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?