr. Bones, and then deplore the final death of any plausible claim that The New Yorker is more sophisticated than the little lady in Dubuque. Lawrence Wright and Rick Lowry (I think it was) deserve to be credited equally when Aggression for Dummies finally hits the market.

Larry of Manhattan can't report accurately what other people say, but that scarcely matters from his own announced perspective. He professes not to care what the neo-Iraqi subjects of the militant GOP say, as long as they say it for themselves. The profession cannot be taken at face value, to be sure, but nevertheless it is professed. If you read all the TNY prose and "comment" that I have skipped over, Mr. Bones, I believe you'll agree with me that Larry of Manhattan expects that if his "plan" were realized, a plurality of inky fingers would be raised in support of the Responsible Nonwithdrawal™ product.

We need not stray off into parallel universes where such a ludicrous plebescite actually takes place and results in this-or-that result, which subsequently is, or, as the case may be, ain't, complied with by Rancho Crawford and Castle Cheney, by "President Clinton" or "President Giuliani." Nothing would be less becoming in us devotees of St. Aristotle than to wander off in that direction, not only putting matter before Form, but preferring hypothetical matter to boot. We know in advance that this is pitch that defiles, sir, and the only safe course is to stand well clear of it. [3]

One begs pardon of God!


____
[1] Si clanget tuba in civitate, et populus non expavescet? Si erit malum in civitate quod Dominus non fecit? (Proph. Am. III:6)

I wonder where Homelander Larry and the New Yorker crew stand on the Decatur Declaration, "[I give you] our country, gentlemen, may she ever be in the right! Yet our country, right or wrong!"?

Imagine a TNY "comment" on the state of the aggression that began from that bumper sticker as a point of departure, pointing out that, although many holy Homelanders do not much care for the Decatur Declaration, everybody recognizes it as part of the heritage of Wunnerful US, and very few think it flat-out insane, as it obviously would be if voiced in the former Iraq concering the current neorégime. Poor M. al-Málikí can scarcely get those who agree with him to rally 'round, let alone anybody who significantly differs.


[2] Plus "gathering support even from Sunni lawmakers" suggests that Larry the Homelander may really have been what the Mu’ámara Junction gentry would call cartoonized: "Here Wunnerful US have been consistently trying to pander to the TwentyPercenters for years, and yet they don't want US hanging around indefinitely. What shocking ingratitude!" One can see where Larry fetched that tripe and baloney from easily enough, but it is more important to notice that he is not a close reader of the invasion-language press, from which it is quite possible to derive more accurate ideas than he has managed to do. I'm afraid I should not be inclined to trust his account of any third party's opinions after this performance, and that is not a happy conclusion to arrive at about "comment" from the direction of Manhattan Island city-slickerdom.



[3] This sort of moral and political self-defilement has been referred to as "blaming the victim" in a somewhat different context. However, the chief object of this exercise is that Señorito Ricky of Dubuque and Rio Limbaugh and Master Larry of NYC are utterly excused from blamin' themselves. Exactly who takes the fall is unimportant, as long as the kiddies do not. Such is probably the case as well with ordinary victim-bashin', yet I am not entirely sure, considering that the phrase is usually conjoined with another along the lines of "Society is at fault, really."

That ideological epicycle won't do when it comes to Big Party aggression and occupation policy, however, for Uncle Sam is not at all the same perp as Society. If Sam dunnit -- as is obviously the case as regards the bloody bushogenic shambles of the former Iraq -- it is a good deal more difficult for the kiddies to exculpate themselves altogether.

To view it from the flip side, wouldn't it be bizarre for some wannabe Decatur to lift a glass to "Our society, right or wrong!"? Millions of Wunnerful US in fact believe something of the sort, especially around Wingnut City and the editorial offices of the Weekly Standard and the Big Party's tanks of thought, yet it sounds feeble, or even silly, to say it out loud. "Society" is scarcely the name of an agent. Nobody ever cartoonizes, either literally or in the Mu’ámara Junction figurative way, by marking one of the persons portrayed "Society" to clarify some point that the mere image does not convey. Whereas poor Sam is so cartoonable that there are rigid iconographic guidelines in place that make labeling unnecessary for even the least competent doodler that any organ of journalism would ever actually buy from.

"Uncle Sam" is an agent, and always has been; "Society" is . . . what? A fog, a mist, an ambience . . . .

But God knows best about all the Picture People.

