But we may still discuss our own wretched tradition, Mr. Bones, which has not been nearly such a paradise as Mu’ámariyyan Mesopotamia. We were already up to our necks in Colestories three centuries ago:
| There is no doubt but the Supreme Authority of a nation has in itself, a Power, and a right to that Power, to execute the Laws upon any part of that nation it governs. The execution of the known Laws of the land, and that with but a gentle hand neither, was all that the Fanatical Party of this land have ever called Persecution. This they have magnified to a height, that the sufferings of the [Fourteeners] in [Lebanon] were not to be compared with them. Now to execute the known Laws of a nation upon those who transgress them, after having first been voluntarily consenting to the making of those Laws, can never be called Persecution, but Justice. But Justice is always Violence to the party offending! for every man is innocent in his own eyes. |
Today's goodie is a twofer, sir; it may pass for a Lynchtale against Western Civistán as well as a Colestory about our dotty sects-addicted ancestors. Abú Aardvaark wrote yesterday
| I've said a hundred times that I think that the only hope for locking in the tenuous security gains of the last year - and thus turning the tactical successes of the surge into strategic progress - is to consolidate an actual Iraqi sovereign state with a monopoly over the legitimate means of violence. Old-fashioned of me, I know. |
Older-fashioner than AA ever dreamed is his spes unica -- unless wording the business exactly Herr Professor Doktor Weber's way be accounted critical. True, the venerable spoofster did not mention "monopoly," he failed to insist that Supreme Authority (may Its shadow be prolonged!) must possess "a SOLE Power and an EXCLUSIVE right to that SOLE Power." Yet, never having heard of the nifty Competing Governments™ product now available from Rand and Nozick LLC of St. Petersburg and Harvard Yard, he almost certainly tacitly assumed monopoly.
In Peaceful Freedumbia, every candid observer must recognize that there has been a grave failure "to execute the known Laws of [the] nation." The bushogenic quagmire has been made more treacherous and tricky than was absolutely mandatory by Khalílzád Pasha's insistence that there should exist certain fundamental "known Laws." There is a small gain in the matter of certainty, I daresay, when each subject of the International Zone neorégime may readily compare her individual proceedings with the Khalílzád Konstitution and be entirely confident that there are discrepancies -- for who could wish to deviate into konstitutionality unawares? The Brit neorégime of Anne Stuart was plainly deficient by comparison, possessing no Laws that were formally Basick, after the colonial Madisonian or colonialist Khalílzádí manner. The Jacobite muqáwama could only thumb their noses at particular statutes, I presume, since the so-called "Bill of Rights" of the sectarian Whigs was obviously only a declamation, not a constitution. The Khalílzád Konstitution is not radically different, but it was imposed on Peaceful Freedumbia under circumstances that misleadingly suggested it might be more than declamatory. That delusion cannot endure, it has worn very thin already. For Lynchtale purposes, GOP/DOD konstitutionalism in the former Iraq would matter only if Max Weber had meant a monopoly of constitutional violence when he spoke of a "legitimate" ditto. Obviously he did not. Or, if he did, nobody has ever understood him correctly yet. (Indeed, "constitutional violence" sounds peculiar absolutely. Has any clear name of Pol. Sci. ever used that category? Except of twistifiers practicing hermeneutical violence upon this or that official parchement, of course. The woods are always full of them.)
Considering that Authority has revealed that there was never any sectarianism, tá’ifiyya, in the former Iraq prior to April Fool's Day 2003 (28 Muharram 1424), it is amazing how parallel the Jacobite muqáwama seems to the current doings of Sunninternis and TwentyPercenters and Saviours and Awakeners. Above all, Mr. Bones, there is the grand structural similarity, which leads to the ease with which spoofsters like thee and me can deploy expressions corresponding to "the Fanatical Party of this land" and "Persecution" so as to suggest id cuius contrarium est verum, the contrary of the spoofsters' faction's preferred verity, that is. We ourselves usually speak, for instance, of "poor M. al-Málikí" and more or less mean that he is a victim rather than a victimizer. A victim of the militant extremist Republican Party primarily, of course, but secondarily a victim of Sunninternis and TwentyPercenters and Saviours and Awakeners as well.[1] Yet by its rhetoric that phrase simultaneously reminds the aware that in the eyes of the muqáwama, M. al-Málikí is a monster of sectarianism and one might as well speak of "poor old Jenghiz Khan" or "poor old Otto Frank."
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[1] When the "prime minister" starts grumbling on his own behalf, the Anglo-Arabian Press Trust looms very large. The AAPT brings out the worst in Núrí Jawád Kamál, unfortunately. If he thought his masters down at Rancho Crawford would let him get away with it, he'd probably ban most of the newspapers at New Baghdád, make it illegal to import Arabophone print journalism, and try to jam al-Jazeera and al-‘Arabiyya. All the other Arab Palace gentry take much the same line, but it matters a little that none of them were actually installed in power by the Ever-Glorious Coalition of AEI and GOP and DOD.
Poor M. al-Málikí would do well to take to heart the jingle "Shock-'n'-Awe may break my jaw / But words can never hurt me."
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