| [T]his whole idea of boiling down what is happening in Iraq to those factors that are most familiar to Western readers ("heightened conflict with the approach of elections!") represents not just leaving out those factors that are particular and peculiar to Iraq, but of distorting our view by ignoring the anti-occupation/anti-corruption feelings that are driving dissident groups of all kinds and persuasions. This distorted view is what makes it possible for people to think the continued presence of occupation troops can be a pacifying factor! (This is a politer way of saying what I was also getting at in the prior post). |
"View" is residually visual, though just barely so, and "factor" is a complete blank to the inner eye. "Feelings" and "way of saying" suggest that Mu’ámara Junction may be about to switch to some other rhetorical sense organ, though whether tactile or auditory figures are henceforth to be purveyed is at this point undecided. The suggestion that visuality offends against good manners is interesting, although perhaps it is rather I than Cartoonoclastes who suggests it.
Meanwhile, back in the former Iraq, "factor" will do for the moment, colourless though it be. The top story in our local news is that Cartoonoclastes has just discovered a Whole New Factor:
| Meanwhile in Karbala, security officials have been regularly reporting arrests of persons they say belong to the "Adherents of the Mahdi", one of the groups focused on the coming appearance of the 12th Iman, and who the authorities say are planning violence violence during the Arbaeen, just as they say they did in Basra and Nasiriya a couple of months ago. One of the main tenets of the Mahdists is the corruption of the Shiite religious establishment in Najaf, headed by the Ayatollah Sistani, because of their support for a corrupt, occupation-friendly government. |
I seem to remember a few faint insinuations that the wickedly sectarian International Zone régime might be more or less inventing "Mahdism" out of whole cloth. If Cartoonoclastes ever spun that narrative, though, he has now changed his mind and decided it is more expedient that "Mahdism" should seriously exist and be admitted as a major player. Given the alleged main tenet, there is no difficulty in seeing why the MJ gentry might so choose: nobody who denounces "the corruption of the Shiite religious establishment in Najaf, headed by the Ayatollah Sistani, because of their support for a corrupt, occupation-friendly government" can be all bad. And the more there are of her, the merrier: everybody knows that!
As ever, captious critics may criticize the new MJ spin on various grounds, as for instance that the factor looks almost to have been deduced from the tenet rather than vice versa. Cartoonoclastes is not identical with Rabbi Ben Trovato, admittedly, but up to a point great minds work alike, or so I conjecture. If Peaceful Freedumbia is not in fact infested by noble anti-corruption "Mahdists," it damn well ought to be, what with the sins of the marji‘iyya crying out to Heaven for vengeance. Not even to mention the sins of the Establishment Áyatalláhs' political plaything, poor M. al-Málikí!
For agitprop work, I daresay it seems better to have as many militant Mugwumps in action as possible. The Sadrists are not so very bad, of course, yet a coalition of Sadrists and "Mahdists" would be even less bad, and that regardless of whether the coalition significantly outnumbers the Sadr Tendency alone. One does not count individual noses or inky fingers in such a case, one counts the number of different organizations (or whatever) affiliated with the desiderated Popular Front. It is not cynical but realistic to notice that in a pinch the actual or physical existence of all the organizations (or whatever) coaligned can be dispensed with. Some of them, perhaps even most of them, must be detectable by crude empirical means, or else the bad guys will triumph at once. But not all of them.
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