| The Bush administration and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki greeted last week's Senate vote on Iraq policy -- based on a plan we proposed in 2006 -- with misrepresentations and untruths. Seventy-five senators, including 26 Republicans, voted to promote a political settlement based on decentralized power-sharing. It was a life raft for an Iraq policy that is adrift. |
Clearly America ought to make Captain Hook walk the plank and hand the Ship of State over to sixth mate Joe Biden and able seaperson Tonto von Gelb, whose rhetorico-navigational skills far exceed the norm: when adrift, throw yourself a life raft! Don't look at compass and sextant and map (if "adrift" means that one's aggression has wandered off-course); don't turn on the auxiliary engine (if "adrift" means that one's aggression is becalmed and dead in the water). No, what you (or "we") aggressors need at the moment is a life raft. And don't laugh at their ideas, please, Mr. Bones, or the next thing you know, Joe and Tonto will come to arraign us for "misrepresentations and untruths." (It may even be unheimatländisch to differ from "seventy-five senators, including 26 Republicans"! Fortunately, the FBI answers neither to the Legislative branch nor to the CFR branch, but let's not press our luck all the same.)
’Ammá ba‘da, but seriously: Joe and Tonto aren't any better at figurative carpentry than at rhetorical seamanship. Despite a brief lucid interval above where they called their visionary raft "decentralized power-sharing," by paragraph three of this morning's scribble they have relapsed into the usual inaccurate F-word:
| If the United States can't put this federalism idea on track, we will have no chance for a political settlement in Iraq and, without that, no chance for leaving Iraq without leaving chaos behind. |
Huck and Jim here need at least three logs to federalise themselves -- or rather, to federalise their neo-Iraqi subjects -- a life raft out of, and what they actually have in hand is approximately one log and a third. A Kurdish dugout canoe would be quite a feasible shop project, but who wants a measly canoe instead of a Mark Twain raft? [1]
A Kurdo-Twelver double canoe designed on Polynesian lines is at least conceptually possible. There is not yet any "Free Najafistán" to match Free Kurdistán, but there probably could be. Huck and Jim would have to switch from virtual carpentry to virtual forestry for a decade or so before the slender sapling of the Supreme Council becomes a raft-worthy log, a genuine focus of effective political power that could make treaties and maybe even keep its treaties, should that plan seemed advisable. At one point some of Captain Hook's cabin cronies at the Wall Street Jingo and thereabouts entertained something like this Polynesian paradigm and called it "the eighty-percent solution." That idea seems to have sunk without a trace amongst the Big Party neocomrades, but it is worth recycling from the memory hole briefly, in order to remind these lads that all colonial logs are not created equal. If theocommunitarian percentages are borne in mind, Huck and Jim don't have 4/9ths of the former Iraq in carpenty-ready format, 44.4%, but only 40% of it, all of the Free Kurd 20% plus one third of the not-so-free Twelver 60%. [2]
What sinks Huck and Jim's great life-raft project in advance, however, is the utter absence of any Sunní timber whatsoever, actual or potential. Not only is there no loggable oak tree, there ain't even an acorn to plant that might grow up into one in a generation or so.[3]
However these boys are not very interested in the actual state of the aggression and cherish some remarkably naïve notions about the neo-subjects for whom they plan:
| But if Iraqi leaders keep hearing from U.S. leaders that federalism amounts to or will lead to partition, that's what they will believe. |
Now of course it is true enough that scarcely any of the collaborationist pols at brave New Baghdád have much political talent as a European or American would account talent, but that sentence is quite ridiculous all the same, and even more so when offered ten minutes after Huck and Jim have themselves managed to get the whole crew all clamouring on the same wavelength for once. Perhaps certain of the collaborationist hack pols don't all exactly and thorougly mean "Down with Partition! Death to Biden!" when they clamour it, but the noise is loud enough to make it seem unlikely that they'll all believe a dog has five legs as soon as seventy-five US Senators, twenty-six of them Republicans, solemnly inform them that tails are henceforth to be accounted legs and nobody in the invasion-language media very noticeably suggests otherwise. [4]
Joe and Tonto profess to believe that the Occupyin' Party has been deliberately poisonin' the mind of the native against their own admirable snake oil. That self-piteous moan is 95% spinach to begin with. It is also likely to inspire those amazin' twenty-six extremist Republicans in the Senate to vote different next time around.
