The Vision of St. Hugh the Simple

But those who have studied Islam, studied the behavior, over many decades, of the Arabs, know perfectly well -- unless those students are apologists for Islam, collaborators with Muslims, out of conviction or cupidity (or sometimes both), or possibly are antisemites (or sometimes both) -- that the Arabs have no intention of recognizing Israel. Ask the defectors from that world. Ask Wafa Sultan. Ask Nonie Darwish. Ask Walid Shoebat. They know. No, there is not a "solution." There is one way to prevent open warfare. It is to create, and maintain, a situation in which Israel is not only vastly more powerful militarily, but is widely understood in the Arab and Muslim world to be so, which allows Arab leaders the excuse of not going to war based on their invocation of the concept of Darura, or Necessity. That, and that alone, can justify, in the minds of the Muslim masses, a failure to take military action against Israel. Moral arguments are not relevant.

It is picturesque, not to say "ironic," that St. Hugh the Simple should chance to speak of "one chance to prevent open warfare" in a passage I single out as epitomizing the jihád careerist faction's passionate determination that peace should never be allowed to break out. Charity is naturally pleased to learn that the vanguard of the Kiddie Krusade does not insist upon its own preferred forms of Enthusiasm and Superstition triumphing by mere physical violence of the traditional sort. Perpetual cold war amongst the faith-crazies will suffice, it appears, an endless mutual contempt and loathin’ between the two camps, yet unaccompanied by much actual bloodshed.

If we are lucky, that is. For as you can see, Mr. Bones, St. Hugh's mystic vision of Armageddon avoided or averted is strictly conditional and precarious. And, as we ought to have anticipated, whether or not the ultimate balloon goes up does not primarily depend upon the efforts of Bob Cardinal Spencer and Dr. Pipesovitch of Harvard and all the mighty forces of jihád careerism -- even includin’ humble St. Hugh Fitzguerriere himself. Keepin’ their Long War™ "cold" does not depend upon their Boy and Dynasty and Party, nor upon their Big Party's base and vile, nor even upon the whole white host of nonpartisan Kiddie Krusaders from Crawford to Tel Aviv. Preventing Armageddon dependeth not upon Wunnerful US at all [1], but rather upon THEM. And ’tis rather an odd and unexpected subset of THEM that turns out to be critical, namely "Arab leaders."

More exactly, two slices of THEM figure in the Vision of St. Hugh, for it is not with Kiddie Krusaders that "Arab leaders" have primarily to contend, but with what is called either "the Arab and Muslim world" or "the Muslim masses." If the latter were ever to get the upper hand, why, Armageddon would take place in a flash! Fortunately no project is dearer to "Arab leaders" than making quite sure that those lesser ethnically and theologically undesirable folks are confined to the kennels where they belong. To be sure, St. Hugh the Simple does not himself mention this point expressly, an omission I attribute to his unwillingness to descend from the lofty heights of Enthusiasm and Superstition to the Romulan sewer of politics. Yet nowadays perhaps one neocomradely tank-thinker in ten is willing to oppose democracy for Arabs and Muslims without beatin’ around the bush, no matter what the Bush itself may bloviate to the contrary. (And even Little Brother has largely learned to keep his trap shut of late.)

Yet St. Hugh is hardly marchin’ in step with most of his Party's lemmin’s. How could he be? Though a militant and extreme jihád careerist himself, most of the neocomrades suffer from a very plain case of IADS (Islamophalangitarism Awareness Deficiency Syndrome). Poor St. Hugh the Simple must keep barkin’ and bellowin’ "Wolf!" to an audience that scarcely knows that particular four-letter word. To bark and bellow about "Arab leaders" and "Muslim masses" collects only a limited number of fans and curiosity-seekers in the naked public squares even of Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh. At Peoria the crowd that assembles for Fitzguerrierean homilies is bound to be even smaller. "Fit company, though few" are they, perhaps, but all the same, rather alarmin’ly few, from the jihád careerist viewpoint. How fortunate, then, that avertin’ Armageddon should depend on "Arab leaders" and "Muslim masses" primarily, not upon voluntary self-defense efforts in the lands of Western Civistán!

Still, the visionary guidance from Beyond does enjoin jihád careerism and Kiddie Krusadin’ "to create, and maintain, a situation in which Israel is not only vastly more powerful militarily, but is widely understood in the Arab and Muslim world to be so." It seems that the objective facts about this Blessèd Ideal Situation are of some importance quite apart from what "Arab leaders" and "Muslim masses" may widely understand. Once again St. Hugh the Simple lucks out, for such a situation does after all obtain at the moment. If the Apostle of Unpeace thought it did not obtain, he would have to bark and bellow at his auditory to "create" it from scratch. It looks as if in fact we have only to "maintain," however. O lucky us!

The practical question is clearly how to maintain, or perhaps how to tell that we have maintained. Here is the key element that makes WUNNERFUL US dependent upon "Arab leaders" and "Muslim masses" for the avoidance or postponement of Armageddon. Jewish Statism must both be and be perceived as "vastly more powerful militarily." I think. The Beyond would be displeased with us, I presume, if we tried to fool "Arab leaders" and "Muslim masses" into thinking Jewish Statism very formidable when it fact was not. However it is more likely that St. Hugh the Simple worries mainly about the opposite case, in which the Tel Aviv statelet's supplies of tanks and bombers and bayonets -- and perhaps money from Crawford as well -- would be mistakenly underestimated by "Arab leaders."

The "Muslim masses" are made to sound as if they routinely make that underestimation, which brings us to the heart of the Vision of St. Hugh Fitzguerriere. The Beyond plainly takes the view that although "the Muslim masses" inveterately underestimate the massive armed forces of Zion and neo-Zion and para-Zion and Hyperzion, their ignorant and vulgar mistakes can usually either be corrected by "Arab leaders" [2] or else simply ignored, because "the Muslim masses" have no say in the policies of the Arab Palace people.

Alas, the Beyond warns of two distinct dangers through the mouth of Hugh the Simple, yet the Beyond does not tell us which danger to dread the most. Is Armageddon more likely to ensue because the existing Arab leadership will succumb to democracy / populism / ochlocracy, or because, while the cardboard kings and the barracks-based republicans maintain their total exclusion of street Arabs from power, they will nevertheless come to accept the foolish errors of their inferiors?

Quite different grand strategies to "maintain" would be called for in the two cases. Should Boy and Dynasty and Party commence by makin’ quite sure that nothin’ like Neocomradess K. Hughes ever happens again? That would be a reasonable plan if upholdin’ Gen. Mubárak and Col. Qadhdháfí and les altesses royales du Ryad be the crux of Armageddon evasion. However if the real and urgent threat is that these good Kirkpatrician gentry will remain in place but may relapse into the errors of 1948 or 1967 about the organized violence potential of Jewish Statism, it is not so easy to see exactly what steps Kiddie Krusaders ought to adopt. Naturally it would be desirable that the Tel Aviv violence pros should perform in public a little more successfully next time than they managed against the God Party of Lebanon in the summer of 2006 -- yet how is such a "next time" to be arranged, exactly? And for that matter, once arranged, how is the desired outcome of it to be ensured in advance?

Certain tank thinkers at Wingnut City, mere mortals who necessarily lack St. Hugh the Simple's special relationship with the Beyond, have suggested with some plausibility that launchin’ an anti-Safavid front in the Big Party's Long War would be opportune. Given proper manipulation and twistification, [3] that strategy could probably close the gap between "Arab leaders" and "Muslim masses" to some extent: "Hey, guys, let's everybody pile on the Shí‘a!" The fearsome specter of Levantine Democracy might be seriously discouraged thereby, at least for a time, but a Crawford-Qom match (if plainly won by the vigilante cowpokers) would have no very obvious tendency to make Jewish Statism look stronger than it does.

Reflection as I scribble suggests that an attack upon the evil Qommies conducted by the Tel Aviv régime single-handed might pull off both St. Hugh's tricks for him, both discouragin’ democracy and exaltin’ the horn of Hyperzion. "Arab leaders" require to be thoroughly terrorized of Jewish Statist power, but for that purpose it is not necessary that the thunderbolts fall upon themselves, M. Ahmadí-Nezhád would make a very suitable victim and illustration. If the cardboard kings and barracks-basers were actually in cahoots with Qadima (or with the extremist GOP) about such an affair, their difficulties with the street Arabs might easily become terminal, but given a decent degree of plausible deniability, the Arab Palaces could come through with their domestic security unimpaired.[4]








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[1] I oversimplify. Like most of the Big Party ’phobes, St. Hugh the Simple can scarcely open his jaws about the evils of Islamophalangitarianism without attackin’ certain persons in Western Civistán who have not the happiness to be Muslims or neo-Muslims at all, but are only godforsaken l*b*r*ls. He performs exactly this sadly characteristic shtik of his crew's in the quotation provided, with "apologists" and "collaborators" and "cupidity " and "antisemites." Yuck.


[2] St. Hugh the Simple's exemplary simplicity means that one should not expect too much from him in the way of pedantic accuracy, yet perhaps it is not an accident that we hear only of "Arab leaders" and not of "Muslim leaders." M. Ahmadí-Nezhád of the Islamic Republic of Iran would no doubt cross the mind of a jihád careerist first as a non-Arab Muslim statesperson, and that gentleman is taken in most circles of simplism to be the very model of an underestimator of Jewish Statist might. Like the ignorant vulgar in Arab lands, the evil Qommie President is represented by JC's and KK's as thinking that a large eraser is pretty well all it would take to efface the Tel Aviv statelet once and for all.


[3] Not likely to be forthcomin’ from the Harvard Victory School MBAs, to be sure.


[4] When the status quo is a total monopoly on power by the Arab Palace gentry, republican or "royal," there can not be any substantial improvement on it. Balátar az siyáh rangí níst!

"My Analysis Neglects ..."

No, of course the only person who said that was me, Mr. Bones. The original marched to a different tune altogether:

My analysis of this NYT piece is that Bush and the Republicans are betting that they can portray as irresponsible and unpatriotic the Democrats in Congress who decline to give Bush all the war funding he wants. The Democrats are betting that the public desperately wants them to stop the Iraq War, which is hemorrhaging money and costing American lives, all for goals that are unclear. If I were a betting man, I'd put a big bet on the Democrats in this regard, and even without a bet I predict that the Republicans are going to suffer an earthquake-like reversal next November.

