| The River of Disappearing Truths It is an amazing feature of the blogosphere that no one in the upper echelons ever corrects him- or herself, and the farther removed he is from his or her subject-matter, the more true that is. Imagine Matt or any of that ilk correcting themselves on the subject of Iraq. Of course, this is partly the effect of what somebody once explained as the essence of "bullshit", namely that it differs from lying or falsehood in that its truth or falsity was never in question. |
A great deal more of that vein will flow burbling by, right before the blogging victim's tube, should she allow it to do so in her amazement. You may root most of the rest of it out for yourself, sir. For our immediate Sabbath-scholarly purposes, the main necessary preliminary is to classify this as part of the latest MJ offensive in the War on Juan. Know also that it is the River Heraclitus that flows through beautiful downtown Conspiracy City. [1] No surprise, that second item!
Now if thou or I hadst undertaken to bloghivate like that, O Bones, what would have come after the incipit? Would we not immediately have adduced as long a list as flesh and self-esteem can endure of our own mistakes and deceived expectations about the bushogenic quagmire, starting with the most vulgar and conventional communis error of all, which also happens to be the most comprehensive, namely that it utterly never occurred to us that the aggressonistas would still be tryin’ to nail their coonskin to the wall five years after 20 March 2003. Even if the Grand Coalition of AEI and GOP and DoD be reckoned as only one quarter of the population of the holy Homeland -- that half of the voting half of the populace that votes for the Party of invasions and occupations, it still consisted of eighty million willin’ invasionites to a mere thirty million patients in the former Iraq. Endowed with nearly three times the enemy's demographic base -- plus Sole Remainin’ Hyperpower to boot! -- they have nevertheless not been able to . . . (&c. &c. quantum sufficiat) . . . . Who'd 'a' think it?
In addition to that One Big Booboo, there are subordinate unthunk-of-heres that would loom quite large in isolation, as that (A) we did not dream that (nominal) power would not be handed over to natives drawn from the rootless cosmopolitan community as soon as the Mesopotamian provinces had been seized and secured. Possibly not to M. le Docteur de Tchélabi in person, despite all his advance billin’, but at least to somebody like him. Alternatively to somebody like Generalissimo Mubárak. Instead of either, "we" installed Sultán Jerry. (Maybe only Nostradamus could have seen that uncovenanted fiasco in advance, but the Sabbath-morning point is that we certainly did not.)
(B) We did not dream of the Khalílzád Konstitution. Even now, it flabbergasts that any crew so fatuously narcissistic as the Coalition of the Willful failed even to attempt to raise New Baghdád up and up until it was nearly on a par with Kansas City, politically speakin’. Who anticipated that after their cakewalk, the bozoes would prove so extremely uninterested in the cake? It was left to Noah of Harvard and Señorito Zalmáy of AEI and a few randomly assorted indigs with Homeland law degrees to play at being James Madison, coming up with that malicious travesty of proportional representation that makes quite sure that real power can not consolidate itself around any of the formal institutions of the imposed neorégime. Here one can at least bernielewisate and discern in retrospect What Went Wrong™, which is more than one can about the ineffable Neocomrade P. Bremer. All the same, who thunk it in advance? Neither thou nor I, Mr.Bones.
(C) Once accustomed to the stumblebumism of the Big Management Party stumblebums, we were blindsided by Rear-Colonel Kagan of AEI/GOP/TWS and Dr. Gen. Petraeus of Princeton and West Point along with pretty well the whole non-GOP human race. Both Cartoonoclastes and Wicked Juan are blindsided still, to take them at their word, as why should one not? In this matter we have fallen off the other side of Martin Luther's drunk man's horse, Mr. Bones, for all the current jubilation of Boy and Party and Ideology comes down to little more than that we were not so mistaken the first time around: it appears that eighty million aggressors with Hyperpower actually can prevail over thirty million third-worlders on occasion. Big deal. Quelle surprise....
(D) Yet there is a bit of surprise in it, because neither we nor Freddy K. nor even the Dr. Gen. himself anticipated the beauties of the Bribe-a-Tribe™ gizmo. AEIdeologues and violence pros were expectin’ to gain their ends in the former Iraq by imposin’ plain old-fasioned martial law, which to some extent they have managed to do, yet Bribe-a-Tribe™ clearly differs from merely usin’ one's Hyperpower to do what any competent metropolitan police department does in the holy Homeland. It's a whole new thing, Bribe-a-Tribe™ is, a thing that Señorito Kagan neither invented nor anticipated, a thing that has no connection with the Petraeo-McNamaran dogmas of counterinsurgency from yesteryear.
Being taken by surprise so often and about matters so grave may undermine our solemn pretensions to guruship, Mr. Bones, but it can also be sort of fun, no? And while I'm up, allow me to toss in (E) that we would not have been totally astounded if Dr. Blix had been mistaken and the Heroes of Error had unearthed moderate quantities of nerve gas or anthrax spores in the former Iraq -- not enough to warrant their extremely courage-challenged frame of mind as they aggressed, of course--certainly no nukes!, yet moderate quantities of lesser WMD. Farther afield, and finally, there is (F), that we never dreamed M. Bin Ládin and Dr. Zawáhirí and the Rev. Mullah Omar would still be walking the streets (or prowling the caves) in the year of religionism 1429/2008.