They rally a little at the end, however, distinguishing their own snake oil accurately enough (labels apart) from the "bottom-up patchwork quilt" product vended by the Baní Kagan and their dupes.
| Now, it always made sense to seek allies among tribal chiefs to fight common terrorist enemies. But to simply back these groups as they appear, without any overall political context or purpose, is to invite anarchy. Nothing will fragment Iraq more than a bottom-up approach that pits one group against another and fails to knit these parts into governable wholes. |
But it is festuca in oculo time for Joe and Tonto nevertheless, because they utterly fail to notice how much -- and how impossible! -- a knitting up of parts remains to be done by themselves if they are ever to have three driftworthy logs to ‘federalise’ into the form of a life raft for aggression and occupation policy. [5]
____
[1] Ambassador Galbraith, that's who!
[2] Huck and Jim don't do native percentages, which is a bit surprising, but fortunately there is another raft-daft propaganda piece this morning that fills the gap. Messers-about E. P. Joseph and M. O'Hanlon, of Johns Hopkins and Brookings respectively, advise the holy Homeland that
| an ABC News/USA TODAY/BBC/ARD poll shows more than half of the Shiite population favors such partitioning, and a clear majority of all Iraqis believe that the country will be divided in some fashion. |
The second half of that is malicious twistification or innocent muddle, as the case may be -- even in the future tense, facts and values can be distinguished, and what the indigs expect to be stuck with is entirely different from what they desire -- yet if we take the first part seriously, then a bare majority of the militant GOP's neo-Iraqi subjects now crave "such partitioning," 51% of 60% plus 100% of 20%.
Eddie and Mikey have actually thought out their raft project to the extent of forty-five pages , putting Joe and Tonto in the shade, blueprintwise. On the other hand, one cannot take for granted that seventy-five Senators (and twenty-six of them militant Republicans, just think of that!) intended to endorse precisely that scheme and recommend it to the attention of Little Brother.
Despite all the post-Petrolaean fuss, I still consider it highly unlikely that the former Iraq will ever get much more "federalised" than it has become already. Khalílzád Pasha's "constitution" doesn't leave much room for raftmongering. Should I eventually change my mind about which way their aggression is driftin', there will be plenty of time to work through those forty-five pages with a red pencil. Meanwhile, Eddie and Mikey's agitprop piece is more to the point and much quicker to get through.
[3] The former Iraq is not absolutely unpartitionable or "unfederalisable" of course. If our invasion-friendly classes choose to rely frankly on Right of Conquest™ and chop their spear-won provinces up this way or that way or some other way, neither the occupied natives nor "the international community" nor Father Zeus Himself are likely to be capable of stopping them. That, however, is no plan for a humble life raft, one must speak rather of a rhetorical icebreaker or even a battleship.
Huck and Jim muddle their figures of speech badly, yet "drift" is appropriate enough to the paleface planmongering that they intend, even though "life raft" is ludicrous. Unless the policy customer supposes that the former Iraq is already drifting towards tripartition and that Huck and Jim intend to go with the downstream flow like a dead cat or a fallen tree, she will not purchase this product -- unless perhaps she misunderstands it altogether.
[4] Joe Biden and Tonto von Gelb are quite amazingly obtuse or uninstructed, it looks like, and especially considering those toney credentials that they like to flash. Have the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and an ex-hogenmogen of the Conspiracy on Foreign Relations never noticed that ever since 1920 at the very latest, the former Iraqis have scarcely been able to look at a paleface planmonger without fancying that she comes to divide them and conquer? Instead of a cow-worthy placidity prepared to accept any tale that Bushes and Rices and Powells and Wolfowitzen -- or alternatively Bidens and von Gelbs, or formerly the Gertrudes Bell and Percies Cox -- choose to regale them with, these patients have quite plainly long been suffering from paranoid delusions. It is true enough that they have real and present enemies as well, especially at Rancho Crawford and Château Kennebunkport and Castle Cheney, but the degree of their antecedent suspicion remains more pathological than political.