'Tis true, Mr. Cole, that I here cite the World's Greatest Area Student. But before your pulse goes wild, sir, recall that central North America is not included in the authorised WGAS Pundit Zone. When it comes to the holy Homeland, one need not be too surprised if some mere New York Times prognosticates more accurately than all the Nostradamuses of Ann Arbour. Ne sutor ultra crepidam!

Our Aunt Nitsy is not, by and large, a bettin’ gal, although she can be a terrible scold when she starts editorializing with "this page" deployed as the pronoun of the First Person Opinionated. However,it is not even a nitsytorial that Don Juan picked up to clobber his Little Brother with, it is only a short unlabelled performance by one David Stout. Since the New York Times is generally regarded as a newspaper, I suppose the thingamajig might as well be classified as a "news story," even though it begins by denying that anything new is going on:

House Democrats and the White House continued their public relations battle over money for the Iraq war today, as two leading lawmakers accused the administration of trying to scare people for political gain.

Well, maybe there are faint traces of nitsytorializing after all, now that I look at that topic sentence in splendid isolation: the man Stout is probably going a bit farther out on a limb than strict Martian or RupertMurdochian objectivity would approve of. Tweedledee (D-US) and Tweedledumb (R-TX) could conceivably be having only "a money battle over money," could they not? Who says it's all about P.R.?

The Honourable Obey of Wisconsin says so, that's who. And the militarist Murtha of PA seconds his fellow jackass's motion:

“We’ve already provided all the money the administration will need to get them through to March and to avoid the horror stories that they’re peddling,” said Representative David R. Obey of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. And money for beyond March will be available if only President Bush will accept “modest and reasonable conditions,” Mr. Obey said. Representative John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, head of the defense appropriations subcommittee and a harsh critic of the war, said, “There’s a difference between supporting our military and their families and supporting the war in Iraq.” “This administration supports this war,” Mr. Murtha said. “This Congress supports our troops and their families, as we proved over and over and over again.”

Come along, Mr. Bones, by the time Congressman Subhead starts worrying about what "support" means and what it is that the holy Homeland "supports" exactly, either we are doing dialectics with postmediaeval religionizers or we're visiting Madison Avenue on a virtual day trip, with the odds heavily weighted towards the latter hypothesis. Nitsy's man Stout had every justification for speaking of "their public relations battle over money for the Iraq war today," and the standard literary license covers his introducing the justification subsequent to the claim justified.

Myself, I should have liked to hear some of those "horror stories" that the legislative lemmin’s of Boy and Party are said to be peddlin’. I don't doubt the fact, for such behavior is thoroughly lemmin’like and by now thoroughly traditional with the Aggression Fan Club, yet those of us who come in late to this particular bout of the Tweedledee-Tweedledumb conclobberation could do with a sight of The Rattle, just to make sure the Great Crow or somebody has not secretly made off with it and thus rendered all these proceedings nugatory in advance.

Here again, Mr. Stout puts the evidence in well after what it is supposed to buttress, and in this case it seems to be an inferior grade of evidence as well as a tardy one:

If the war bill remains stalled, it will soon have harmful effects on normal military operations and could cause many thousands of civilian employees of the Defense Department to be laid off, Mr. [sic] Perino said. A Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, buttressed the White House complaint, telling reporters that people who think the Defense Department has lots of money to transfer between accounts are “simply misinformed,” according to The Associated Press. “We’ve entered into a very serious period here,” Mr. Whitman said.

Big Party neocomrade[ss] D. Perino is "President Bush’s chief spokeswoman." I really should have remembered the gentlecritter's name, Mr. Bones, yet perhaps I am not alone, here in the abendliche Dämmerung of Château Kennebunkport and Castle Cheney and Rancho Crawford, in having lost track of exactly who is dubyapologizin’ for ’em now? Be that as it may, the substantive dubyapology is mildly interesting for a couple of reasons.

(1) Neocomrade D. Perino distinguishes between "normal military operations" on the one hand, and the Ever-Victorious Surge of ’07™ (I presume it must be) on the other. She expects, or pretends to expect, that even odious Demoncrat defeatists regard "normal military operations" as sacrosanct. Unfortunately she is probably quite justified. I am tempted to digress into editorializing about this national misfortune, but shall content myself with a mere brief "news analysis" instead: although only militant extremist GOP gland-basers can be counted upon always to wish to wish to act like Godzilla, America's Party is full of folks who think it very important that Uncle Sam always be able so to act, though we restrain ourselves to comparative decency in fact. Their attitude can be dignified as Aristotelian and Shakespearean -- "Those that have power to hurt but will do none," etc. -- but more practically, it could also be codified as "normal military operations," and that appears to be what the female flack for Crawfordite invasionism had in mind.

(2) The neocomrade was rather reinforcin’ her first P. R. assault than launchin’ a different one when she spoke darkly of "many thousands of civilian employees of the Defense Department to be laid off." It may well be that she supposes this to be her Little Brother's ace of trumps vis-à-vis the wretched Murthas and Obeys. How shall America's Party resist an appeal to keep civilian unemployment down? Why, that would be to side with Dr. Hoover and against FDR, almost!

Although interesting, Mlle. Perino's agitprop is tame stuff as "horror stories" go. More exactly, only incumbent Congresscreatures like Obey and Murtha and a small circle of immediate associates are likely to perceive the full horror of lay-offs at DOD or interference with "normal military operations" as conceived by Wingnut City tank-thinkers. So-called "real people" do not in general pass through life dreading non-re-election as among the fates almost as bad as D**th, after all.

By those standards, however, perhaps Mr. Stout is not entitled to speak of "public relations" after all. A horror story that can properly horrify only pro pols would appear to qualify as "public" only indirectly and in a very qualified sense. Nostradamus spoke of Big Management settin’ out to "portray as irresponsible and unpatriotic the Democrats in Congress who decline to give Bush all the war funding he wants," but what are we to say about that analysis after we wonder if the WGAS had his reading glasses on? Neocomrade Perino is not quoted as sayin’ a word about "war funding," except insofar as she may have meant to imply that it is quite inseparable from unwar funding.

The neocomradess was certainly not tryin’ to blackmail and blackguard the defeatist donkeys as "unpatriotic" in the straightforward sense of preferring that the Big Management Party's supralegal aggression into the former Iraq should fail ignominiously, an aggression that "works" being more detestable than one that does not, as well as much more likely to be used as a basis for further crimes in future. Those of us who actually take that rigorist view cannot avoid noticing that not many holy Homelanders agree with it, certainly far too few to be of significance in discussions of public opinion or manipulatory Public Relations. The WGAS does not agree with us himself, or at any rate he never worries that saving their bacon for the Harvard Victory School MBA’s might set a very undesirable precedent.[2]


==
Plus in a narrowly political sense, Dr. Cole manages to be exotic-parochial: he grossly overestimates how well "the public desperately wants them to stop the Iraq War, which is hemorrhaging money and costing American lives, all for goals that are unclear" actually plays at Peoria and South Succotash and Rio Limbaugh. Doubtless Televisionland and the electorate ought to take some such view of the Kiddie Krusaders, but nobody paying much attention to the holy Homeland is likely to claim that they -- that "we" -- really do attach that much importance to what the Lesser Breeds Without are up to in the world, or what the LBW think Uncle Sam is up to either.

But God knows best.


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[1] Quoth the Torygraph ,

The Taliban has a permanent presence in most of Afghanistan and the country is in serious danger of falling into the group's hands, according to a report from an international think tank. The Senlis Council claimed that the insurgents controlled "vast swathes of unchallenged territory" and were gaining "more and more political legitimacy in the minds of the Afghan people". It said that the NATO force in the country needed to be doubled to 80,000 front-line soldiers who should be allowed to pursue militants into Pakistan.

Do Televisionland and the electorate pay any attention to all that splendid innovation by our Big Party Managers, however? There is not much sign of it. Outer Khurasán is simply too far away, I fear, and too unimportant economically and jewishstatistically for the Big Party perps to work up a plausible scare without some really serious input from the direction of M. Bin Ládin and Dr. Zawáhirí. I have no idea whether D. Perino's "normal military operations" include or exclude the normalcy of Áfghánistán. But then it does not matter, does it, Mr. Bones? Even Obeys and Murthas are not going to become hobgoblinized about civilian unemployment levels at Kábúl and Qandahár.


[2] Ann Arbour Faculty Club attitudes are defensible, it seems to me, only insofar as they concentrate on the Greater Levant exclusively and ignore the fact that Rancho Crawford and Castle Cheney so much as exist. In that case, minimizing damage to the patients can be legitimately exalted to the status of unum necessarium. However in the real world, that outcome is very difficult to separate from enhancing the reputation of the militant extremist GOP quacks and encouraging them onwards to their next excellent adventure.

The World's Greatest Area Student does not attempt to unravel this knot at all, and the reason for his failure seems to be a certain muddleheadedness peculiar to himself. The WGAS viscerally detests Little Brother and "Richard Bruce Cheney," as he likes to call Tonto. You and I, Mr. Bones, can match only a small part of the Colean scorn and revulsion. We can, however, perceive from afar that scorn and revulsion are sentimental or emotional and do not qualify as arguments in themselves. "Half the known world hates George Walker Bush" might do as the basis for an adult political appeal. "I, J.R.I. Cole, hate George Walker Bush" is in a different category altogether, despite the formal similarity.

The upshot is that the WGAS takes for granted that nobody sane will ever use the invasionistical doin’s of RBC and GWB as a precedent for themeselves. After all, who would appeal to Chancellor Hitler's precedents except sarcastically and backhandedly? That sort of pitch defiles very aggressively indeed. Unfortunately (?) Little Brother and Tonto do not quite fall in the same pigeon-hole as the Greater German statesperson, and such a classification depends on intersubjective or "objective" criteria that are qualitative in nature, meaning that no mere quantity or intensity of distaste at Ann Arbour or elsewhere can be dispositive.

The WGAS himself does not, I believe, maintain that there was nothing wrong with the aggression of March 2003 apart from its being conducted by a crew of Boy-'n'-Party stumblebums -- or, if you like, by a dread Neo-Con Cabal -- who failed to make their aggression "work." Millions of other people do believe that sort of proposition, though, many more than enough to make it a legitimate question of public opinion and target of opportunity for Public Relations. The reputation of aggression in the path of Preëmptive Retaliation is therefore a cause that might be revived, and indeed is being revived at the moment, largely by the Baní Kagan and other factional boosters of the Ever-Victorious Surge of ’07™, yet also by less culpable and more reflective perps. The WGAS has been responding to this unwelcome stimulus mainly by disputing the facts, and the facts are undoubtedly disputable, especially the facts about the future. That level of response is OK, as I have conceded already, so long as the WGAS is content with being an area student exclusively. Should he essay to be a philospher or critic in addition, however, some grappling with the alarming possibility that supralegal aggression really does WORK on occasion would seem to be demanded of him.