(Wherein Rear-Col. Dr. A. Powerpoint Solves The Former Iraq)

We shouldn't stay in a losing game indefinitely. I believe we should give ourselves until October 2008; if there's no Iraqi political accommodation by then, we should get out. Meanwhile, we must play out the hand we have dealt ourselves.

Surely that must be the shortest and snappiest bit of paleface planmongering yet! Unfortunately Professor P. is likely to prove much inferior at self-knowledge and knowledge of colonial politics than his day-to-day claptrappery might suggest to the unwary.

As usual, there is no need to raise any questions about this perp's subjective sincerity. It suffices in general to repeat that subjective sincerity is a very cheap commodity indeed. In perfect good faith, Tony Powerpoint will discover in October 2008 (and conceivably in October 2028 as well) that he has slightly misjudged the state of the aggression and must revise his previous recommendations accordingly. [1]

Brief though his planmongerin' be, it yet includes enough evidence to make Tony's upcomin' U-turn easy to spot from afar, for anybody who attends more to human events than to violence professional statistics and slick e-presentations:

[T]he stakes are immense. America's reputation and credibility are at risk; it "broke" Iraq, put 28 million lives at risk and is morally responsible for the consequences. Global energy security -- the continued flow of the oil exports that fuel the world's economy -- are also in play.

Will the petroleum and the credibilitarianism and the "morally responsible" that TP mentions -- plus the sentimental or "ideological" attachment to the Tel Aviv statelet that he carefully omits to mention -- be significantly different next year or twenty-one years hence? Will these considerations have ceased to matter because poor M. al-Málikí's neorégime, or its successors, shall have done, or shall have failed to do, such-and-such? Does Tony Powerpoint seriously -- as distinguished from sincerely -- propose to allow the merest tail of Sole Remainin' Hyperpower to wag the whole elephant like that? The odds are about 1000:1, I'd say, that it is a near total failure of self-knowledge for Tony to think that Tony is serious.

As to knowledge of the occupied indigs, whatever a Tony Powerpoint may possess in that line certainly does not seem to empower:

The leaders of Iraq's sectarian and ethnic factions are shaping events far more than the United States can. The most the U.S. can do now is to continue to pressure all sides into some form of political accommodation.

It is some other invasion lover's department, clearly, to decide exactly what sort of pressure to apply and how to go about it. (Col. Dr. Powerpoint feels nuch more at home countin' and classifyin' tanks, don't you know?)

Emitted from the lips of a different brand of invasion lover, the whole shtik might be taken for an attempted bluff at the expense of poor M. al-Málikí, but Tony disavows that notion in so many words, and here again one should, as far as I see, take the perp at his own word:

What leverage we have at this point does not lie in threatening to leave but in offering more incentives in the form of aid and long-term support.

[2]
==

Moral disapprobation befits this shabby performance, though not because of any shortage of sincerity. Col. Dr. Powerpoint simply is not doin' his own proper job. Tusk, tusk! The Los Angeles Times sufficiently indicates what sort of duty gets shirked:

Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies is the author of Iraqi Force Development: Conditions for Success, Consequences of Failure.

Read the whole scribble, Mr. Bones, it's short enough, and then judge for yourself whether there are three words of it that bear on international strategy or "force development." Or even on "consequences of failure," though that is admittedly rather out of Tony Powerpoint's professional line, strictly delineated.

What this piechart-crazed perp ought to be doin', I should think, is to work out a viable proposal according to which Boy and Party can redefine "success and victory in the former Iraq" down to some target small enough to be attainable, or at least very probably attainable. Yet their Tony does not attempt anythin' of that sort, he might as well be Princess Cassandra of the soon-to-be-former Troy waving her arms and prophesying doom, for all the good he does the cause of invasionism with this sad stuff. Shirkin', I calls it. [3]


_____
[1] Rank-and-file Big Managers from Grant's Old Party will take the view that poor Tony misjudges the situation right this moment, for is it really the case that Boy and Party are "in a losing game"? Have not Petrolaeus and Crockerius all but nailed the coonskin to the wall?


[2] To follow up the previous footnote, do not the Boy-'n'-Party hogen-mogens think so well of their nifty Bribe-a-Tribe™ scheme that everybody ought rather to be talkin' about the radiant successes of current "incentives in the form of aid and ... support"?

Be that as it may, Col. Dr. Powerpoint almost certainly subscribes to the conventional Big Party wisdom that all foreigners can be bought, wherein he betrays a lack of self-knowledge and indig knowledge simultaneously. Unless, to be sure, he'd happily sell out personally to the highest bidder.


