"An Arab Initiative For Iraq," begorrah!

Those sporadic watery noises that you hear over to port, Mr. Bones, must be Dr. Cartoonoclastes splashing about in the bushogenic quagmire in passionate quest of his favourite ignis fatuus:

There was a surprising announcement of a "reconciliation conference" to take place in Baghdad tomorrow (Tuesday March 18), but.... Al-Hayat, in its concluding remarks on this, reviews the fact that there has been a whole series of secret meetings, at the Black Sea in Jordan, two in Beirut, one each in Rome and Morocco, including Baath people and people connected with the armed resistance groups, all of them focused on three issues: (1) expanding the political process; (2) presence of foreign military forces in Iraq; and (3) certain amendments to the constitution. The journalist says these were all thought of as preparatory for an "expanded conference to be held in Baghdad".

It is high time we consider the cartoonoclastic implications of our old friend the Invisible Cat, Mr. Bones! You recall the paradigm, I trust?

(I) If there were an invisible cat sleeping in that chair, the chair would look empty.
(II) But in fact the chair does look empty,
(III) Therefore, et cetera. Q.E.D.

Now with the gentry of the Mu’ámariyya, even an invisible cat's furniture is not easy to catch sight of. The MJ gentry make a big deal of pointing the difficulty out themselves, actually. Cartoonoclastes may blithely, or for convenience and to save time, scribble "the fact that there has been a whole series of secret meetings," but he is quite certain that hardly anybody knows that fact -- apart from his own firm's customers, naturally. [1]

Will Juan the Wicked tell us about "the fact that there has been a whole series of secret meetings"? Will the slaves of the New York Times Company tell us? Don't be silly, Mr. Bones! [2]

Dr. Cartoonoclastes can (could?) not only detect the throne of Felix the Unseen, he can detect it so reliably that he gave it a nickname. "The Cairo Process," he called it. Here, he called it that. And also here.

The Cairo Process™ has been completely eclipsed and overshadowed, obscuritywise, by the Annapolis Process™. (That's a remarkable achievement, considering what a wretched nonentity the Annapolis Process™ was to begin with. But come, let us eschew digressions and excursions to Chesapeake Bay or Gentile Palestine!)

I trust you will be suitably sorry to be informed, Mr. Bones, that tomorrow's invisibility at New Baghdád is not fated to be THE definitive culmination of the Cairo Process™:

... taking various reports together it seems clear this won't break any new ground ...

but cheer up, sir, there's always Jam Tomorrow, at least in principle:

... there will likely be Iraq-political discussions at the Damascus Arab summit [at] the end of this month, maybe even an "Arab initiative for Iraq"!!!

No, sir, I do not think three (3.0) exclamation points excessive when it comes to an AI4I. You are almost certainly correct to suppose that nothing genuine of that sort is about to happen -- when did it ever happen? -- but reflect that I punctuate on the basis of Cartoonoclastes’ factious notions of the real world rather than yours or mine. Like the Anglo-Arabian Press Trust that he lovingly cites, Dr. C. is always willing to fantasize Arab Initiative right around the next bend in Clio's tunnel, and need one actually say that he is all agog for it? [3]

Asleep upon her flickering Cairo Process™ throne lies Felix the Unseen, who is accessible exclusively to the eye of factional faith. The said eye envisions her in three parts, parts which might make better sense if presented in an order different from that of the AAPT: (3) revision of the Khalílzád Konstitution; (1) "expansion of the political process"; (2) withdrawal of all extremist GOP forces from the former Iraq. Certainly the last thing to happen chronologically, if it ever happens at all, will be that the Big Management Party operatives pack up and go away. The other two points are presumably supposed to conduce towards that happy event. It is doubtful if they really would, however, and even if they did, it is not clear which should come first.

Perhaps one might be so heretical as to doubt that Konstitutional revision belongs in this select company at all. It would take a major Arab Initiative in its own right to produce a Greater Levantine statelet in which it genuinely matters what the local ‘constitution’ permits or forbids. Gen. Mubárak and the altesses royales du Ryad do not trouble themselves unduly about such fripperies, and neither do any of the other cardboard kings and barracks-based republicans. (Lebanon is exceptional, but also negligible, so let it be neglected!) If the Cairo Process™ is to be held up until constitutions count in the Middle East, nobody now alive need worry about it.

I suppose the Anglo-Arabian Press Trust folks must have in mind to fiddle with Khalílzád Pasha’s gracious bestowal without anybody native actually taking the damn thing seriously. Though it would sound a little unedifying to say that out loud, there would be no great harm done if the unedification were acknowledged and accepted. Taken in isolation from long-term prospects that are short-term delusions, "expansion of the political process" would be far easier to get on with, [4] although whether it would actually lead to getting rid of the Busheviki is another matter.

But what means "expansion of the political process," exactly? One can grant without discussion proper elections in governates and municipalities, but beyond that, what? It is not hard to imagine the TwentyPercenters grabbing twenty percent of such political power as is available to natives in Peaceful Freedumbia, but how do they get to 51% -- and 99% and 1000% -- from there? That, after all, is the real expansion sought.