The Con Man As Vulgar Marxist

"Property is theft," Mr. Bones, no doubt about it! Yet up to a point we humble can steal from Slogger City as well as they from the Anglo-Arabian Press Trust. Look what I just liberated, sir!

In an interview with pan-Arab al-Hayat, Ahmad Chalabi, the ex-vice Prime Minister and staunch supporter of the US invasion of Iraq, said that "Iran is exerting its right to defend itself in Iraq," and described the ongoing Shi'a-Shi'a clashes in the South as a veiled form of class conflict. Chalabi, who currently leads the "popular committees" created to support "Operation Imposing Law" in Baghdad, complained about the lack of accountability in the Iraqi government, and argued that it is caused by the preponderance of political/sectarian blocs in the Parliament: "despite all we hear in Parliamentary sessions regarding summoning this or that minister to the Parliament for questioning, all these efforts fail because of the pressures exerted by the minister's bloc, which considers the measure to be directed against it." Chalabi also complained about the "power-sharing deals" that have plagued the Iraqi state and the corruption that accompanies them; when told...

Larceny fails when the trashy treasures of Sloggerdom were not lurking in the HTML page at all. But that's a fun place to break off for speculation purposes, is it not? Imagine that some impertinent indig had objected, for instance, "But surely Your Excellency is part of the ‘accompanying corruption’ as well?" How would the cheek that launched a thousand tanks have responded to that perfectly rational inquiry?

More cheeky than ever is Neocomrade Dr. A. Tchélebi, formerly of MIT and AEI and GOP. It is difficult to say, however, exactly whom he is cheekin’ for at the moment, other than his inevitable and best-belovèd Self. In a mere two and a paragraphs there, we spot him frenetically defendin’ (1) the Islamic Republic, (2) popular committeedom, (3) "Imposition of Rule", (4) the transparency chiché, (5) the antisectarian cliché, and (6) the Quasilegislative Branch of Khalílzád Pasha's Konstitution. As far as I can tell, there could be another six dozen contradictority scams mentioned by the panarabian fishwrap that Slogger City summatorializes from.

And that's minus the Marxism! If indeed there is any Chalabomarxism, for to speak of "a veiled form of class conflict" could easily veil the fact that His Excellency sides ruthlessly with the Benaziriat rather than peasantry and proletariat. Perhaps if his family got its pre-1958 provinces back, the former Iraq would be almost as good as mended? Feudal Landladyism is the sort of scam I can imagine His Excellency really believin’ in, though that may be more a fact about me than about him.

On the other hand, neomediaevalism is not a very demagoguable cause in Peaceful Freedumbia at the moment, so it is in fact far more likely that His Excellency means to pass himself off as a popularis of some sort. To the extent that the al-Hayát pudding has any theme at all, it is perhaps to exalt the horn of Dr. Tchélebi at the expense of poor M. al-Málikí, whom it is not difficult to present as a model impopularis. All very unfair, of course, since the Chairman of the Council of Quasiministers is only what the GOP genius of Z. Khalílzád and N. Feldman and assorted other Party perps has caused him to be. Still, the incompetence of aggression-based Big Management does create an opening for the likes of Dr. Tchélabi. Nobody can get anything done through the official machinery of "national" "government," all genuine political power must be based elsewhere, and Dr. Tchélebi is at least as good an elsewhere as any other, is he not? [1] Rather a more agreeable elsewhere than your typical warlord bandits and sunny awakeners and Badr brigadiers, in certain respects. Much the best feature of the Error Hero of Our Time is that he does not have a militia behind him and seems unlikely to acquire one no matter how hard he panders to all or any of his widely assorted panderees. [2]

==

On a related topic: Slogger City seems to have miscalculated badly. Their attempt to extort money for "secret" or "insider" info about the semiconquered provinces of Republican Party extremism, info straight out of invasion-language journalism and the Anglo-Arabian Press Trust, has coincided with the pretty people losing interest in the whole fandango now that Dr. Gen. Petrolaeus and Party Proconsul Crockerius have taken the bushogenic quagmire in hand. Maing it impossible to cut and paste from what little they display on their main page can scarcely suffice to save their bacon and allow them to retire to Rio de Janeiro for a suitably financed retirement after the Peaceful Freedumbia racket collapses altogether.

Once in a while, Mr. Bones, one catches such a faint glimmer that maybe some just Providence really does concern herself with the world at times. But God knows best.


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[1] If we were talking about the holy Homeland, Mr. Bones, that would not be a rhetorical question. The worseness of AEI/GOP con artists has had more than a century to unfold itself to appalled onlookers. However, nobody to speak of in the Big Party's boondocks knows that parochial North American history, which means that most of what is corrupt about Dr. Tchélabi means nothing much to Uncle Sam's neo-Iraqi subjects.


[2] But remember, corruptio optimi pessima! If Dr. Tchélebi ever did manage to get some reliable bayonets behind him, the prospects for Peaceful Freedumbia would be very dark indeed. We may hope that his attested track record is sufficient to ensure that nobody sane would ever loan His Excellency a slingshot or a pea-shooter, yet human events is not an exact science nor sanity always available. The worst danger is perhaps is that H.E. might find some total klutz of a colonel or general who likes prancin’ about the barracks on a white horse and then set up as Ludendorff to Ibn Hindenburg. Fortunately neither the evil Qommies, nor the Sadrist proles, nor the popular committeewomen, nor the wannabe Imposers of Law, nor the enemies of rootless cosmopolitanism, nor the disgruntled quasideputies of brave New Baghdád have any such Colonel Klutz at hand to advance the schemes of Tchélebisme. But the improbability of the event must be multiplied by its immense godawfulness, should it ever occur. Better keep an eye out and knock on wood, everybody!

Cowpokers v. Turkeys (plus "O God, O Montreal!")

The good spooks over at the JCIA [0] are very brief in this morning's dispatches, and one can see why, even though they don't want to talk about themselves. Not TOO MUCH, anyway. It appears that they have joined the rest of Big Party neocomrade H. Fitzdhimmi's "MESA nostra" in at last taking flight from the soil of that holy Homeland that they have so long abused and dishonoured. [1] "Good riddance!" resounds from shore to shore of Lake Goldwater in beautiful downtown Rio Limbaugh . . . .

(The bad news, for the Pipesovitch-Kramerides classes, is that the MESA monsters clearly intend to reenter God's Country after going up to the high-latitude places to worship the abominations of Lady Shariah. Surely Boy and Party ought to be able to give all twenty-seven hundred of ’em a stiff dose of Táriq Ramadán Visa Therapy™?)

Although it is always fun to cartoonize the pomposities of Student Government, and although the WGAS itself takes student self-governance fandangos even more seriously than most of its ilk, and although sticking a spoke in the wheels of the jihád careerists and dossiermongers can never come amiss, nevertheless what the JCIA reports not about itself -- and even not about General Buonaparte! -- is even more interesting still. Behold:

Saturday, November 17, 2007 // Turks Favor Invasion A new poll shows that 81% of Turks favor invading northern Iraq, up from 46% in July. "The number of people saying Turkey should conduct a cross-border military operation against militants of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) stood at 81 percent, up sharply from 46 percent in the last poll in July." ... Despite U.S. offers of help for NATO ally Turkey in fighting the PKK, the poll showed the number of Turks with a negative view of the United States had risen to 86 percent from 49 percent in November 2003 after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Reuters adds, "The survey showed support for Turkey's European Union membership bid had fallen to 51 percent from 52 percent in July, with 40 percent now opposed to joining. A few years ago, support for EU membership was above 70 percent. Turks with higher education were most opposed to joining the bloc. " [2] In other news, the Sadrists oppose allowing Baath officials back into the government from their exile. posted by Juan Cole @ 11/17/2007 06:30:00 AM

A pity I do not know enough Turkish to make it worthwhile to try to ascertain whether the indig pollsters put this matter to their patients exactly as the JCIA reports: "Do you favour your rulers invading Free Kurdistan, O Turk on the Street?" In the holy Homeland such frankness would be almost inconceivable, for the whole business would have to be carefully packaged and presented as involvin’ Preëmptive Retaliation. "Don't you agree that evil THEY have provoked Wunnerful US quite intolerably, ma’am?" Or whatever.

JCIA/WGAS prescinds from mentioning its own view of the legitimacy of the proposed aggression, which seems to ourselves about on a par with the Baghdad caper of militant GOP extremism. If those two instances are considered to involve a suitable casus belli, why then we need never worry again about Peace suddenly breaking out in this alien and bewildered world of ours, Mr. Bones!

As often, however, I notice that few credentialed opinionators are likely to take my own view of the case. Doubtless the vast majority with any opinion worth mentioning would evaluate the attested Big Management Party aggression into the former Iraq quite differently from a Justice and Development Party ditto. Those who approve one crime but disapprove the other will far outnumber those who approve, or disapprove, both crimes alike. A Martian might infer from that line-up that all earthlings agree with Buckley Minor's pet proverb Quod licet Jovi non licet bovi, i.e., that Kennebunkport-Crawford vigilantes are so different in kind or degree from Erdoganian invasionites that it would ludicrous to expect common rules to apply.

Eighty-six percent of the pollsters' patients take just that view evidently. Only one Turk or Turkess in seven (at most) could argue with consistency that appreciation of the wisdom and beauty of Little Brother's Machtpolitik, as conducted for Uncle Sam in the shambles of the former Iraq by GOP geniuses and Harvard Victory School MBA's, ought to increase, now that the heirs of Atatürk are resolved to emulate it. They clearly do not reflect to themselves "Why should heroic Turks not aggress also, just like paleface cowpokers do?" In the absence of such reflection, naturally the notion of redefinin’ the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, to which both great Turkey and Greater Texas adhere, as a joint appliance for salutary aggression wherever aggression may be required in the world does not occur to them, and would be hooted at should it be proposed.

