| Because British forces, nominally responsible for the area in which Basra is located, have abandoned the city, there were few coalition forces present and very few Westerners at all. Most of the details of the operation publicized in the American press come from Iraqi stringers, the usual anonymous Iraqi officials, and, it seems, some Sadrist media outlets. In all previous operations where U.S. forces were present, we have learned that such information is of limited value. We simply do not yet know how well the ISF acquitted itself in the actual fighting, what if any areas were cleared, who was resisting, and so on. |
The bright side of that is that Freddy does not claim to be in possession of Secret Right-Wing Truth from (paleface) sources loyal to Boy and Party and Ideology.
Another side of it, though, is that the Glorious Coalition’s native subjects do not get much respect, not even the two percent or ten percent of them who think AEI tank thoughts and emote GOP values. Even the latest George Washington of Mesopotamia himself is treated abruptly.
The governate of Basra is in fact the (nominally non-nominal) responsibility of the International Zone neorégime, of M. le Président du Conseil N. K. al-Málikí, or -- assuming the analyst is not a card-carryin’ Republican -- of Party Proconsul R. Crocker, or conceivably persons superior to both these down at the TX ranch are the true bosses. It looks as if Colonel Freddy thinks such striped-pants cant is not worth wastin’ any time on, and under other circumstances maybe he’d be right.. In this particular instance, however, the cant has a substantial bearing on the correlation of forces: if AEI and GOP and DOD "simply do not yet know," then either poor M. al-Málikí shares the ignorance of the invasionites, or else he tells them stories that they do not altogether trust.[1]
Though this issue is connected with the question "To what extent is the Hannibal of Islamic Da‘wa in control of Basra?", it is not identical. Maybe NKaM does not have enough reliable soldiers and policemen on the spot um sich ganz und gar durchzusetzen, but how about secret state policemen and plain volunteer drop-a-dime informers? [2] Poor M. al-Málikí may perhaps be excused for not actually ruling "his own" "state," but surely he may be expected to know what goes on inside those "internationally recognized boundaries" that mock him from the maps? "A cat may spy on a king," says the proverb. And of course Hannibal II makes the appropriate operatives of AEI and GOP and DOD privy to all his own intelligence, does he not? [3]
Well, as a matter of fact, maybe he doesn't. Rear-Colonel Freddy words his way carefully around a matter touchy for the glory of the Glorious Coalition:
| The attack appears to have resulted from an impulsive order by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who had gone down to Basra to see the preparations for a more deliberate operation then being planned. |
Once again His Excellency gets scant respect, being made to appear like a small boy in a candy shop. More important, how can AEI and GOP and DOD ever know in advance what their Little Foreign Friends are goin’ta do, when those impulsive LFF's don't know themselves? "Half devil and half child," saith St. Rudyard, and fat Freddy might be tempted to agree, imperialistically incorrect though the expression of such feelin’s about the LBW, lesser breeds without, has become since Kipling's day. [4]
___
On a more cosmic level, Rear-Col. F. Kagan may have just discovered or invented an entirely new rationale for the President-Apparent's new Hundred Years’ War: [T] here were few coalition forces present and very few Westerners at all . . . -- and look what happened! Tank thinkers of the American Ideological Enterprise should find it easy enough to expand upon that serendipitous insight, to conclude that makin’ the world really safe for demoplutocracy requires lots of small garrisons of paleface coalition operatives scattered all over Gore's green earth, and then spell out exactly how many warm bodies are needed exactly where.
Not being any direction of colonel personally, and handicapped by thinking in prose rather than PowerPoint® the way glorious coalitionites can and do, I can not say much about the details beyond the obvious suggestion that every town outside the holy Homeland (and possibly Airstrip One as well) that has as many inhabitants as Basra [5] should have as many Western Watchers™ stationed in it as Rear-Col. Freddy and other qualified spooks and creeps and violence pros agree would undoubtedly have forestalled the recent unfortunate human events. To be sure, should the expert adherents to Boy and Dynasty and Party and Ideology decide that it would have required thousands, rather than dozens, of Western Watchers™ to save their Kiddie Krusade from poor M. al-Málikí's impulsiveness, the whole scheme ought to be discarded at once.
But in the meantime, it would not cost much for AEIdeologues or Hoovervillains or Heritagitarians to look into the matter and prepare some preliminary cost-benefit gibberish for their masters’ guidance. That sort of factional research, after all, is why we came to be equipped with Tanks of Thought in the first place, is it not?
Ideally, fat Freddy of AEI and GOP would superintend the project. Not so much because it's his idea, conscious or subliminal, as because it would return him to his roots, from which he has been sadly recedin’ of late. In its original form, the Ever-Victorious Surge of ’07™ was conceived by F. Kagan in exactly the manner best suited to a Western Watchers™ scheme, namely as a labour-savin’ device. Had EVS07 been adopted and enacted by the glorious coalitionites strictly according to the letter, AEI and GOP and DOD would have found themselves at "war" with only six million of their neo-Iraqi subjects instead of twenty-odd million, with their requirements for IED-fodder reduced proportionately.
Once the scheme got out of the hands of the Baní Kagan, though, various irrelevant bells and whistles were stuck on to appeal to other neocomrades, and then when Dr. Gen. Petraeus of Princeton and West Point began actual surgin’, naturally his pet irrelevancies (mostly involving neo-McNamaran counterinsurgency) becaome mandatory. What with one thing and another, Goethe's maxim about In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister has not often been raped so thoroughly as it has been by the glorious coalitionites. "Not with a bang, but a whimper": what started as sURGe, has ended as not much better than mission creep. [6]
Maybe Freddy K. could get other Big Management Party perps besides himself back on an intellectually respectable track if he had a chance to start over more or less from scratch. Or, more precisely, to start over from Economy of Force. As things stand, the little ideoladdie has wound up defendin’ everythin’ that is done in the name of "his" Ever-Victorious Surge of ’07™, with no regard at all to whether what is done agrees with the original plan of the thing or not.