God knows best how they are going to do it. Whether they are going to do it. (Perhaps "an Arab initiative for Iraq"?)

Happy days.


_____
[1] Within the invasion-language Pale, that is, of course. Folks who can actually think in them cuneiforms ’n’ chicken tracks don't score any points at MJ for knowing about whole series of secret meetings. Every Levantine worth her salt has a head stuffed full of series of secret meetings -- and some of the meetings may even have actually occurred.


[2] Juan the Wicked has his head buried in Pakistan this morning, as it happens, plus of course he must still be getting over that Músae al-Sadr binge at the weekend. Aunt Nitsy, however, has something interesting that we'll get around to after a little more mockery of mental cripples.


[3] Well, maybe 86.5% agog. Like many other ideological or chauvinist twistifiers, Cartoono -- and indeed, the Baní al-Hayát as well -- exhibits a strong tendency to attach sentimental or dramatic or moralistical weight to terms that are of themselves neutral. ‘Initiative’ is one such. That which is fort mauvais simply cannot, at Mu’ámara Junction, be the goal or substance of an ‘initiative.’ When Prof. K. Makiya and Dr. A. Tchélabí solicited the extremist Republicans to invasionize the former Iraq, that was not an ‘initiative’ on their part, it was only ... well, only a mu’ámara, I suppose one is obliged to word it, "only a conspiracy." [sigh]

On a loftier and more spiritual plane, when Herr Prof. Dr. F. ‘Ajamí explains us many otherwise unheard-of explanations about the Arab Mind and the Greater Levant, that is not a star intellectual's variety of ‘initiative’ -- it is, say, "only a disgusting exercise in collective masochism." The key word there, Mr. Bones, is only: GOP neocomrade ‘Ajamí's suck-up self-hatin’ is real enough, and group self-hatred is thoroughly barf-inducing generally, yet Ajamianity could turn out to be an epoch-making Arab initiative all the same. Vidkun Quisling might have been a great Norwegian initiative-monger. It is only a fact of contingency, not a consequence of logic, that he proved to be nothing of the sort.

Dr. Cartoonoclastes I take to suffer from this brain disease in its milder and more respectable form. When lay sheep rather than coffee-house blogghiosos are afflicted, the symptoms may include flat-out horsefeathers about suicide bombers bein’ cowards and the like. That is to say, some faction lays its dirty paws on the catholic human virtue of courage and allows nobody to be brave who is not marchin’ in step with the rest of the Party lemmin’s.


[4] Though brain-diseased, the AAPT and cartoonoclastic position is not altogether brainless. (They just don’t think things through, Mr. Bones, that’s their big problem!) In this instance, the Sunninterni factionalists evidently expect that a reworked Khalílzád Konstitution will secure their position in the former Iraq after the forces of GOP extremism have departed. Parchment is to make up for paratroopers, as it were. In the really existing Greater Levant, few hings could be less plausible than that policy, yet there is no good reason to doubt that many Sunninterni factionalists believe in it sincerely, including everybody at Mu’ámara Junction. The MJ gentry are presumably westoxicated and actually expect a ‘constitution’ to matter.

Indig factionalists certainly ought to know better than that. Perhaps one may guess that they hope that only the Natural Masters of Mesopotamia -- i.e., Sinn Féin, "themselves alone" -- properly understand the correlation of forces in the wake of paleface aggression. The heretics and the hillbillies, neo-Safavids and Free Kurds, may still be at such a low level of political awareness that parchment really will serve instead of paratroopers. At least serve temporarily, long enough to get rid of AEI and GOP and DOD, so as to prevent impertinent interference from the direction of Crawford TX when the time for the show-down finally comes, when Natural Mastery (a.k.a. Sunni Ascendancy) can be securely reaffirmed on its traditional and authentic twin foundations, spiritual superiority and physical force.

This calculation on behalf of the TwentyPercenters is likely to be mistaken, Mr. Bones, being in my opinion mostly only overesteem of self and misunderestimation of others. Yet quidquid recipitur, recipitur ad modum recipientis: in the light of the TwentyPercenters’ own political development and political experience, to make such a calculation as I have outlined cannot fairly be dismissed as ‘brainless’ or the like. The cleverness of political scheming can not be simply equated with the accuracy of the pols’ knowledge of facts. One can scarcely say that a project like that one "deserves to succeed," yet supposing the Sunninterni factionalists actually try it and it fails, some modicum of sympathy with their deceived expectations will not be out of place. One can see why they thought it might work without having agreed with them.

But let us not lean over backwards to be charitable to the wrong parties, Mr. Bones! The intellectual superiority of a Sunni factionalizer in the former Iraq who dispenses with any reliance on constitutions and Konstitutions whatsoever is patent.

To be sure, the intellectual superiority of a TwentyPercenter factionalist who could come up with a sure-fire way to win would be staggering. Certainly thou and I could not teach that crew how to triumph even if we adhered to their cause as rigidly as Mu’ámara Junction does.