A familiar and customary asymmetry applies to this instance: we may be quite confident that Mr. Zogby and Mr. Rasmussen will not be asking those who endorse Rancho Crawford's invasions and occupations what they would think of their own game if M. Erdogan starts playing it also. We may also be pretty confident, I suspect, that somethin’ like eighty-six percent of Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh would find it fort mauvais that M. Erdogan should behave like that -- actin’ far above his country's proper station in the Kiddie Krusade Weltordnung, that is what Turkish self-help would amount to from the perspective of the Big Party base and vile, unless I am much deceived about their sentiments. Neocomrade W. F. Buckley's fancy Latin proverb applies to their case well enough, although one might reinforce with a cruder Russian peasant saw, "Another's tears are water." The grievances of some wretched far-off Turkey do not often disturb the beauty sleep of Master Narcissus of the extremist GOP, and that fact is quite enough basis to predict how Narky will react if somebody insists on pesterin’ him with such exotic chickenshit. [3]

Despite these polarities and discrepancies, there remains a fairly clear sense in which all gland-basers are alike. I may overestimate peccatum originale a bit to estimate that the pollsters could probably detect 86% approval for pretty well any aggression that ever actually took place amongst the subject populace at the point of maximum jingoism.

However there is a faint trace of a silver lining here, also, in that the J-word forever associated with M. Disraeli of the Brit Stupid Party reminds us that on occasion one can have the jingoism but somehow lack the aggression. So maybe there is hope? [4] God knows best!


___
[0] "Juan Cole Intelligence Agency"


[1] ME does not talk about itself TOO MUCH in its own blog, O Bones! It only modestly provides cross references:

Cole on Academic Freedom The Monreal Mirror carries an interview with me by Samer Elatrash, in honor of the holding of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) Conference in Montreal. MESA has over 2700 members among teachers and researchers at colleges and universities, mainly in North America.

Interviewing the World's Greatest Area Student seems to have become positively pontifical of late: one does not just go ahead and perform the familiar ritual acts, one must go about them with a niyya, offering each detail, and the solemn occasion as a whole, up in honour of . . . of this or that.


[2] Dr. Matrix seems to have attempted to twistify the numbers about Turkish enthusiasm for henôsis with "Europe,", although I can't imagine why anybody at Reuters would bother. If you work it out, Mr. Bones, I believe you will find that opposition has increased from thirty percent to forty percent, which seems to me a good deal less than the efforts of M. Chirac and M. Sarkozy might have looked forwards to when they commenced.


[3] Down in the gutter of Grant where Master Narky dwells, I doubt there would be much resentment of M. Erdogan for infringement of the Big Management Party's virtual patent on aggressions and invasions. Up in the proud towers of AEIdeology and Hoovervillainy and Heritagitarianism, to be sure, that consideration would no doubt swamp any substantive discussion of Turkey's intolerable grievances. No militant extremist tank-thinker can allow any little foreign friends of the Big Party whatsoever to behave with the same unilateralism and preëmption -- and Yoo-based legitimacy -- that belong by right to Little Brother alone.

The very special status of Jewish Statism may cause this rule to be severely tested one day, perhaps one day soon, but I expect it will survive. Should it be M. Olmert who moaned about the Free Kurds as M. Erdogan now moans, that little foreign friend's account of the case would of course be far more sympathetically looked into by tank-thinkers and policy perps. Yet at the end of the day, would the Tel Aviv statelet actually be permitted to exercise a fully Crawfordite latitude of retaliatory aggression and preëmption? The thing is not absolutely impossible, and making up Tom Cruise scenarios about the evil Qommies is not difficult at the moment. Nevertheless, the prudent gambler should, as I'd recommend, bet her chips that tail will remain tail and never be able to wag the Elephant Folk altogether.


[4] Serious discussion of hopefulness would require having a much better idea of what M. Erdogan and his co-conspirators against peace have in mind to accomplish. You'll recall the speculation that the colonels and generals might be fobbed off with announcement of a RIGHT to invasionize that would not have to be actually exercised. BGKB.

The Friends Of Hugh Fitzdhimmi

Let's start with some self-criticism, Mr. Bones, or anyway, with how little Huey of Dhimmi Watch does not care to be even a candid friend to folks like us:

... Giuliani's foreign policy advisers, including the reported director, Charles Hill, immediately strike one as far superior to those advisers to the candidates in the Democratic camp. I have read that Albright and Berger are, unbelievably, still being consulted by Hilary Clinton. And Brzezinski by Obama Barack. That these names, these people, should be consulted by anyone, at this point, given their records on Iran, on Arafat, bref,[sic] on all things having to do with Islam, is, of course, fantastic.

Now when you come right down to it, sir, perhaps Pan Brzezinski and Pani Albright and Master Sandy are not really our own notion of ideal expertise on questions of aggression and occupation, not to speak of jihád fiendishness. It does not break the heart that these gentry should be disliked over at Dossiermonger Central also. However at the moment we are interested in Master Hugh Fitzdhimmi's Kiddie Krusade rather than Secretary of War Albright's Militärhumanismus, and from that point of view the final sentence above is a revelation. This laddie really does seem to be SHOCKED à la Casablanca to find that not everybody accounted wise and virtuous agrees with his own pet notions. "How can anybody sane want to consult those losers?", he moans. Will Huey ever grow up and realize that one must stand by one's own judgments even though well aware that persons better and brighter could not agree with them less? Will he ever learn that no matter what product he chooses to ideologize for, most of the human race will prefer something different?

Ah well, God knows best about future contingencies!


Meanwhile, what the señorito actually scribbles about before coming to that ass-coverin’ passage at the end is how much he disagrees with many of his own neocomrades, including a number of nomina clara whose performances we enjoy following ourselves. Even more enjoyable is to watch the knaves fall out intramurally, of course.

You are to reflect, Mr. Bones, that the Straight Path of jihád careerism is far from easy, being obstructed with so many pseudos, and wannabes, and extremist GOP cheerleaders, and Iraq aggression fans, and overcultivated tertiary educationalizers and . . . . Why, hardly anybody stands up to the Islamophalangitarian Menace exactly right -- apart from of course the Holy Family in person: Bob Cardinal Spencer, little Huey himself, plus the ever-blessèd Bint Ye’or.

What can spurned neocomrades like B. Lewis and N. Podhoretz make of the Fitzdhimmian fickleness? Little Huey does not very clearly explain why he is obliged to reject their Kiddie Krusade credentials. Viewing his pitch from a safe and nondefiling distance, one might guess -- up to a point, anyway -- that Neocomrade H. Fitzgerald requires that the Elect abandon their minds to the Great Sacred Cause absolutely without reservation. Anybody who proposes to do anythin’ whatsoever with her careerism other than lash out at the jihád fiends is potentially or actually unreliable. Along those lines you can see, Mr. Bones, why Neocomrade N. Podhoretz and Neocomrade B. Lewis won't quite altogether do. Both these prominent gentlethugs have a positive program as well as a cravin’ for the creative destruction side of the common racket. It may not seem to themselves that the advancement of Jewish Statism or of the interests of Republican Party extremism need involve any unfaithfulness to the Great Sacred Cause, but little Huey F. is stricter than they, as strict as Neocomrade S. Kirkegaard used to be: PURITY OF HEART IS TO WILL ONE THING! Hyperzionism is not the unum necessarium, and even farther off the mark is devotion to Grant's Old Party. Father, Son and Mme. Littman cannot spare a moment from their appointed trajectory to worry about whether they are elephants or donkeys, Jews or Gentiles. If Prof. Lewis and M. du Podhoretz allow themselves that leeway, why, so much the worse for Norm and Bernie! The watchword of jihád careerism must ever be Écrasez l'infâme!, and that means not wastin’ even a single instant on writin’ somethin’ new into the blank spaces from which fiendishness has been happily effaced.

You can read little Huey's particular nastygrams for yourself, Mr. Bones. Only in the case of Dr. Pipesovitch does he seem to me to have thought things through very clearly. His extreme of mist and muddle, on the other hand, is undoubtedly Neocomrade M. Kramerides, whose great offense against jihádological correctness is apparently only to like Neocomrade Herr Prof. Dr. B. Lewis somewhat excessively. Less rigorous scrutinizers have been known to find that sort of fault rather endearing and even praise it as "loyalty," but Señorito Fitzdhimmi will have none of that wishywashiness:

A professor should, in any case, be proud to have trained students who, when the time comes, will be able to see what that professor has done wrong, along with all of the right, rather than remain uncritical, worshipful acolytes.

As you'll recall, Bones, we have wondered ourselves before now exactly which professors of jihádology Neocomrade H. Fitzdhimmi looks backwards towards with unenchanted eye -- rather suspecting, to put it crudely, that he hasn't any to speak of. In the course of trashin’ poor ol’ Bernie, he seems to confirm these low doubts:

LEWIS is deeply cultivated --those paintings, those artworks, those linguistic gifts which can best be appreciated, of course, by Arab or Turkish or Persian visitors (intellectual vanity that can best be assuaged by those who know how much you know, because they are native speakers of those languages, can be a dangerous thing) . . . But he has also, over the years, belittled -- and not helped but possibly hindered -- BAT YE'OR. He has, one suspects, somewhere along the line missed something, something essential about Islam, possibly because the Muslims he knows, the ones who laugh at his bons mots, the ones who can appreciate his linguistic sallies in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, are as unrepresentative as . . . .

Well, you can look up for yourself exactly whom this señorito accounts representatively unrepresentative -- it's rather a surprising crew.

Myself, I am more concerned with his fascinating insinuation that one somehow knows jihádology better if one knows it in translation. Little Huey seems to be a silly man, yet that need not be entirely a Philistine and ridiculous prejudice that he cherishes. If not good ol' Bernie Lewis specifically, yet still there may be lesser neocomradely sages who have put so much effort into learnin’ those exotic chickentracks that they cannot properly appreciate how godawful Islamophalangitarianism really is. Worse, mere area students who fall well short of Theodore Noeldeke eruditionwise have been known to sympathise with the indigs that by rights they ought to be only dispassionately studying.

H. Fitzdhimmi certainly seems not to like anybody in the Greater Levant at all -- apart from Littman of the Nile, naturally. So far, so good, impartiality is admirably preserved, but . . . .



So what do the victims of little Huey's candid friendship make of him, I wonder? Perhaps not very much, for they all seem to possess so much more jihádological accreditation than he does that it would be absurd to dispute with him and at the same time contrary to the interests of the Kiddie Krusade.

"The dogs bark, the caravan moves on" -- perhaps that's the proverb for Huey.