[3] As you and I agreed the other day, Mr. Bones, although we stipulate the subjective sincerity of a Tony Powerpoint, our stipulation does not mean that we can't let it cross our minds at all that he might be up to somethin' cynical and manipulative. Uncharitable speculation must come second or third or nineteenth, but when it does at last drop by for a brief visit, that "October 2008" could easily be regarded under the species of politics. If Televisionland can be persuaded to more or less forget the whole bloody bushogenic shambles until "President Giuliani" has been elected, then the Kiddie Krusade or Long War of the invasionite crew can probably be protracted until some date in 2011 or 21012 without too much difficulty. One could make "We shouldn't stay in a losing game indefinitely" fit that paradigm too, no? Verb. sap.

The Upstart Affix, ossía, This Way To The E-Gress

In addition to redecoratin' other folks' Islám for 'em free of charge, Mr. Bones, our jihád careerists have designs on the language of aggression as well. At least Big Party neocomrade D. Horowitz does. Take a look at this, sir, straight from the upper left flank of the horse's anatomy as of 10/14/2007 04:18AM:

Islamo Fascism Awareness Week Berkeley -- Nonie Darwish, October 22 Brown -- Robert Spencer, October 24 Cal Poly -- Greg Davis, October 25 Cal State Fullerton -- Nonie Darwish Clemson -- Mike Adams, October 25 Columbia -- Phyllis Chesler, Ibn Warraq, Christina Hoff Sommers Columbia -- Sean Hannity, David Horowitz, October 26 DePaul -- Robert Spencer, October 25 Emory -- David Horowitz, October 24 George Mason -- Luanah Saghieh, Alan Nathan, October 22 Lawrence Univ. -- Jonathan Schanzer Maryland -- Michael Ledeen Michigan -- David Horowitz, October 23 Northeastern -- Daniel Pipes, October 24 Ohio State -- David Horowitz, October 25 Penn -- Rick Santorum, October 24 Penn State -- Rick Santorum, October 23 Rhode Island -- Robert Spencer, October 24 San Francisco State -- Melanie Morgan, October 24 Stanford -- Wafa Sultan Temple -- Rick Santorum, October 24 Tulane -- Ann Coulter, October 22 UC Santa Barbara -- Dennis Prager, October 25 UC Irvine -- Ann Coulter UCLA -- Nonie Darwish, October 24 UCLA -- Frank Pastore, John Ziegler USC -- Ann Coulter, October 25 Virginia -- Frank Gaffney Washington -- Kirby Wilbur Washington -- Michael Medved, October 25 Wisconsin -- David Horowitz, October 22

That scrap is worth filing away in our antidossiermonger dossier for the O.B. of it, though only after it is resorted by surnames from the second, or bozo, column with duplicates removed. Meanwhile what catches the invigilatorial eye is the authoritative neocomradely header. Should you ever resolve to pervert, Mr. Bones, make sure that what they tatoo or brand on your forehead to proclaim your new allegiance forever reads "Islamo Fascism" -- two separate words, no hyphen.

Is that how everybody at Wombschool Normal University writes it? I have no idea, actually, and even if I did, I'd continue to defer to D. Horowitz myself, him bein' stultus stultorum Dei, as it were. [0] As the Baní Chomsky decided long ago, one needs to borrow a native speaker, or at least her intuition, to decide such subtleties. On the basis of certain private communications I have tentatively concluded as follows:

(A) D. Horowitz is a bozo is perfectly acceptable, whereas
(B) *‘U. Bin Ládin is an Islamo ain't.[1]

All the same, almost the first thing I did was feed the pertinent bit of tripe and baloney to my pet google. The results obtained are not, I fear, very useful or reliable:

Results 1 - 10 of about 126,000 for "Islamo Fascism Awareness Week". (0.17 seconds) Results 1 - 10 of about 11,900 for "Islamofascism Awareness Week". (0.05 seconds) Results 1 - 10 of about 126,000 for "Islamo-fascism Awareness Week". (0.13 seconds)

It appears that hyphens and spaces inter se convertuntur over at Google Corp., not to mention UPpers and lowers, which I daresay is best for almost all inquiries other than the present one. Machines cannot be expected to know or care whether Islamo is "really a word" or not, the same way bozo is undoubtedly a word.[2] To quest for Islamo as a snark in itself is useless, but if it were a nonmythological critter, it ought to leave certain traces in the cloud chamber as it passes:

Results 1 - 10 of about 1,260,000 for Islamo. (0.05 seconds) Results 1 - 10 of about 843 for Islamos. (0.10 seconds) Results 1 - 10 of about 423 for "Islamo's". (0.17 seconds) Results 1 - 10 of about 843 for "Islamos'". (0.04 seconds)