This is corruption, the kind of intellectual corruption that results from AEI rottin’ the brain. Rear-Colonel F. Kagan's cerebral degeneration is not yet so advanced as that of V. D. H. Blimp or R. M. G. Spook. Freddy is still capable of utterances like "We simply do not yet know how well the ISF acquitted itself in the actual fighting, what if any areas were cleared, who was resisting, and so on." Unfortunately, Freddy is already capable of emittin’ swiftboat tripe and baloney:
| Iraq has already demonstrated that it is by far the most serious and determined ally the United States has in the war against al-Qaeda by deploying more forces and taking more casualties in that struggle than any other state. After several years in which Americans feared that the Shia government would attempt to triangulate between Iran and the United States without taking sides, the Iraqi leadership has made its choice clear. It chose America. What will we choose? [7] |
____
[1] Bein’ self-encumbered with an LFF, Little Foreign Friend, like Núrí (Jawád) Kamál is no bowl of cherries; one does not have to root for Team Aggression to appreciate the distress they must sometimes feel at their indig clients' misbehaviour.
In the few hours since Freddy scribbled his latest apologetic, NKaM has changed his stance in a major way: Iraqi Premier Suspends Government Raids on Militias , headline the fiends of the MSM. No large number of hours can have passed, seeing that "On Thursday, Mr. Maliki said Basra was only the first stage of continuing operations to crack down on illegal militias and criminal gangs" and it is now [04/05/2008 05:48AM] still early on Saturday at Rancho Crawford.
[2] After five years of futzin’ around in their semiconquered provinces, AEI and GOP and DOD might reasonably be asked why they do not have paleface equivalents to secret state policemen on the spot at Basra, as part of a functional Drop-a-Dime Network that covers all of the former Iraq. Were they relyin’ on poodle people from Airstrip One, perhaps, who eventually let them down? But for that matter, did the redcoats themselves ever develop such rapport with the local wogs as used to be regularly boasted of and invidiously contrasted with cowpoker occupational therapy? Even real outstandin’ GOP geniuses under the command of F. Kagan in person couldn't take the canny Brits’ D-a-D over if it didn't exist.
[3] It has been claimed repeatedly that M. Muwaffaq ar-Rubay‘í, "national" "security" adviser to poor M. al-Málikí, really works for the DIA/CIA/NSA/FBI alphabet soup of holy Homelanders. If true, that means that his reports go first and foremost to the glorious AEI-GOP-DOD coalitionites, so perhaps Rear-Col. F. Kagan of AEI and GOP knows all about what is in them.
However one can not exclude the possibility that Hannibal II of Da‘wa gets info copies. "Really works for" is not a perfectly clear conception in this sphere. It scarcely matters who pays the spook’s salary. One might say such a creep "really works for" whichever paymaster he conceals less from, but there is no reason to suppose that any paymaster gets told everything the creep believes to be the case. Or that any receives dezinformatsiya exclusively either.
As with M. le Docteur Tchélabí, so with M. ar-Rubay‘í: a really clever bastard in either position should be able to set up as tin-horn dictator of Peaceful Freedumbia. Since neither has managed the trick in five years, one should probably conclude that neither is quite clever enough. But God knows best.
[4] The logical upshot would be for the glorious coalitionites to ditch "impulsive" Hannibal II of Da‘wa at this juncture and set some other indig pol up on the white prancer at the head of the parade through the native quarter. But that rumor has floated by a dozen times before and Team Aggression never actually did it. The chances that they will do it now range from zero to negligible. As before, they don't have any satisfactory candidate, and to make a public mockery of the Four Pillars of Fudge upon which Peaceful Freedumbia rests -- the sovereignty, and independence, and constitutionality, and democracy of the I.Z. neorégime -- merely for the sake of installin’ a different impulsive incompetent is so dumb an idea that even a Harvard Victory School MBA might spot the flaws in it.
It would not be surprising if Freddy confers with other Big Management Party perps about the theoretical possibility of makin’ a coup against their own bastard at New Baghdád, but I'd be flabbergasted if they take action. Meanwhile this is not a topic that Big Management cares to discuss out loud where they might be overheard, not even in so friendly a forum as the Weekly Rupert.
[5] 2.600.000, guesses Wikipedia.
[6] One is not a Juan Cole or a Cartoonoclastes to ignore or deny that certain results of value -- mainly from narrow partisan AEI and GOP and DOD standpoints, but perhaps from others also -- have emerged from the Ever-Victorious Surge of ’07™.
It turns out, for example, that the expression "martial law" still refers to a workable plan. Some of us were never inclined to doubt that one can perform the routine work of a large metropolitan police department with assault rifles and air strikes even after the Big Bang of 2001. It does no harm to have additional evidence for what one knew already, and, in other such cases, it may even turn out that one knows a few things incorrectly. Half of Soc. Sci. is a joke along those lines, but nobody wants to abolish it on that account. The same applies to Mil. Sci., for all I can see to the contrary.
[7] What's bad could always be worse still, no doubt. Master Kagan might have swiftboated "Iraq chose America, what wil DEMOCRATS choose?" Maybe he'll get that far down the greasy slope before J. Sidney McCain has been officially elected and the neocomrades can safely knock it off. God knows best.
No comments:
Post a Comment