So there are seven attempted self-corrections, Mr. Bones, the One Vast Booboo plus six lettered items of smaller consequence. Enough to be humbly getting on with, had we composed this cartoonoclastic scribble.
Needless to say, the scribble does not flow on in that direction at all. Whether or not the gentry at Mu’ámara Junction have been infallibly correct in fact and judgment and tea-leaf reading throughout the whole course of the aggression cannot be determined from the evidence at hand. This Sunday scribble is, after all, only a skirmish in the War against Juan, not the Confessions of Jean-Jacques or Gloomy Gus.
Now bear in mind, sir, that the man Cole is very outstandingly wicked:
| The disappearing truth, and the river of these disappearing truths, are a form of what most people call propaganda, particularly when the perpetrator has some kind of a vague connection with established authority. The flow leaves a sediment, and the sediment has a particular odor. "Harith al-Dhari is wanted for criminal instigation of violence"; "Sadrists are motivated by narrow sectarianism"--and before you know it, like Liza Doolittle, you've got it! Iraq is the scene of a religious war; those who oppose the occupation are nothing but perpetrators of criminal violence for narrow sectarian aims. Thank [G]od for the occupation! |
Cartoonoclastes can't possibly be drawing us a verbal cartoon here, Father Zeus forbid that anybody should think any such thought as that! But there is not much resemblance to the announced topic either. To go as far as sanity permits in the direction desired, Prof. Cole might be indited as an accessory after the fact to the Big Management Party's crimes of aggression and breech of contract and occupation, though scarcely as a principal. Don Juan appears on stage mediis in rebus, as it were, with the former Iraq already broken into and entered and subjected under the yoke of Crawford, inhuman events that had nothing to do with him. He merely hopes to take advantage of the situation a little now that it exists anyway. "The hapless indigs are being imposed upon already, so why not impose something sensible, like for instance the Ann Arbor Plan, revision 13.4?" Thus Don Juan may plausibly be imagined to soliloquize, whereas putting "Thank God for the occupation!" into his mouth is travesty.
In addition to thinking the culprit's alleged offense far less felonious than Cartoonoclastes misrepresents, I take it to be a different type of offense qualitatively. I pick up Juan Cole by his paleface planmonger end, and at once want to poke a little fun at the instability of his planmongering with some mild spoofery about "revision 13.4". Cartoonoclastes wants this monster burned at the stake for telling defamatory lies about the former Iraq. That is to say, he disagrees with the professor's analysis, which is not so important to me as the professorial celebrity's policy suggestions. [2] Not that the latter are of crucial importance either: Don Juan has zero effective impact on the willful coalitionites who frame Uncle Sam's aggression and occupation policy, exactly as much effective impact as Cartoonoclastes and you and I have, Mr. Bones. Exactly as little.
After that, Cartoonoclastes ascends into the radiant empyrean like many other sermonizers and Sabbath-morning lecturers. "The sins of Ann Arbor are the sins of you all" may, or may not, be what he goes on about. Rather to his credit, Cartoonoclastes is not entirely sure himself what he is going on about:
| [The desirability of listening to people different from yourself and trying to see what it is they have to say[,] I never thought it would be necessary to explain why you should do that, but now when the social "scientists" go about "coding" utterances and counting them and manipulating aggregates of them mathematically and the whole dipsy-doodle, I guess it is. Unfortunately, I'm not up to it. Having peeked into the abyss, I think I'll take a few steps back. |
Seeing that recoil from his own Blick ins Chaos throws Cartoonoclastes straight into the ideological arms of the late M. Foucault, maybe you had better go take a look at the whole show for yourself, Mr. Bones, and then give me an account of what it comes to rather than vice versa. [3]
Happy days.
_____
[1]
| Juan [exemplifies] the hard type (...) Hard bullshit is when you say the Sadrists "spearheaded" the recent de-Debaathification Law, and that they were against the amnesty law. There isn't any evidence for that, rather what drives the assertions is that they fit a particular world-view. (...) [The hard bullshit artist perpetrates] something like "Informed Comment". You're making a claim about the truth of it, but it is a special kind of truth--a "disappearing" truth that you don't have to defend or adduce evidence for, and that for two reasons: (1) access to that world is supposedly limited to the specifically "credentialed" guy who made the claim in the first place; and (2) the author of it is so busy that today's truths overwrite yesterday's truths, so what's lacking in verifiability of individual claims is made up for via the whirligig of linked claims that never ends. It is a river of truths, and as we know you cannot step into the same river twice. |
[2] I incline to suspect that the Ann Arbor analysis wobbles to support the Ann Arbor plan du jour, and that the wobbles in planmongering have a great deal to do with what George XLIII happens to be up to at the moment. Indeed, the wobbles display so much correlation with Crawfordological considerations that I discount them a good deal as Greater Levantine area studies. "Whatever Bush does must be wrong" may be a defensible maxim or a laudable rule of thumb, but as a guide to what's factually what on the ground in Occupied Mesopotamia, it is likely to be defective for reasons we need not go into here.
[3] "Abroad is a foreign country, they do things differently there" seems scarcely a worthy bottom line to all the cartoonoclastic fuss and feathers. Still, for a Sabbath morning harangue, perhaps a tautology is as good as any other text? God knows best.
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