| Shiite Iraq is on fire, Moqtada addresses his followers and the Iraqi police and Army, and your comment is that it might not "echo" with Sunnis because it's "rhetoric". |
In Old Chicagoland, and at Noble Najaf, "rhetoric" is not a word of abuse. But never mind that, let's have the aberrant comment:
| Interesting as always Badger. A few notes: -I think "haddam" is "destroyer". Referring to Saddam or maybe Satan? -Interesting that he [Sadr III] condemns sectarian parties given the way his and the Mahdi Army are seen as very much that. But then that is the intermingling of the Sadrist trend with broader nationalist discourse that is a topic you and others have addressed many times. -Again, I am left wondering how this echoes within other nationalist quarters? I greatly appreciate your efforts, it helps show just how much Sadr does emphasize rhetorically unity and nationalism. But is that voice heard or believed given on the ground death squads and such over the past few years? And more specifically in the current moment where all the Green Zone parties of all sectarian stripes seem to be lining up against Sadr and where the Awakenings seem to have a stake in defending the existing structure, do the Sadrists get any traction beyond their own (admittedly large) base? |
If you can think yourself into the dir..., the tight little orthodoxy of Mu’ámara Junction, Mr. Bones, it is not too difficult to make out how Comrade Deviationist went wrong. He is mildly objectionable to impartial judgment in that he abuses the noble name of Rhetoric, suggesting that only insincerity has resort to it. That error is only mildly objectionable, it allows that the insincerity may be unconscious or inadvertent.
Such, I take it, is the way Mr. Deviation misdeploys "rhetoric" here: Master Muqtadae has talked lots and lots about the national identity and patriotic unity of all ex-Iraqis, but he has not actually done much in that direction -- certainly far from enough to satisfy the MJ gentry in full. The resulting gap between deed and word might have been bridged with the equivalent of "Bush lied," but Mr. Deviation did not care to be so rude as that about a (potential) fellow-traveler with the Mu’ámariyyan Cause, so he contents himself with charging that Sadr commited rhetoric. The question of whether the Rev. Señorito has been deliberately trying to snooker the Sunninternís is left open.
You and I, Mr. Bones, must applaud the judgement, if not his wording of it. Mr. Deviation cannot possibly know anything much for sure about other people's subjective sincerity, so when he talks accordingly, he talks well. Perhaps not absolutely as well as he might, to be sure, since there is no way to tell whether he admits our own guidline that everybody in politics is to be presumed sincere until clearly proved otherwise. One swallow does not make the summer, perhaps only friends of the Mu’ámariyyan Cause get such allowances extended to them. (Mr. Deviation posts very little, at least since we have learned to recognize his nom de guebbe.)
Such was the stimulus. The response from Cartoonoclastes is as if he had heard the words "Sadr lies." Having already worked the renegade firebrand cleric™ into his vast and kaleidoscopic jigsaw puzzle in a different capacity, one incompatible with the faintest suggestion that the Sadr Tendency might be taking somebody Sunní for a ride, Cartoono is alarmed and indignant.
Perhaps Cartoono is a bit more alarmed and indignant than the occasion warrants, even misunderstood, because Mr. Deviation opens the door to far worse offenders than himself and his "rhetoric." Label it as you please, the word-deed gap actually exists. Perhaps under the yoke of an Occupyin’ Party, there is no way the gap could not exist. Every indig pol and panacea vendor, even poor M. al-Málikí & Cie., even the virtuous shootists!, is forced to deal in promissory notes, as it were, to talk about what she and her crew will do after the extremist Republicans finally go away -- without much attempt to start doing it prematurely. [1]
The word-deed gap exists, and it exists more or less universally, and talking about "rhetoric" risks drawing attention to it. Certain parts of the word-deed gap are inconvenient for the great Mu’ámariyyan Cause, even as other parts of it inconvenience lesser ideologues and chauvinizers without the Cause. Under these circumstances, stuff like " intermingling of the Sadrist trend with broader nationalist discourse" and "how much Sadr does emphasize rhetorically unity and nationalism" can be dangerous. Mr. Deviation may wish only to insinuate "Muqtadae has not done much for us, really" but once that has been insinuated, a thought like "But then, how much have we done for Muqtadae?" could easily arise by false analogy.
To accept Cartoonoclastes’ picturesque (and rhetorical) account of the present state of Peaceful Freedumbia -- "Shiite Iraq is on fire" -- aggravates the danger. False analogizers might even arrive at "For that matter, what are we doing for Muqtadae right now, in this present critical discrimination of things?" Unfortunately that silly question could be treated as real rather than rhetorical and then answered in part as follows :
| "A member of the IAF, Ammar Abdulsattar called for giving this idea of political-party disarmament a condition for participating in elections, legislative form in parliament. He told Al-Hayát : "We need to issue a law on political parties as soon as possible, and have it include what was in the announcement [by the Council on National Security about no armed parties participating in elections]... And Abdulsattar said he sees March 25 [when Chief Commander Maliki went to Basra] as an important watershed in Iraqi history, and as the inauguration of a nation of laws." [ Translation and annotation due to Dr. Cartoonoclastes] |
__
[1] Núrí Jawád Kamál may personally have reached the point where he has ceased expecting operatives of the militant GOP ever to depart at all, and he may even be rather happy that they will be stayin’. Yet that is not what he says for public consumption, Mr. Bones, and thus not what our rule requires us to presume sincere.
As to the noble shootists of the Sunnintern, it might seem plausible to consider their very shooting as itself a form of postoccupational dispensationalism. Careful analysis will, however, reveal that they agree amongst themselves so little that one may treat them as the Shadow Of Things To Come only in the sense that there would probably be lots of shooting in any neorégime that they preside over. So it may be just as well that their success and victory remain highly improbable. But God knows best.
No comments:
Post a Comment