____
[1] Amateur psychoanalysis of little Huey and his ilk leads nowhere fast, yet perhaps it does matter a little that he and his Cardinal Bob should be spiritual Indo-Europeans? The entanglement of Jewish Statism with the Kiddie Krusade certainly leads to problems for certain neocomrades both within and without the Pale of Zion. Chauvinists for the Tel Aviv statelet may worry that their traditional vested interests will suffer if anybody else is allowed to set up as a devoted victim of T*rr*r*sm, while Krusader kiddies much like R. Spencer and H. Fitzgerald may come to think of Jewish Statism as the sort of proverbial "good" that can becomes "enemy of the best." Perhaps in the long run chauvinism and jihád careerism will come to coincide altogether, at least for practical purposes, but that time has not yet arrived, and will not have arrived until all Gentile Palestinians have signed up with the Hamás and repudiated the Fatáh. As long as there exists any "secular" resistance to the military occupation of East Palestine and Gaza, stern Kirkegaardians associated with any of the zealotisms available on either side of the Green Line will have good reason to deplore the sad muddle that human events so regularly tend to be.

Little Huey Fitzdhimmi may or may not conceive his own zealotism like that. A different diagnosis of it would begin by pointing out that Bob Cardinal Spencer and the whole dossiermonger gang conceive of their jihád careerism as altogether a project of aggression. They are not tryin’ to defend anythin’ in particular, not even some self-servicin’ tripe and baloney of a "Western Civilisation," they are out to create a vast blank where Islamophalangitarianism used to be. Only that and nothin’ more. That comes to quite a large sized "only," to be sure, and one far beyond their feeble intellectual and physical powers ever to attain, but all the same, such is the announced scheme. There shall be when Islám is not! There must be when Islám is not!!

"... he seems quite serious about having identified an actual clinical condition ...."

(( On second thought, Mr. Bones, I think we might as well spare the Just World Peaceniks the bad news that we happen to disagree with them about their Herr Professor Doktor von Syndrome, a.k.a. "David Owen." Explaining to grown-ups why they have inadequate notions about Right and Wrong almost invariably means lots of trouble endured for very little benefit obtained. Fortunately his lordship is rather a theoretical menace to Mere Democracy rather than any clear and present danger, because he is in no position to demand credentialled expertise from the laity before graciously allowing us humble to vote. ))

It seems like an interesting move, to "medicalize" what we might otherwise regard simply as extremely bad behavior in these leaders.

It might do as a joke, or a deliberate polemical ploy when addressing one's own troops, to make out that one's political opponents are demented or "mentally ill" rather than old-fashioned knaves and fools. However, when one actually starts believing in such a propaganda, one is in a thoroughly deplorable state. It certainly looks as if Lord Owen must be a deplorable believer, for that Guardian piece mentioned in a customer comment ends with a solemn cross-reference to a longer version of the same performance in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. (The referent referred to does not seem to be there, however: allow me to diagnose a case of EJNC, "electronic journalism negligence complex.")

Perhaps something still worth calling Liberalism could survive clinical Owenisation, but mere democracy is obviously doomed if one really needs a white coat and a stethoscope and a portentous yimmer-yammer about syndromes to dispose of Blairs and Bushes adequately. Mere moralists need not apply, and of course lowly citizens who are not even credentialled moralists should please shut up altogether at once. (What's wrong with them? Don't they realize we all live in ExpertWorld nowadays?)

Considered as evidence of cultural and intellectual decay, Owenisation resembles the late Bruno Bettleheim's theory of how the Anglo-Saxons highjacked Freud , making the great man out all "medical" and "scientific" in a positivistic sense, instead of properly geistlich and humanistisch the way Dr. B. preferred (and claimed that Freud really is in German.) Lord Owen appears to be eminently within reach of that parallel, since Greek hybris started out much closer to temple and theatre than to the clinic. Perhaps the word did not denote precisely what we would call in English a character flaw or a moral failing, yet it was much more like that than like Tay-Sachs or AIDS or GERD.


The form of Owenisation is politically insufferable, then. Far better to ridicule the black hats honestly than set up to "diagnose" them!

The substantive matter of picking on Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush for their aggressions is entirely different, but in the Guardian piece Dr. Syndrome does repeat one common fallacy of anti-warriors that ought to be questioned a little: "Even when the insurgency developed, neither man was ready to admit error and authorise the extra troops needed." We are presumably to understand that if only Gen. Shinseki's advice had been followed and twice or three times as many troops dispatched, the outcome would have been far happier, for members of the Invasion Fan Club. Dr. Syndrome has a thesis to grind, so he implies that this was "hubristic" as well as erroneous, yet was it not in fact perfectly sensible? Busheviki and Blairites did not need more bayonets to overthrow the Ba‘th, and if they had sent more, probably the excess would have been withdrawn before the resistance/terrorism/guerilla/insurgency got properly under way. [1]




____
[1] One might make a better case for a far more general "hubrisity," one that figured largely in Secretary MacNamara's War: namely the notion that a Godzilla equipped with Superpower or even with HYPERPOWER simply can not lose to so contemptible an opposition as it encounters in Indochina or Mesopotamia.

But I don't think Lord Owen would be especially interested in syndromatizing that mistake, partly because it does not seem particularly dotty. Indeed, the political shrink may even believe in it himself.

Cats, Rats, Dogs, Elephants: "This is Ameriya, not Iraq!"

We’ve been doing al-Qazwíní's ‘Ajá’ibu l-Makhlúqát for the Muses and Annemarie Schimmel, Mr.Bones, and as often happens, all the world seems to have fallen in with our own chance preoccupation, for suddenly "unnatural history" turns up everywhere: [1]

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.

Cartoonoclastes Meets Dr. Kahl

Even though it only comes from the tenuous and obumbrated gentry at Conspiracy Junction, don't you find the following "nub" rather intriguing, Mr. Bones?

[R]emarks by the American delegation to other participants in these meetings indicated that the "bottom-up reconciliation" process modeled on Anbar, appears to be the centerpiece of a new American policy, in replacement of the earlier policy-efforts for reconciliation on the national level. Which as it happens is exactly the nub of what Colin Kahl preaches in his widely-read recent essay where this switch to local-level "stability" provides him with the rationale for keeping American forces in Iraq for the foreseeable future (meaning under a hypothetical Democratic administration). (...) In the American case Kahl, and no doubt others who will soon be emerging from the woodwork, are using the same positive atmosphere to roll out a rationale for keeping American troops in Iraq for the foreseeable future even under a Democratic administration. Which will sound just as comfortable for the Washington people as for their counterparts in the Green Zone.

Political entymologists who can detect exactly what bug's larva lurks curled up in the woodwork even before it actually gnaws its way out and spreads its splendiferous wings to take flight are always welcome, are they not? And this Colin Kahl is a comparatively exotic and unheard of species of bug, is he not, Mr. Bones, an up-and-coming youngster just out of the pupa, as it were? Cartoonoclastes must be well ahead of the mob, to single out this particular social scientizer for great villainies to come [1] and to do so on a very thin evidential basis, for it appears that his "widely-read recent essay" is only that off-hand e-mail to his Faculty Club buddy Abu Aardvark the other day.[2] Cartoonoclastes plainly thinks he's discovered a major indicium, howvever, possibly even a dalíl. In addition to what I just borrowed, from a Conspiracy Junction scribble called "The new rationale for keeping American troops in Iraq indefinitely (with an update)" , the insect in question gets a dissection all to himself called About the Kohl Plan . General Marshall's plan got somewhat more attention in 1947, to be sure, but Cartoonoclastes is trying hard to narrow the gap. In the highly improbable event that Princess Posterity and her court historians account C. Kahl a major figure in Quagmire Design and Implementation, Cartoonoclastes will deserve to be recalled as his John the Baptist.

Now of course we have already read the monstrous outrage ourselves without seeing anything very exciting in it, Mr. Bones, so perhaps we should let Cartoonoclastes take the first whack before re-examining his piñata? Here is Point One, plus a sort of Introductory Essay on Yank Altruism:

The overall assumption behind the Kahl essay is that the US has at least four specific aims in Iraq, and that they are all altruistic. They are: (1) Helping create and maintain a "stable equilibrium" in the sectarian and regional sense (the recent centerpiece of that being the arming of Sunni tribes in Anbar);

Finding out what the accused actually said that turned into that ought to indicate the prosecution's modus operandi. Lemme see, here is a paragraph numbered (1) in the piñata, but it seems not altogether congruous:

1. Fair oil revenue distribution may make Sunni areas economically viable, reducing incentives for them to seize the central government (and, because of this, hopefully reducing Shia fears that they will try).

That's an interesting notion, and as I consider, an interestingly mistaken one. Unless I misgauge Mu’ámara Junction altogether, the notion that the TwentyPercenters of the former Iraq might be interested in seizing the government will not recommend itself. (That analysis cuts a bit too close to the bone, I suspect.)

What pleases myself not so well, however, is the idea that anything as crass as petroleum matters much to those who labour spiritually (and at times militarily) towards restoration of a Sunní Ascendancy. Dr. Kahl of Georgetown errs in company with Dr. Gen. Petraeus of Princeton and West Point, it looks like, thinking that restless natives can easily be bought and put to sleep. To be sure, Kahl proposes to go at it wholesale, with "fair oil revenue distribution" from the Centre rather than a patchwork quilt of petty Bribe-a-Tribe™ schemes.

Perhaps "fair" gives some countenance to Cartoonoclastes' nattering about "altruism"?

As regards the substance, the prosecution's count (3) seems a better match:

The creation of viable local security forces with defensive capabilities (as opposed to heavy weapons that provide them with the offensive capacity to topple the government) may reduce the fear Sunnis have of being exterminated (thereby reducing their incentives to engage in violence) while deterring Shia offensive actions. In other words, if the system is defense-dominant, it helps alleviate the sectarian security dilemma.

Dr. Kohl does seem worried about government-toppling: it's a wonder that Cartoonoclastes does not make ensuring the survival of poor M. al-Málikí's neorégime one of the key poiints. Certainly I would.

Perhaps that rather exaggerated "exterminated" will appeal at Mu’ámara Junction? The idea as a whole will not, for it is axiomatic in cartoonoclastic circles that the Centre must rule any revival of "Iraq" with a firm hand (once the Centre itself is again restored to the right hands, of course). The notion of a "stable equilibrium" between Baghdád and Podunk will not do at all -- one might as well say "federalism" straight out and have done with it. [3]

Onward! The other three prosecutorial counts are as follows:

(2) Degrading Al-Qaeda in Iraq; (3) preventing genocide; and (4) deterring any further extension of Iranian influence, so as to "prevent any wider conflict".