Final white space is discarded, clearly. Incidentally, isn't it a bit peculiar that the name of the D. Horowitz Travelin' Circus and Brain Wash should constitute almost precisely one hundredth of one percent of all alleged snark sightings? Furthermore, Google Corp. -- those notoriously unhorowitzified friends of Globoterror -- seem to take the view that *Islamos are as mythological in the Muttersprache as *unicorns in the former Real World, wondering "Did you mean: Islamic?" [3] Of course I did not mean ‘Islamic’ at all, I meant what I keyboarded, yet perhaps we may reconsider, and even pursue these inquiries a little further:

Results 1 - 10 of about 300,000 for "Islamic fascism". (0.12 seconds) Results 1 - 10 of about 579 for "Islam fascism". (0.11 seconds) Your search - Muslimofascism - did not match any documents. Results 1 - 10 of about 1,330 for "Muslim fascism". (0.50 seconds) Your search - Islamophacism - did not match any documents.

At this point one may give the neo comrades of Wombschool Normal the benefit of the doubt and not even ask about *Islamophashism.

==

All very curious, but not particularly important, for we remain stern prescriptive grammarians ourselves, no devotees of the fiend Chomsky to think that usage justifies all, no matter whose usage it may be. No, sir, if the really upmarket jihád careerists [4] prefer "Islamo Fascism" Awareness Week, why, Islamo Fascism Awareness Week it shall be, then: two typographical words to the epithet, no hyphen, now and forever! If the Big Party base and vile don't like it, why, so much the worse for them!

Still, 'tis an odd linguistic choice that Party neocomrade D. Horowitz has made, and one wonders if the JC gentry propose to make a habit of it. Let's see, since they'd never call themselves jihád careerists to begin with, doubtless one will look in vain for *jihado careerist, yet why not *jihado terrorism or *jihado genocide or the like, especially from Party neocomrade Dr. Hugh Fitzgerald of JihadoWatch, who already adores that particular shtik without the extra syllable?

On the other hand, jihád already possesses jihádí if considered as a foreign word, and in most cases the Muttersprache has traditionally preferred to import both adjective and substantive as a package deal, which means, for instance, that *form consideration deserves its asterisk, and "formal consideration" is de rigeur, at least for everybody off the Wombschool Normal campus. For that matter, have we ourselves not just now been compelled to speak of "an odd linguistic choice" instead of *an odd language choice? [5]

But God knows best how Big Party neocomrades talk, or should talk. [6]


____
[0] Cf. Jewish pundit defends Ann Coulter / David Horowitz: 'What else would a Christian hope for?'


[1] It would be nice to have some oral and aural equivalent of that stigmatizing asterisk, or at least some standard way of wagging one's fingers in the air such as exists for "quote . . . unquote."


[2] Let's not be creative-destructive Luddites, Mr. Bones: machines can be better at some things than we are, like knowing where to hy
phenate between successive lines vertically.


[3] Actually, they left off the questiono mark at the end, a shorto cut we've been known to take in programming ourselves, Mr. Bones, amateurs that we are.


[4] Bear in mind, however, that at the very tippy top of the jihád careerism market niche, nothing that resembles this snark is ever sighted at all. Either the apex of the Big Party iceberg has foresworn "History is bunk" and recalls what Fascism meant when it used to mean something, or at least there is enough residual good taste to prefer not walkin' around with anythin' at all branded or tattooed on one's figurative forehead. Dr. Pipesovitch, for example, who assures us that he words himself very carefully and would never, ever, dream of utterin' the dread word ‘Palestine’, is extremely unlikely to be found goin' on about I***F*** of any description, save in the course of citin' some other and lesser neocomrade.


[5] When one is deliberately spoofing the bozocomrades, the stigma(tic) asterisk is ever implicit, and to insist upon "*bozocomrades" would be excessively pedantic even by Mr. McCloskey's liberal standards.


[6] You'll rather irrelevantly recall, Mr. Bones, that one of the peculiarities of F. Newman that Mr. Matthew Arnold might well have done a "vivacity" about was to maintain that Britspeak ought to have a linking vowel after the Greek manner, and hence euphonious *steamoboat would replace clanky "steamboat," and so forth and so on. Yet as with that "pitches of suchness" for "degrees of compasison" mentioned by F. Hopkins, Greater Anglophonia has failed to ascend to such elegant loftiness.

Domine, non sumus digni!