From the Joe-and-Tonto perspective, on the other hand, if the cow-like placidity that they assume really exists, how come there is so little peace and freedom to be found in the Big Management Party's Peaceful Freedumbia? Why didn't the neoliberateds just accept what their neoliberators told them and buckle down at once to instantiate Iraq-The-Model™ and Domino Democracy™ and all the rest of the "Mission Accomplished!" GOP tripe and baloney of May 2003? To postulate that natives are gullible all 360 degrees around the ideological compass would be entirely mistaken, yet plausible compared with what Dr. Joseph Biden and Leslie Freiherr von Gelb actually postulate, namely a direction-sensitive gullibility so mistakenly conceived that it expects the target market to snap up exactly the conceptual products that they ought to have known in advance would be a very hard sell indeed. Yuck.
[5] The Gelb-Biden life raft is so daft that, as we noticed yesterday, Mr. Bones, there is a serious temptation to speculate that it might be cynically, rather than ignorantly, proposed. Suppose ex-president Tonto and Senator Joe secretly want to maintain armed forces answerable to the militant GOP in the former Iraq forever, more or less, but hesitate to set forth the true (and politically unpoular) reasons why they crave that particular outcome. Might not they suggest a raft-buildin' project that they themselves know is utterly impossible and that must therefore prove interminable, hopeful that the less splendidly credentialed will not immediately detect it as such?
We have not sufficient evidence to positively accuse Joe and Tonto along those lines, but they are sailin' sufficiently close to the wind that we need not put it resolutely out of mind, either, that possibly the gruesome twosome has no serious withdrawal intentions whatsoever. Very likely nobody will never actually know what they are up to, condering that theirs is one of the paleface planmongering products currently available least likely to be attempted. Perhaps it tells slightly against the cynicism hypothesis that what Joe and Tonto recommend is rather more elaborate than mere Responsible Nonwithdrawal™ calls for. In fact it will require no positive program for our "bipartisan foreign-policy community" to help pull the chestnuts of aggression out of the fire for Big Party and Little Brother, the convergence of CFR and GOP is (probably) workable as long as both co-conspirators can shriek to Congress and Televisionland and the electorate, "But think what a mess Peaceful Freedumbia would become at once if we ever did irresponsibly withdraw!" The perps need neither avow their real motives nor propose any particular concrete notion of Success and Victory as long as they can make out Failure and Defeat black enough.
Joe and Tonto may even, though this is improbable, pose a threat to the emerging ‘bipartisan’ convergence. Should Televisionland and the electorate ever get the mistaken notion that some impossible raft-buildin' project of "soft partition" is what the original fear-based WMD caper of Boy and Party has now come to be all about, would they not more likely want to drop it than persevere? Supposing that Dr. Biden and Freiherr von Gelb are smart enough to be cynics (and also happen to be fans of Responsible Nonwithdrawal™), surely they ought to be smart enough to perceive also that the murkier they leave the WHY of it all, the better for their knavish cause?
To propose either a definite goal in Peaceful Freedumbia that could actually be attained or a definite goal that could be correctly perceived as unattainable would be inadvisable. Yet here Joe and Tonto are, embracin' the latter horn of an easily avoidable dilemma! Is it not therefore more likely, Mr. Bones, that they really do want what they claim to want, call it "soft partition," and furthermore that they somehow fail to grasp that they can't ever reasonably expect to obtain it, whether through ignorance, or narcissism, or possibly bumptious overcleverness? As usual, I conclude that our default principle of subjective sincerity in politics is not to be abandoned.
However, it is not abandonment for us to reflect that after all we might be mistaken, and that this case may be exceptional and irregular. Mere prudence or humility, that attitude is, or so I trust. Meanwhile, we can be ten times more confident that "soft partition" ain't gonna happen than about why Joe and Tonto propose that it should. As we are also at least ten thousand times more interested in the former Iraq than in the psychoanalysis of the Hon. Leslie Gelb or Senator Biden of Delaware, let us leave it at that for now.
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