| [I]f there is any toughening or image-improvement by the Sistani group in Iraq, it is completely invisible. No attempt was made to put the implications of the AP story into the Iraqi news system. And as far as the Karbala office-opening is concerned, there isn't any suggestion of any "hinting at a tougher position" on the part of Sistani there either. In fact the brazenness of the Americans' idea of having their first big provincial ribbon-cutting right in the religious heart of Iraq suggests the Americans, for their part, don't think there's any such thing as a Sistani tightening, implicit or otherwise. |
There is a lot more drool where that specimen came from, Mr. Bones, and maybe we will get to some of the rest later on. Naturally one prefers to begin with the drooliest drool in sight, however. There it is, behold it!
Perhaps we ought to cite Dr. Cartoonoclastes’ preliminary observations on "toughening or image-improvement," especially because (1) Cartoono collaterally blames Juan the Wicked -- big surprise! -- and (2) because we ourselves have been known to joke about being a "Cole Patrol," and (3) especially because one wonders whether an avowed cartoonoclast supposes that anything short of total breakage can improve an image. So, then,
| [T]here are really two main families of theories about the AP story and the surrounding Sistani news: (1) The ... "challenge to Sistani" theory, .... (2) Another theory is that the AP story (and a supporting item Juan Cole dug up this morning in Farsi, to the effect Sistani has banned sale of food to the American forces) represent first and foremost a move by Sistani and his circle to start hinting at a tougher position against the Americans, in implicit support of the Sadrist position. This might represent "real" toughening, or merely "image improvement," but the main point of this family of theories is that the stories are mostly being initiated by the Najaf side, not by the challengers. |
We had better begin by passing over how Cartoono the Magnificent passes over any question about the accuracy of the AP story. Let it be stipulated that ‘Alí Cardinal al-Sístání has in fact told a number of persons that armed resistance to aggression and occupation by operatives of the AEI-GOP-DOD Grand Coalition is warrantable. Whether these persons were seeking a formal responsum jurisprudentiale is not very important for political and moral purposes, and neither is the question of whether such guidance was intended for the inquirers alone. The paleface invasionites have every reason to be alarmed to hear that His Eminence approves of anybody at all shootin’ back at ’em under any circumstances whatsoever. If H. E. deviates from Gandhian passivity and Quakeroid ‘quietism’ at all, the exact degree of deviation is immaterial to the Aggression Faction here in the holy Homeland, and almost equally immaterial to the International Zone neorégime of poor M. al-Málikí.
When it comes to Miss Lynx and Mr. Badger and Dr. Cartoonoclastes , however, degrees of deviation from Gandhi and Cobham are all important. What is the first passage quoted, if not a shriek or moan that Cardinal al-Sístání refuses to deviate enough to suit the firm of LB&C? Being themselves perfectly impartial, as is of course only to be expected from rigorously nonsectarian cheerleaders for the Sunnintern, LB&C long ago decided that the I. Z. neorégime is illegitimate and to be opposed by any and all hooks and crooks that may come to hand, with those hooks and crooks involving physical force rather favoured over wimpier ones. By this point the Mu’ámara Junction gentry will take anything they can get, I daresay, but ideally they would not have to accept the expulsion of AEI and GOP and DOD at the hands of a heretical pontiff. Such a pseudoliberation would not, obviously, restore the former Iraq to the luster that it once enjoyed under Aaron the Orthodox , or even to the subluster more recently allowed it under the Ottomans and the Brits and the Mecca Monarchy and the Patriot Officers (and even under the‘Aflaqí Ba‘th). Were His Eminence of Najaf to prove the Fidel Castro of Twinriverdom at last, the Natural Masters of Mesopotamia would still be left out in the cold, and that might prove even a worse chill than the present one. [1] [2]
Thee will notice, Mr. Bones, how Juan the Wicked gets involuntarily recruited for "the Najaf side, not by the challengers." Thee will recall that Cartoono the Magnificent knows about the bahá’iyya business but prefers not to talk about it. Quite apart from that, Prof. Cole of course knows a thousand times more facts about the duodecimal heretics than MJ goofballs or real Sunninternis and TwentyPercenters usually do. By a sort of tertiary-academic equivalent of the Stockholm Syndrome, there is a certain tendency for folks like Juan the Wicked to become advocates of the indigs that they happen to know lots of facts about. It will not do to deny this flatly, but as against Dr. Cartonoclastes, there is no need for denial. JC could stockholmize just as well by rooting for Muqtadae as by rooting for His Eminence. Or indeed, by rooting for both the Sadr City team and the Noble Najaf team equally. Only if a fan’s two pets were playing one another, would she have to choose between them.
Has it come to that? At Lynx, Badger, Cartoonoclastes LLC they think so, obviously, but do they think what is so at LB&C?