Dr. Kohl has nothing to say against any of that, oddly enough, although none of it would appear to be particularly central to an impartial student of what he wrote. But then it's no particularly central for Cartoonoclastes either, who revolves around a rather unexpected and eccentric point:

[T]he first and most important point to notice is that no one in the Arab world thinks those are American objectives. On the contrary, on point (4), states of the Gulf think it highly likely there will be a US and/or Israeli strike against Iran, contrary to Kahl's point about preventing any wider conflict. Palestinians and Israelis are convinced there will be an American supported military attack on Gaza once the Annapolis conference is over, [and so on, and so forth].

That judgment looks so omphaloscopic and selfocentric as to be absurd, yet perhaps there is some redeeming social value to be extracted from it even so. Practitioners of sociology and other black arts do raise the question of whether the "truth" about how human events work can be entirely divorced from what goes on in the minds of those whom the events befall. Cartoonoclastes allows not an inch of leeway here: if the oppressed and conspired against don't see a particular "factor," then it does not exist. Others are less narrow-minded, some to the point of believing with a straight face that the Wars of the Roses were a simple matter of demography or the like, the inevitable working out of a variety of factors that nobody at the time would have dreamed of mentioning. When we have no fixed position on this controversy ourselves, Mr. Bones, it would be rash as well as rude to write off even the parochial and partisan extravagances of a Cartoonoclastes without a second thought.

Having attempted a little secondary cogitation, though, it still seems to me very likely that what the militant GOP thinks it is doin' in the former Iraq counts for a little something too. Possibly even what a mere fellow traveler with Big Party extremism like Dr. Colin Kahl thinks may count a little.[4] Cartoonoclastes himself thought it important to warn us about this Soc. Sci. insect coming out of the woodwork, although he did not specifically say that Dr. Kahl's opinions are to be attended to. It may be enough that the man looks to be a Democrat and that Cartoonoclastes looks for Democrats saying rather GOP-like things about the former Iraq if and when we regain the Executive.

What then to make of the Kahl essay? If you look at some of the sensible remarks in his Mother Jones interview of last month it seems hard to take him as a regime propagandist, for the current regime, that is. On the contrary, the idea suggests itself that he is an ideologue for the coming Democratic administration. Because if you assume that a Democratic administration is going to abandon the warlike ambitions with respect to Gaza, South Lebanon, Syria and Iran, then his altruistic package of Iraq aims and objectives might arguably make sense. But how likely is that? Democrats are just as AIPAC-compliant as Republicans; and the remarks of the "mainstream" Democratic candidates for president indicate they intend to outflank the Republicans on Iran and other defence issues to the right, not to the left. So what sense does it make to try to shape Democratic party opinion with respect to Iraq on the basis of assumptions about regional policy that will seem just as ludicrous under a Democratic administration as they do now under the Republicans?

Setting aside Cartoonoclast's gratuitous Nostradamus impersonation, the implication of that tirade is that it would be a waste of time to worry about whether Dr. Kahl believes what he says, let alone whether there is any truth to his sayings. I daresay at Mu’ámara Junction that attitude must be de rigeur, for who can be so naïve as to suppose that conspirators will be frank about what "warlike ambitions" they are up to? Possibly at times the knaves feel so confident of success that they are frank, but only the most skilled of conspiratorialists can be quite sure which times those are. Better safe than sorry, then, treat them all as you would treat Dr. Goebbels and do so on every occasion!


Meanwhile, as regards the former Real World, it would be a good deal more useful to learn about the "key points" on which Abú Aardvaark disagrees with that "guest post." I'd guess that AA, too, does not care for that rule-or-ruin attitude that Dr. Kahl realistically attributes to the TwentyPercenters. Talking about the smithereens of the Sunní Ascendancy in so disrespectful a tone of voice seems inconsistent with winning them over to being good with gobs and gobs of Affirmative Action™. Though it hardly qualifies him as Chief Architect of the Quagmire, either today or tomorrow, it does Dr. Colin Kahl credit not to believe in that particular baloney, and especially when almost everybody else does.

Their fair share of the oil loot but not one penny more, plus as many Kalashnikovs as it may take to ward off extermination -- that's about as affirmative as he is prepared to be, Sunniwise. His may not be the ideal occupation policy for Peaceful Freedumbia, but compared to most of the other paleface planmongers, he's brilliant.[5]



____
[1] What I presume is the accused's account of himself may be found at http://explore.georgetown.edu/people/chk34/?PageTemplateID=39 .


[2] Seven hundred and eighty words it comes to, fully clothed and with the wind behind it. Might do for an Executive Summary. Not quite Kennan Minor's Long Telegram.


[3] Should anyone have the supreme bad taste to like "federalism," she might think Dr. Kohl rather a smart cookie on account of that paragraph. The other schizomaniacs hardly ever indicate any mechanism to make their paper contraptions actually work. On the other hand, the idea of a firepower balance between Centre and peripheries is pretty crude, as is the bribery by petroleum scheme. Dr. Kohl may well be capable of something much more suave and Machiavellian than he sent off hastily in this casual e-mail. It would be a grand credit to the perspecacity of Cartoonoclastes if Kohl ever draws up a really thorough scheme to frustrate all the knavish tricks of the TwentyPercenters: anyone can see that he's quite clever, but to discern that he is fiendishly clever is not given to us all. Time will tell.


[4] This social scientizer fellow-travels pretty extensively with Big Management: "He is a regular consultant for the Department of Defense on stability operations, counterinsurgency, and strategy, and he has been a consultant for the U.S. Government's Political Instability Task Force (formerly the State Failure Task Force) since 1999." (Cf. URL in [1].)

Cartoonoclastes may even be mistaken to think him a registered donkey, though I daresay "President Clinton" might well hire him even so.


[5] "But he's an invasionite all the same?" Well, yes, Mr. Bones, so he is. This is still the sewer of Romulus, sir, not the Republic of Plato.

Safavid Imperialism Unmasked!

The courage-challenged of Rio Limbaugh and Telavivistan are in no danger, of course, yet all the same, the evil Qommies are manifestly on the march. One cannot deny the facts, Mr. Bones!

[F]our independent nations – Russia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan – emerged in place of the former USSR. Since then, the five littoral states have squabbled over how much of the Caspian territory they deserve. At first sight, Ahmadinejad’s position seems reasonable. He argues that the landlocked sea should be divided equally, with each country receiving a fifth. What makes that position grossly unjust is that Iran has by far the shortest coastline of all – only some thirteen percent. Understandably, then, the other nations do not like Ahmadinejad’s proposal. They call for a different division, one in which each country would receive a share in proportion to the length of its shoreline. It is a reasonable solution to the controversial territory, one normally used in disputes of this nature. Ahmadinejad, however, strongly opposes such a compromise. He insists that Iran be granted one fifth of the disputed territory -- a land grab that far exceeds Iran’s defensible claims. In essence, Ahmadinejad is demanding fifty percent more than he is entitled to. Under most circumstances, this kind of international insolence would be laughed out of the conference hall. (... ) [A]t today’s record energy prices, Iran’s takeover would amount to the most brazen instance of international thievery in recent memory. But the full extent of Ahmadinejad’s nastiness will only become obvious when we learn whom he intends to rob. At thirty-three thousand squares miles, Azerbaijan is smaller than Maine and ranks 114 in the world by territory. With barely five million people, Turkmenistan has fewer inhabitants than Wisconsin and places 113 globally in terms of population. It is this diminutive, Shiite Muslim nation that Iran would dispossess of a critical natural resource. Ahmadinejad’s attempted theft is made more unseemly by the fact that Azerbaijan’s and Turkmenistan’s Caspian field are these countries’ primary source of natural wealth. For Iran, on the other hand, the Caspian is only one of several revenue sources. A large country situated in an oil-soaked corner of the globe, Iran has a number of extensive deposits within its boundaries. Its most valuable happen to be opposite the Caspian in the Persian Gulf. Presiding over one of the world’s resource-richest nations, Ahmadinejad is trying to rob his two tiny neighbors of a portion of their comparatively modest resources. To put this into perspective, Iran’s territory is nearly twenty times that of Azerbaijan while its population exceeds that of Turkmenistan by a factor of fourteen.

'Twas the unenchanted eye of GOP neocomrade V. Kohlmayer[1] that detected this stealthy assault upon Western Civistan and all decent BigManagerial Values, raisin’ the alarm at once through the Baní Horowitz . Should apologists for the mad mullahs at Ann Arbor, for instance, continue to lie that the Persian hordes have not aggressed since the year 1785/1163, their shamelessness is now exposed for all of Wingnut City to behold. Let's have no more of that poppycock, Professor Cole!

==

The learnèd neocomrade is on to somethin’ here, no doubt about it, although perhaps this outrage in isolation will not seem to Televisionland and the electorate to warrant instant preëmptive retaliation. There are limits, I fear, to how interested most denizens of the holy Homeland are in whether Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan and Turkemenistan allow themselves to be swindled by that wily oriental gentlethug, M. Ahmadí-Nezhád. Even tossin’ in the Muscovite Menace that I have deliberatedly made disappear in quoting V. Kohlmayer, I suspect the whole affair may arouse more eye-glazin’ than flag-wavin’ amongst the Big Party base and vile.[2]

_____
You and I, Mr. Bones, may observe to the Muses and ourselves that M. Ahmadí-Nezhád looks to be rather a smarter cookie than we took him for back when we were unaware of V. Kohlmeyer's important discoveries. He seems quite as prudent as Mr. Bush of Rancho Crawford or M. Olmert of Telavivistan in that he makes sure to pick on somebody far smaller and weaker than himself. Iran is perhaps not quite a Godzilla compared to the Azeri-Kazakh-Turken Bambis, but close enough.
Neocomrade V. Kohlmeyer himself trades on the pathos of that disproportion, you'll notice, although his melodrama probably won't play well in Peoria all the same.[3]

It is at least a mild curiosity to learn that anybody in the fever swamps of Yank neorightism should think it worthwhile to go about discreditin’ the evil Qommies' claims to represent the former tiers monde, a.k.a. "the globally downtrodden." Logically speaking, should not that whole shtik of theirs have been abandoned as soon as the posteconomic Gospel of Clashism was revealed to Huntin’ton of Harvard? In any case, the neocomrade might have strengthened his brief by supplyin’ a few recent quotations from M. Ahmadí-Nezhád, or some suitably bearded/turbaned theofiend, to establish that the Islamic Republic really does still do business at that particular stand nowadays.[4]

There are, as often with neorightist agitprop, a number of lacunae in plain sight here. For example, we are not told that the poor helpless Bambis have actually agreed to be robbed by Qommies and Muscovites. And might there not be a problem for the Big Party argumentation, if in fact they did agree, though it be under pressure? Our own OnePercenters' devotion to sanctity of contract does not often invalidate their own negotiations on any such sentimental grounds, does it? Worst of all, however, for the Party cause is that Neocomrade V. Kahlenberg does not even pretend that any use of physical violence has taken place here. Indeed, there is no sign of even the threat of physical violence. The whole touchin’ fandango makes no sense, really, unless Godzilla tried to twist arms, but he presents no evidence to that effect whatsoever.

