| 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missed out, which were merely "the will of the Iraqi people has been clear from the beginning: they want the troops withdrawn."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.
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