I should guess that they do not. By thinking this particular thing that is not -- viz. that there is an unbridgeable gulf between the Rev. Señorito al-Sadr and ‘Alí Cardinal al-Sístání -- the goofballs manage to misunderstand everything that is Shí‘í-political triumphantly. His Eminence is still doing business at the same old stand: "Let everbody Twelver stick together, the Sadr Tendency most emphatically included!" After five solid years of Responsible Nonwithdrawal on the part of AEI and GOP and DOD, one may reasonably begin to wonder whether that is the best possible line of business to be in. What if the alien gentlethugs never go away at all? That is a good question, in my judgment, but my judgment is worth nothing worth mentioning except insofar as it is shared by actual neo-Iraqi subjects of the extremist GOP. And there is no clear sign that either Sadrists or ‘Sistanians’ have begun asking this question yet.
His Eminence of Najaf’s alleged responsa jurisprudentialia could be taken to point in exactly the opposite direction from that in which Cartoono’s crew choose to look. To agree -- (only) in private, and perhaps (only) in theory as well -- that the Sadr Tendency, or the Army of the Mahdí, or particular individual believers, may possess a Divine-Law right to resist invasion and occupation might be understood as an attempt to keep the hotheads in the fold, not at all to excommunicate them from it. To create a really unbridgeable gap would seem to require that H. E. declare political and military collaboration with the forces of AEI-GOP-DOD harám, a step which would obviously be the death knell for "Let’s all stick together!" One could have inferred from the ’Áyatalláh’s external behavior to date that he must internally consider that Divine Law does not forbid either collaborationism or muqáwama, and likewise that it makes neither of them mandatory.
Perhaps times have changed and that henotic view should be changed as well. Perhaps it will be changed. We shall see. Meanwhile, though, there is no evidence worth mentioning that it actually has been changed, not in the Associated Press article or anyplace else that I know of. Cartoono the Magnificent assumes what it makes him feel good to assume, adequate evidence not required.
Juan the Wicked offends against M. Pascal’s First Moral Principle as well, though only in a curious proleptic fashion. JC is quite sure that the Rev. al-Sístání is going to endorse muqáwama and ditch collaborationism one of these days, but he is also quite sure (and quite correct to think) that it has not happened yet. [3]
____
[1] The MJ goofballs and their Sunninterní clients (or patrons) cannot be expected to agree with my speculation. It is totally inconceivable to them, as far as I can ascertain, that anybody but the TwentyPercenters should rule the former Iraq in the absence of extraterrestrial intervention from Planet Kennebunkport-Crawford.
Dr. Cartoonoclastes may even know that His Eminence ‘knows’ that scrap of knowledge as well as the goofballs and the TwentyPercenters themselves, in which case there would be no mystery about why H. E. is not exactly ablaze with zeal in the matter of pseudoliberation. Sic vos, non vobis, mellificatis apes: why on earth should the Cardinal wish to see the backs of the militant Republican Party extremists, if they are merely to be replaced with the fronts of militant Sunninterní extremists?
H. E. is not a military gentleman. It is improbable that he conceives of the correlation of forces in any such terms, not even in terms of joint hillbilly-heretic militias (d.b.a. the ‘National’ ‘Army’ of ‘Iraq’) keeping the Natural Masters down indefinitely rather than vice versa, as Cartoono expects. Perhaps the Cardinal simply does not think about "what if" scenarios for after AEI-GOP-DOD finally go away at all? This whole fuss might be explained as a misunderstanding of what business H. E. is actually in: what was intended as a scholastic juridical ruling on the "right of armed resistance," so to slightly miscall it, may have turned into concrete political and military schemings of the sort that excite the pulses of goofball conspiriatorializers. (But God knows best.)
[2] Mere abstract logic keeps pointing towards an alliance between the TwentyPercenters on the one hand and the Glorious Coalition on the other. AEI-GOP-DOD would find themselves -- as often in the annals of the holy Homeland, as elsewhere in the Greater Levant -- supportin’ a minority indig régime that most likely could not survive on its own. History grievously interferes with rationality from both sides, however: the Natural Masters are not open to the idea that their mastery may have to be propped up by alien outsiders from now on, while the alien outsiders are stuck with the notorious fact that it was they and nobody else who saddled the former Iraq with the I. Z. neorégime in the first place.
For all his thrillin’ Hannibal Redux impression of recent weeks, poor M. al-Málikí remains about as poor as ever. He falls between the same two stools as ever. He is not a Natural Master and will never be accepted as equivalent to one, least of all by the genuine article. That leaves him with only the Khalílzád Konstitution to fall back on, and unfortunately the KK makes all mastery impossible for everybody. For a while poor M. al-Málikí and his belligerent buddies down at Rancho Crawford can make do with Núrí (Jawád) Kamál more or less alone as the indig ‘minority’ to be imposed upon the former Iraq by colonializers and imperialists. In the long run, though, a one-man base is ridiculously tiny and precarious. I do not know what authoritative Pol. Sci. considers the minimum size for a collaborationist native minority to be, but surely it must be a good deal larger than this one.
[3] Since this is an anti-goofball scribble, Mr. Bones, we need not go into the question of exactly what Don Júan is doin’ at this moment. But to give you a brief preview of the coming attraction, I suspect Prof. Cole is really playing holy-Homeland political games when he talks like that: UNLESS B. Hussein Obama gets in and cancels the worst excesses of AEI and GOP and DOD, Cardinal al-Sístání will eventually find himself forced to . . . et cetera.
No comments:
Post a Comment