Should it be imputed to the evil Qommies as aggression, then, that they happen to outnumber Azeris and Kazakhs and Turkmenis and to be rather richer? That would be an interesting proposal, and perhaps one not altogether without merit, but nobody not ethically brain-dead could accept it without examining the implications for other parallel cases, such as the full annals of our own holy Homeland's behavior vis-a-vis Latin America. Perhaps all Monroe Doctrines are improper? Perhaps a Monroe Doctrine is perfectly legitimate even when extended by the likes of M. Ahmadí-Nezhád (or M. Putin) to Azeris and Kazakhs and Turkmenis? Perhaps some Monroe Doctrines are better than others? Who knows? Who is to say?

I do not profess to know the answers to these deep questions off hand, but there seems no good reason why Big Party neocomrade Vasko Kahlenberg shouldn't be forced to worry about them.[5]

God knows best.


_____
[1] (Who?)


[2] The Muscovite Menace angle is, briefly, as follows:

Iran’s scheme would give Russia some five percent more than what it is by rights entitled to. Given today’s energy prices, this would translate into many millions in extra revenue. Even more important, Ahmadinejad’s scheme would make it more difficult for Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to lay pipelines across the Caspian to transport oil and gas to European destinations. This is especially important to Russia, which holds a virtual monopoly on fuel transport to Europe.

That will not quicken many pulses either, perhaps, since normal Homelanders scarcely concern themselves with the Old Euros' energy problems, whilst hot-house Party lemmin’s may even take the line that those aggression-averse folks deserve to be screwed. At any rate, if the O.E.s had to pay more for their commuting, and if they realized that evil Qommies and pernicious Putinites are the cause of it, possibly they'd see the beauties of Preëmptive Retaliation more clearly. (Strictly speaking, though, their retaliation would not be preëmptive. Still, better postpreëmptive than not at all!)


[3] The Kohlmayerian pathos may not be entirely reality-based, however. Population ought to be taken into account: Turkemenistan's "comparatively modest resources" may well match those of the evil Qmmies per capita. To be sure, I'm only guessing, but since V. Kohlmayer supplies no figures, such speculation seems not impermissible.


[4] Perhaps it would be better to pass over V. Kohlmayer's unavoidable insinuation that his Boy and his Party have the interests of the Caspian small fry more at heart than the evil Qommies do. Harder-headed wingnuts such as those of Big Oil and Castle Cheney very likely don't much care who they buy the black gunk from or how the natives distribute among themselves such percentage of the loot as accrues to them.


[5] That one can't actually twist his arm to compel his attention is a fact, of course, but it is no good reason.

Monsieur Veto

That "constitution" that Khalílzád Pasha of AEI and GOP vouchsafed his Party's neo-Iraqi subjects continues to amaze, Mr. Bones: did you ever distinctly notice that there are three times as many opportunities for Executive Branch nullification in the former Iraq as chez nous?

... [T]he Iraqi Accordance Front (IAF) rejected accusation made by a member of the Unified Iraqi Coalition to the Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi, who was described as "practicing dictatorship." (...) MP from the Shiite Unified Iraqi Coalition Sami al-Askari said that "the vice president - he did not mention his name - is practicing dictatorship in using veto against draft laws and some draft laws need 3/5 majority, which is not possible because of the absence of the legislators." "The parliament will not be able to approve any law as the vice president vetoes more than 20 draft laws," al-Askari also said. The Iraqi constitution gives the president and the two vice presidents the right to veto any draft law approved by the parliament and send it back to be amended or reviewed by the government.

Of course "practicing dictatorship" is a thoroughly absurd charge, for no "Hashimite Republic of Táriq" can be established on the positive side when heretics and hillbillies can veto His TwentyPercenter Excellency quite as kiddie-konstitutionally as the other way around.

The Sadness of the Subaltern

You can tell you've got a wheeler-dealer, Mr. Bones, when he begins his "analysis" or his "journalism" with a Nostradamus impersonation :

President Pervez Musharraf's declaration of emergency rule this weekend will only encourage further civil strife, nationwide protests and greater territorial gains by the extremist Pakistani Taliban. Never before in Pakistan's sad history of military rule has a general so reviled invoked martial law to ensure his own survival.

Sir Oracle will be in trouble if nobody gets further encouraged -- or anyway, in a world run by wisdom, Sir Oracle would be in trouble. In the real world, he finds himself on page A-19 of the Washington Post instead, which in a manner of speaking is trouble in itself. The intellectually respectable invasion-language press does not much care about the Perils of Pervez one way or the other. To be sure, the Post features an authentically paleface Postie analysis on the front page, wherein Mr. Griff Witte (who?) reaches for the handiest silver lining:

Many analysts say they think there's an opening for Musharraf's political opponents to mobilize against him. Former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, for instance, has the ability to bring hundreds of thousands of people into the streets against Musharraf. But it is unclear whether she will; she has been negotiating a power-sharing arrangement with Musharraf for months, and any street agitation by her supporters would jeopardize those talks. The top leaders of other opposition parties have been imprisoned. While the lawyers are certain to protest, their numbers are comparatively small. And with independent television blacked out, the police and army could use violence to put down anti-Musharraf demonstrations without inflaming public opinion.

Rather a muddled reach, for on balance it sounds even chez Witte as if Mme. Feudal Landlady can not in fact bring her dynastic retainers out into the streets to overthrow the vile machinations of Colonel Moustache. The headline editor at the Post knows how it must come out in the end, however: "Musharraf Declaration Seen as Latest Misstep / Risky Choice Fits Pattern in Efforts To Retain Power" -- not only is Moustache an obvious baddie, he's a rather unintelligent baddie who puts his foot down wrong, so who can doubt he's doomed?

Ah well, "The People united can never be defeated!" -- and what could be more people-uniting than the colonels Moustache (and the second lieutenants Bush) of the world? Plus what would become of the amour-propre of the Fourth Estate, if "independent television blacked out" were in fact to carry the day? Untinkable! Moustache is as good as defunct, obviously.

M. Ahmad Rashid on page A-19 is at least a couple of cuts above the front page baloney, perhaps because he actually knows a little bit about darkest Musharrafistán. However such knowledge comes with the usual price tag: M. Rashid has axes of his own to grind, and I draw your attention, Mr. Bones, to the melancholy spectacle that such grinding makes. He wants to get rid of Moustache, plainly, and perhaps even of moustachism as a system, and he is not so Panglossian as to expect much from Them The People back home. M. Ahmad Rashid wagers rather that somebody of importance at Rancho Crawford or Castle Cheney will read his piece in the District of Columbia hometown fishwrap and perceive that it is in the general interest of Kiddie Krusadin' and the particular self-interest of Boy and Party to get rid of Colonel Moustache. This strikes me as rather a bad bet, in the sense that things probably won't happen like that, but it is also a sad and depressing sort of bet, win or lose. M. Ahmad Rashid is reduced to kissing the Asses of Power, is what it comes to, just as Mme. Feudal Landlady has been similarly reduced.

The shame and pity of this is not merely that our now incumbent Asses of extremism don't give a hoot about the future of independent television or dynastic patronage in South Asia, though needless to say they don't. The whole show might be even shabbier if the GOP geniuses took a genuine interest in such things the way Secretary of War Albright did whilst unilaterally and preëmptively creating the happiness of Kosova. "Come put me and my friends in power because . . . ." is miserable stuff no matter who the friends are, and no matter how excellent the rationale is. Weakness admitting how weak it is simply does not edify. A moralist might well moralize that such a performance ought to be edifying, and perhaps it does not speak well for human nature in the face of peccatum originale that weakness seems somehow shameful and pitiable simply as such. Nevertheless, things are as they are and why should we wish to be deceived? It does not speak well of feudal landladyism or independent journalism that these things cannot impose themselves upon Pakistan unassisted.[1]

(The generalization implied is perhaps only a rebuttable presumption. I should hesitate to say in 2007 that my Uncle Sam looked weak and shabby in 1776-81 because he had to go cap in hand to the court of France. Still, nearly everybody in the holy Homeland except professional historians manages to forget that anything of the sort ever happened at all, which suggests that most of us might consider it fort mauvais if they did ever think of it. However it happened so long ago, and Sam's subsequent Ascent to Hyperpower is so huge an obstruction to seeing antique things in perspective, that it may be best not to adduce that evidence for any purpose at all. God knows best.)


In addition to the radical and substantial subaltern sadness of M. Ahmad Rashid, there is a sort of sarcastic icing on top as well, in that he is reduced to making pretty much the same appeals for himself and his friends as Col. Moustache makes -- and probably that Mme. Landlady makes in private as well:

. . . greater territorial gains by the extremist Pakistani Taliban . . . battle against extremism on northern Pakistan, where a resurgent Pakistani Taliban helped by al-Qaeda, Afghan members of the Taliban and several foreign terrorist groups are conquering territory and expanding the boundaries of their "liberated" sharia state. . . . extremists know that the Pakistani state has been irretrievably weakened and that this is the moment to push their offensive . . . .

I'm reminded of the eighteenth-century joke about how most gentlemen felt honour-bound to quarrel over Religion as if she was a lady that none of them genuinely care for. Neither Mme. Landlady nor Col. Moustache nor M. Rashid can seriously consider that saving Pakistan from extremist Taliban is priority number one, yet what else can they talk about when they approach Château Kennebunkport and Castle Cheney and Rancho Crawford on bended knee? None of that pack are so naïve as to suppose that the militant GOP is likely to do anything for them just because they happen to want it done, not even in exchange. 'Tis but more sadness and shabbiness that they should be forced to accommodate themselves to narcissistic jerks whom one must talk nonsense at if one expects to obtain any advantage at all.

You recall the joke advice about how one should never grow old, Mr. Bones, and the plight of the Pakies is like unto it: Don't ever be weak, sir!, there is simply no profit to be derived from it.


