The vast saga of Peaceful Freedumbia from well before March 2003 illustrates how totally obsolete the mindset underlying that jest has become. Nowadays the future has become a great deal better known than the past, and also less subject to change. St. George Orwell notoriously had a vision of how the likes of AEI and GOP and DOD would deal with res actae once they had become empowered and emboldened enough to do so. He did not, however, stress the other side of the medal, the res acturae side. Readers of visionary fiction might have felt overstuffed if he had, because as Big Brother was altering the past with her right hand, her other right hand was busy protesting that the past remained quite as immutable as Enthusiam and Superstition have traditionally supposed. "We have always been at war with Eastasia" is, I believe, more or less what not uneducated persons retain on this curious topic after forgetting most of the details of 1984. The future as such hardly came into the Orwellian narrative at all, though obviously it was bound to be perfectly dreadful.
"That was then, this is now." (That baloney, by the way, appears to be the Greater Texan translation of Our Ford's "History is bunk." Both O.F. and His apostle Aldous have been relegated to the bunker by Niederdümmung and the wombscholarship movement. Oh, well, "Change and decay in all around....") At the moment, then, [04/19/2008 03:07AM] we still have Little Brother, George XLIII Bush of the house of Kennebunkport-Crawford, in charge of our planet, Harvard Victory School Big Management is never far to seek, Peaceful Freedumbia has been petraeomorphed into almost the Garden of Eden again. Et cetera. [1] What was it Roebuck keeps saying chez Arnold? "I ask you whether, the world over or in past history, there is anything like it? Nothing. I pray that our unrivalled happiness may last."
Now should our even more unrivalled present happiness, not without that of the former Iraq, in fact last, Mr. Bones, they must necessarily last into the future. (You certainly cannot deny that, sir. I defy you to attempt it!) And as I have been preluding, it is a new and different kind of future that we have nowadays, one much more decent and stable than our ancestors ever dreamed of, even so recent an ancestor as St. George Orwell. Thus we arrive at our President-Presumptive, J. Sidney McCain, and his views on conquest and occupation policy:
| “Al Qaeda is on the run, but they’re not defeated” is his standard line on how things are going in Iraq. When chiding the Democrats for wanting to withdraw troops, he has been known to warn that “Al Qaeda will then have won.” In an attack this winter on Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the Democratic front-runner, Mr. McCain went further, warning that if American forces withdrew, Al Qaeda would be “taking a country.” Critics say that in framing the war that way at rallies or in sound bites, Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, is oversimplifying the hydra-headed nature of the insurgency in Iraq in a way that exploits the emotions that have been aroused by the name “Al Qaeda” since the Sept. 11 attacks. |
Aunt Nitsy’s scribblers keyboarded that to ‘chide’ J. Sidney for scarcely knowin’ al-Qá‘ida from K-Mart. A harmless pass-time, though unlikely to do anybody much good, and JSM least of all.[2] It is more useful to give that data point a nudge or two so it fits in the 1984 mold: "Extremist Republicans are always goin’ta be at war with Al Kayduh." (Poor Al!) Alternatively, "Al Kayduh will always be on the run, but he will never be defeated" and, much more cheerfully, "Mr. Kayduh will never take a country, nor will he ever have (definitively) won." The last version of the fortune cookie may be a tad too cheerful, though, because (popular support for) the Kiddie Krusade would collapse in a flash if the kiddies (or their dupes) ever started makin’ realistic risk assessments. [3] So the fact that Al Kayduh’s prospects of victory are zero is really bad news, not good, for Boy and Dynasty and Party and Ideology. Regardless of goodness or badness, it is news that requires to be suppressed as much as possible for the convenience of Big Management, who find themselves in the spiritual position of aspirin vendors: it goes without saying that in some sense they wish there were more headaches around. [4]
J. Sidney’s cerebrations about Peaceful Freedumbia (and ’most everythin’ else) are not worth making fun of, so let us make fun of a hired hand’s instead:
| Randy Scheunemann, Mr. McCain’s senior foreign policy adviser, said during a recent conference call with reporters that in the event of an American pullout, “you might not necessarily see a single entity taking charge.” But such a withdrawal could empower Shiite militias in the south and Kurds in the north, leaving Al Qaeda “free to try to impose its will” and lead to increased sectarian violence that “would be very likely to draw neighbors into the conflict,” he said. |
If ‘empower’ means the ordinary English thing to Party neocomrade R. Scheuerman, Mr. Al Kayduh would be left trying to impose his will on only the non-heretic and non-hillbilly provinces of the former Iraq. But Al is a Sunni and thus does not differ from his supposed subjects or victims sectarianwise. [5] The neighbors might intervene all the same, to be sure, and for that matter, Free Kúrdestán and the Ja‘farí Republic of Iraq would presumably count as neighbors themselves to the Islamic State of Iraq. There may be hope for R. Scheuerman, in the same way that there used to be hope for neocomrade Rear-Colonel F. Kagan of AEI and GOP. He does, and Freddy once did, show a few faint signs of desirin’ to limit his liabilities rather than surge ’em. In principle, the bushogenic quagmire could mostly be boiled down to solving the problem of how to maintain elementary law and order in the TwentyPercenter districts. No such boil-down has yet taken place in the mind of R. Scheuerman, however, because if it had, he would speak more kindly of neighborhood intervention and be on the look-out for an external Sunninterní patron to run the Islamic State of Iraq and police it internally and keep it in line vis-à-vis Free Kúrdestán and the Ja‘farí Republic -- as well as Kankakee and Kalamazoo. [6]
(( By the way, Mr. Bones, at Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh the sweet puppies will really have some cause to complain that this piece bears no warning label like "news analysis." ))
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[1] Notably gone missin’ since Mission Accomplished Day, 1 May 2003, are only Yoo, Esq., and General Gonzales. The latter can’t seem to find a job, and the former is said to be in danger of losin’ one. These two neocomrades must be the proverbial yeggs that must be broken if there is to be an omelette. Hopefully they find consolation in that reflection. Others may notice the emblematic appropriateness of their plight: Big Management is nothin’ if not supralegal, so once the holy Homeland is converted into a thoroughly supralegal state, many fewer lawyers will be required. The point is plain as day the instant one chances to think of it.
