| A senior Sunni sheikh, whose tribe is joining the new alliance with the Americans against al-Qaida, told me in Beirut that it was a simple equation for him. "It's just a way to get arms, and to be a legalised security force to be able to stand against Shia militias and to prevent the Iraqi army and police from entering their areas," he said. "The Americans lost hope with an Iraqi government that is both sectarian and dominated by militias, so they are paying for locals to fight al-Qaida. It will create a series of warlords. "It's like someone who brought cats to fight rats, found himself with too many cats and brought dogs to fight the cats. Now they need elephants." |
It's a bit of a rhetorical incongruity that those who are wagin' a strictly Boy-'n'-Party war in the former Iraq should be in need of precisely figurative elephants. Yet there is of course no need for little foreign friends of the extremist GOP, like the Unknown Shaykh of Armistice Day here, to be aware of the parochial North American iconography.
I daresay M. Bin Majhúl's notion of a political elephant differs somewhat from the late Mr. Nast's. The indigs east of Suez think more highly of the beast than we do, I believe, and it is presumably a compliment rather than a spoof that every hero in the Sháhnameh is routinely likened thereunto. The point of comparison, for the Native Mind, appears to be irresistable onset of all that thunderous meat -- whereas Mr. Nast was thinking rather of Dumbo's large size and dim brain and unaccountable fear of terroristical mice. 'Tis circus elephants that we in the Wicked West think of, I fear, whereas the Native Mind runs rather towards military or Hannibalistic elephants.[2]
More important for human events is that M. Bin Majhúl pretty obviously thinks of himself as elephantine. The naked literal sense of his parable is that the militant Republican Party began by futzin’ about with mere nobodies and wannabes in the semiconquered provinces of the former Iraq, but has now at last figured out who the true Natural Masters of Mesopotamia are, and have now come to them -- to him -- with hat in hand. Since Dr. Gen. Petraeus of Princeton and West Point and Big Party neocomrade R. Crocker certainly do not see M. Bin Majhúl and his ilk in quite that light, we should be in for some interesting times on the Bribe-a-Tribe™ front. Please stay tuned, everybody.
Meanwhile, M. Bin Majhúl is a collector's delight already. One does not, after all, run across a "warlord" who admits to being a warlord very often. The usual specimen of a Little Foreign Friend to the J. Kirkpatrick GOP would prefer to call itself a statesperson, after all. That this gentlethug abstains from the usual cant suggests that he is a good deal less unintelligent than the sort of ideobuddy whom the Kirkpatrician gentry typically dredge up. On the other hand, we need not account M. Bin Majhúl another Machiavelli simply because he is willing to be mildly cynical in an anonymous interview with an employee of the London Guardian. He does not, after all, explain what Boy and Party are likely to do -- or would be best advised to do -- once that "series of warlords" has been triumphantly created. [3]
In the absence of any elucidation, we may guess that the Unknown Shaykh conceives of a strictly defensive serial warlordism, aspiring only "to be[come] a legalised security force to be able to stand against Shia militias and to prevent the Iraqi army and police from entering their areas." Geographical TwentyPercenterdom, or M. Bin Majhúl's patch of it, at least, may be conceived of -- by majhooligans -- as having no serious problems that getting rid of outside agitators would not solve. That guess brings us to His Excellency's most striking feature, his willingness to write off "the Iraqi army and police" as only so many more alien troublemakers. If this were a widespread opinion amongst TwentyPercenterdom, we might find it a rather encouraging development, Mr. Bones -- but is it in fact typical? The rest of the Sunni Ascendancy crew, without any exception that comes to mind immediately, seem to disagree totally, taking it to be axiomatic that there can never be any "Iraq" again except as a racket dominated by themselves -- just like "Iraq" always was before. If M. Bin Majhúl is willing to relinquish the brand name and the firm's good will to heretics and hillbillies, that's an interesting fact about him, a curious psychological quirk; whether it has anything significant to do with the native politics of Peaceful Freedumbia is entirely another matter.
The Guardian scribbler is not primarily concerned with M. Bin Majhúl, but with an even more fiercely charging warlord elephant whom he calls "Abu Abed." [4] That mammoth collided with M. Táriq al-Háshimí, TwentyPercenterdom's delegated quasivicepresident under the current neorégime at brave New Baghdád, quite picturesquely:
| "I can't, I don't have orders," replied a gunman. "Do you know who I am? I am the commander of Ameriya," Abu Abed screamed at the vice-president's commander of guards. "Who are you? Did you dare to show your faces here before I kicked al-Qaida out? Even the Americans with their tanks couldn't come before I liberated Ameriya." Bakr pointed his gun at the entourage. Guns were cocked on all sides. "Abu Abed, we all know who you are, but this is the vice-president of Iraq." "This is Ameriya, not Iraq! Here I rule, I am the commander, I can make sure that you won't show your faces here!" "We are all Sunni brothers. The Shia militias will be happy to see us fighting; we have the same enemy," said the man. "You are trying to claim my victory. I will show you!" Abu Abed pushed the officer and went back to his car. |
Now to be sure, Mr. Abu Ghaith of the Guardian does not care much for Big Management's nifty Bribe-a-Tribe™ gimmick, and he may therefore be disgilding the GOP lily to some extent with his anecdotal evidence. God knows best.
____
[1] As also with spending five days in the hospital for the first time in forty years, and then after our escape, it looks as if half the articles in the New York Times are about quacks and quackery and Harvard Victory School MBA's barkin’ against "socialised medicine."
[2] Either way, the pachyderm-in-itself gets neglected, or so it appears. But such neglect is a given in the sphere of Unnatural History, I expect.
[3] For that matter, one wonders a little what the Raging Elephant of Warlordism thinks of himself being only one part of a "series." The Muses rather consistently point towards monarchy and monopoly in that line of work, as I recall.
[4] My own druthers are altogether with M. Bin Majhúl, for Big Party neocomrade ’Abú ‘Ábid is merely the sort of "our bastard" thug that the Kirkpatrician gentry naturally would find antecdently congenial. When one invasionizes other folks' countries supralegally, what could be less remarkable than that one's neoliberateds should emulate their neoliberators? Anybody adult and decent might have foreseen the likes of ’Abú ‘Ábid emergin’ from under the cloak of Wolfowitz. M. Bin Majhúl is much less predictable, and therefore in some sense of greater "information" value than mere Crawfordoid thugs.
Yet all the same, it is likely enough that even both ragin’ elephants taken together are only an irrelevant side show to the Big Party's Aggression and Occupation Circus. BGKB.
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