____
[1] Colonel Moustache can make a certain amount of hay for the bad guys out of this dubious configuration of human sentiment. Just being a colonel helps him considerably, for pursuit of the violence profession does not often look weak and pitiful and shabby to the vulgar. The poor dears are of course muddled about the matter, because any serious military confrontation is likely to result in not just suggesting, but effectively demonstrating, that somebody's colonels are no great shakes after all. Still, Musharrafistán has, like most of the barracks-based republics of the Levant and Latin America, managed on the whole to avoid classical military confrontation with the neighbors. The fact that its violence pros can't actually grab control of Waziristan &c. does not seem to discredit them much with The People, and perhaps there is no reason why it should, as long as the disputed badlands are remote enough from where real people live.

Little Lady From Big Party Finally Goes Away

Karen Hughes' two-year Halloween ?!
"Her professional and official calamity" -- ?
"The absolute worst in American political culture" -- ??
"A monumental and insulting hoax" -- ???!

It requires a special perspective to find Texas GOP neocomradess K. Hughes as important, not to mention as godawful, as all that, Mr. Bones. Naturally nobody in M. Rami Khouri's position could possibly enjoy getting treated as a backward and refractory child by some ignorant parochial member of Little Brother's kitchen cabinet, yet all the same, there must be some element of accident involved here, for surely R.K. will have understood how low mere natives stand in the Crawfordite scale of bein's well before Mizz Karen set to rubbin' it in with salt. He has been around a long time, has M. Khouri, so he ought to have seen this foul ball comin'.

With a slightly different temperament, M. Khouri might even have welcomed the Hughes Hobgoblin Show, pointing out sagely that everybody else sent down previously from Imperial HQ to address the Levantine idiot school has taken basically the same attitude as the resigned neocomradess, merely dissembling their contempt insincerely with more or less success. It won't quite do to go on as if the wretched provincial critter had been dragged in to replace George F. Kennan, Jr., or John Kenneth Galbraith -- or to make like Kissinger of Harvard or Baker of Texas. The Greater Levant has never been found worthy of such high-powered permanent representation as that from Uncle Sam's side.

The holy Homeland's credentialled ambassadors in the zone of darkness are mainly contributorial hacks, and unlike Mizz Karen, they are at least credentialled to somebody in particular. Being hacks, it is not an accident, but a logical consequence, that they should be swept out of sight the instant some authentic GOP genius like Kissinger or Baker shows up to solve it all in a jiffy with a paroxysm of shuttlin'. Party neocomradess C. Rice suffers from no discernible urge to shuttle, which may or may not explain how Mizz Karen crept into the picture in the first place. At very least, M. Khouri ought to reflect that the little lady was not sent to lie abroad to insult anybody, let alone to infuriate Rami Khouri in particular. I'm sorry to say that the (indigenous) Greater Levantines were classified as uninsultable decades ago[1], but also sorry to find that a distinguished journalist at the Daily Star should seem to find this a new discovery. It would be nice to suppose that M. Khouri is only funning with us along "Casablanca" lines, only pretending to be SHOCKED by the abominable K. Hughes. Alas, either he's quite serious or my spoofometer is totally out of order.

Anyway, here's the heart of the indictment:

The core, devastating flaw in her entire mission was to completely separate the world's critical views of the US government from the conduct of American foreign policy itself. She assumed that the problem was that foreigners misunderstood American values or foreign policy goals - but she never tried to understand Arab-Muslims in the same way she asked them to understand her country and its policies. She never understood that her brand of moralizing and arrogant cultural cheerleading - "Go, Muslims, go! Reach for the sky! You can be modern and democratic, if you really try!" - was part of the problem, not part of the solution. She failed to grasp that she was handicapped from the start by trying to make us love a country whose pro-Israeli, pro-Arab autocrats foreign policy - and now the Iraq fiasco - has devastated our lands and cultures for nearly half a century.

All perfectly accurate, except perhaps that "nearly half a century" underestimates the chronological depth of LCS, Levantine contempt syndrome. M. Khouri may well be reckoning from the summer of 1968, but if he was magically transported back to then, he'd not be all that happy with the fifty years preceding either. [2]

All accurate enough, though scarcely complete. More important, though, not a word of it is new or different or peculiar to the abominable Hughes. I notice, though, that M. Khouri seems not quite sure how to charaterize the Big Party neocomradess's calamitous activities: was she tryin' to get the Lesser Breeds Without "to understand her country and its policies" or merely "to make [them] love a country whose"? These are not the same thing, and it seems to me clear enough that Mizz Karen was a good deal stronger on seekin' Luv [3] for her Boy and Party than on explainin' policy. M. Khouri is clearly in no mood to give the critter or her employers much Luv, and that is admirable, for she and they certainly deserve none, but all the same, I don't think he quite sees how the internal wind-up mechanisms of Grant's Old Party really work.

Meanwhile, there's been nothing to warrant that harsh four-letter word HOAX, and there isn't anything that comes afterwards either. M. Khouri perorates in a way that a stern critic might classify as toying with his readers, but it casts no light on how he supposes the abominable Hughes to have been practicin' upon himself or tryin' the patience of Greater Levantines more generally:

We should criticize her personally only for accepting to be part of this charade, and playing the fool on a global stage that increasingly came to see her as a strange combination of a comedy and horror show rolled into one. We should instead remind Americans that this is a moment for them to reconsider this whole silly episode, stop wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on vacuous public diplomacy programs, and stop insulting several billion people around the world who do not need any prompting to enjoy American values, education, business, technology, sports, and other offerings - including Halloween night, with its bags of Tootsie-Rolls, and the fantasy of defeated wicked witches who get on their brooms and disappear into the night sky, to reappear only in our future nightmares.

Even "charade" is not really warrantable, when it comes to Boy and Party, justly evaluated. Of "hoax" there can be no question at all. To be sure, M. Rami Khouri has never bound himself to our own canons of what is to count as lying in politics, Mr. Bones. Still, where are hoax and charade even by his own standards? He has detected Big Party neocomradess K. Hughes in the act of sayin' all sorts of silly things to the Lesser Breeds Without that the vast majority of LBW's would never dream of believing no matter who alleged them. Fine, but when there is no danger of the intended marks and dupes actually being deceived, "hoax" is the wrong word by anybody's standards.

"Charade" I am not quite so confident about, but should not the implication be that everybody playing at charades knows the rules and has deliberately suspended her usual everyday standards of serious communication? Dulce est desipere in loco, or so they say, and it would be easy enough to extend a little charity to Mizz Karen on those grounds, if only those were the flack's own grounds. But obviously they ain't. She did not expect her Party tripe and baloney to be greeted with winks and nods and a tacit agreement from the audience that of course that is how Crawfordite extremists have to talk, even though we all know what they are really up to. This is more than a matter of neocomradess K. Hughes's subjective sincerity, though it is that as well., for of course she really does consider that the GOP Demoplutocratic Way is so intrinsically warm and wunnerful that if only the Lesser Breeds Without could once catch an unobstructed view of it, they'd pervert to it instantly and never look back. To mock such parochial ignorance and self-infatuation and narcissism is a worthy cause, but unfortunately to mock them with accusations of hoax or playin' at charades is almost entirely off target. Unless criticism starts by conceding that the little lady from Rancho Crawford believed all her own pet nonsenses one thousand percent -- and had not the slightest intention of deceivin' or insultin' anybody with them -- criticism can say nothing to the point.

The worst true thing to be said about Mizz Karen is that she believed every last word of her own Big Management Party sales spiel. That is a very dreadful thing to have to say about any rational animal, I admit, but there is no occasion for M. Rami Khouri to blow the subjective sincerity of partisan hacks and fools up into "the absolute worst in American political culture." He ought to reflect, it seems to me, that he and his patria grande would be in a far worse fix if that "country [that] has devastated our lands and cultures for nearly half a century" were in the hands of subtle cynics rather than omphaloscopic nitwits and applause-lovers. The clownishness of clowns who take themselves very seriously can be very annoying, no doubt, but if the alternatives to Master Dubya and Dr. Condi and Mizz Karen are pondered seriously, I believe the devasted will conclude that they do not inhabit the very worst of all possible Weltordnungen.

King Log is no great treasure, obviously, but King Stork really would be even worse. [4]

And God knows best.

___
[1] The case of the Tel Aviv statelet is sui generis insultwise as otherwise, yet Jewish Statism gets no better diplomats than Gentile intransigeance, as far as I can discern. It's the nine-tenths of the iceberg that Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer have been plumbing lately with very rash zeal that makes the chief difference, and that glacial phenomenon is plainly located in central North America rather than Southwest Asia. M. Olmert is quite as insultable as M. Lahoud or M. Siniora, if considered in himself, yet his cause is hallowed by sentimentality or "ideology" like no other Greater Levantine cause whatsoever.


[2] Or the millennium before that, I daresay. It seems harder in those parts than elsewhere to fix upon any "Good King Charles' golden days" that won't immediately arouse a chorus of boos and snickers from a plurality or majority of any mixed audience of locals. As regards M. Khouri's own patria chica, the Beirut statelet, what was there to yearn back towards now? Perhaps a few years after 1945 when it looked as if the United Nations Charter might make much more difference to this alien and bewildered world of ours than it actually has.

M. Khouri's patria grande is even harder to bask in the ancient glory of, unless that glory be so ancient as to be irrelevant. "Good old al-Mu‘tasim's golden days" would have a rather desperate ring to it, I fear, even if there were not quite a number of Greater Levantines who would be happy to rip the gilt off even that remote gingerbread.


[3] Or let's cut the spoofery and speak like grown-ups of "applause" rather than "Luv." Applause seems to be the commodity that Château Kennebunkport and Castle Cheney and Rancho Crawford are more in quest of than other, which puts them somewhat at odds with certain harder-headed Party neocomrades of the oderint dum metuant school. This generalization applies to the politics of the holy Homeland as well as to all zones of overseas aggression and occupation whatsoever, not merely in the Middle East. Accordingly, I expect that Princess Posterity's historians will discuss the applause-seekin' abominations of K. Hughes in close conjunction with those of neocomrade K. Rove. Since I lump these two P. R. creeps together in a larger whole in a way that M. Rami Khouri does not, his account of the Boy-'n'-Party malfeasance will not agree very closely with my own, even as regards just Kiddie Krusadin' and the Palestine Puzzle.


[4] To think one's way around the GOP geniuses seems the obvious recourse, and in principle what could be easier than that? In practice it is not quite so simple, mainly due to the sad degree of fragmentation that obtains in the Greater Levant. Like pretty well everything else, this difficulty can be blamed on the Fifty Years' Devastation and often is. M. Khouri is far from the worst offender in this respect, but even he might bear in mind that to pass the buck is not in itself any contribution to thinking one's way around the obstruction.