[2] Old dog, new tricks, ’nuff said.
[3] Should J. Sidney stumble on the way to his coronation, which one does not expect to happen, the question of how far it is possible to conduct a proper krusade in the absence of popular support would become less academic.
[4] You are not to think that thought in any crude sense, Mr. Bones. I do not mean to insinuate anything like "The Big Party perps wanna declare a phony emergency and grab power, exactly the same way they accuse others of doing with anthropogenic climate change." GOP geniuses sincerely believe in their own baloney, sir, or at least 99.947% of ’em do. Such belief implies an almost incredibly bad assessment of risks. But look at their record, sir, and decide for yourself whether they are not genuinely unreality-based and unreality-basers in the highest degree.
There is a tactical and polemical advantage in accusing the militant GOP and its tanks of thought of imprudence rather than cynicism, over and above that being the way it is. If Ms. Chicken Little is a cynic who does not believe the tripe she preaches, it makes no sense to question her courage as well as her judgment. Indeed, her judgment ought to be accounted excellent too, as soon as one detects what she is tryin’ to achieve. Whereas the Big Party perps are in fact fools and poltroons simultanously.
On that basis they cannot be knaves as well. If you go about accusing them of logically incompatible deficiencies, Mr. Bones, the natural result is that nobody will take any of your accusations seriously. That approach also reduces you to the goofy level of the Mu’ámara Junction gentry, who continually imply that their faction’s enemies are not only more fiendish than Satan, but more intelligent to boot. A totally ridiculous way that is to think about either Little Brother that is or about the Commanderissimo who is yet to come. "The Devil is an ass."
[5] It is unlikely that an R. Scheuerman knows enough about Islám or Peaceful Freedumbia to have meant by these remarks that Mr. Kayduh would be attempting to impose controversial salafí views on his Sunní cosectarians. Taken that way, the neocomrade need not be quarreled with. Yet if that was what he meant, he is aware of what a total smash-up the former Sunní Ascendancy has become, and must be accounted a cynic rather than a Chicken Little groupie when he tries to frighten the kiddies and the NYTC with Al Kayduh’s Mesopotamian franchise.
A theocommunity as divided as the TwentyPercenters of ex-Iraq are does not very urgently need to be conquered for Big Managerial and libido dominandi purposes. Furthermore, the presence of petroleum in frabjous quantities has not been definitely established. Should many Big Party neocomrades start thinkin’ along those lines, they might well retrieve that nifty Roach Motel Paradigm™ from the memory hole and allow the TwentyPercenters to fight it out in the Islamic Sate of Iraq undisturbed by AEI and GOP and DOD so that none of ’em come and make trouble in, for instance, Kankakee IL.
It is fun to play the vigilante cowpokers’ cards for them, and it might be maintained with a straight face, I think, that their Roach Motel Paradigm™ would make a very fittin’ euthanasia or apotheosis of their Bribe-a-Tribe™ scheme. "The Salvific Awakeners shall always be at war with Al Kayduh! (But we’ll sit here safe and brag and blow / Maryland, my Maryland!)"
Great fun, but I doubt R. Scheuerman and J. S. McCain would enjoy it much, and I am quite confident they never thought of it for themselves.
[6] If the neocomrade only modifies J. Sidney’s vision of fifty or a hundred more years with the AEI-GOP-DOD coalition as Occupyin’ Party by restriction of occupation by forces from the holy Homeland to the ISI rather than tota Mesopotamia from Zakho to Fao, he makes things worse for himself and his boss, not better. In addition to not having a port to get occupational therapy equipment in through for Dr. Gen. Petraeus and his successors, the ISI would lack not only a port to get the oil out through, but (apparently) the oil itself. That plan would leave the Big Management Party engaged in a sheerly humanitarian enterprise -- keepin’ the Party’s peace for the sake of peace alone, with nothin’ but glory in it for the Party -- a thing quite incredible, and even unthinkable of, in connection with Grant’s Old Party.
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