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| I was very intrigued to hear that the Senate Armed Forces Committee has unanimously recommended, in addition to a somewhat problematic ban on US financing for reconstruction projects larger than $2 million, that "Iraq also would have to pay to train and equip its security forces and provide the salaries of Sunni-dominated "Sons of Iraq" security groups." I've been advocating this move for a long time - not to save money, but to force Maliki to integrate the Awakenings into state security force to advance both sectarian political accommodation and the effective sovereignty of the Iraqi state. (( long self-quotation omitted )) The argument for this has only gotten stronger over the last two months, as the Maliki government has suddenly found it possible to find jobs for significant numbers of members of Shia tribes and presumed Shia militia members in its battle against the Sadrists. Good move by the Senate Armed Forces Committee - now let's see if the recommendation can be leveraged into some real progress on that front. |
Thus is intrigued that moderate aggression fan, Prof. M. Lynch of George Washington University, whom the conspiratorializing goofs managed to mistake for an antiwarrior open to factional blackmail. [1] Be that as it may, what is to be said about "a professor of political science at George Washington University and author of Voices of the New Arab Public" who dares to accuse Congress of doing something right? Which planet did he just arrive from?
As luck would have it, Providence furnishes us with a Sabbath editorial from the New York Times Company in which the august Solons of the holy Homeland are scored more traditionally on the same subject matter:
| The only mission that needs to be accomplished is an orderly exit from Iraq, and Mr. Bush is no closer to acknowledging that reality. Neither is Senator John McCain. All Congress seems capable of is hand-wringing. |
I don’t believe, Mr. Bones, that we lovers of peace and consensus can resolve this particular cognitive dissonance by suggesting that on occasion it may be a good move to wring one’s hands a little.
Once you have been notified of the discrepancy, sir, you can read through the corporate wisdom of This Page for yourself and be struck as I was that "national reconciliation" does not seem to figure on the NYTC’s colonial agenda any longer. Responsible Nonwithdrawal -- a.k.a. "an orderly exit from Iraq" -- is conditioned on a number of things, but not that one. Rather the contrary, if anything:
| Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s decision to finally challenge some Shiite militias was a good thing, but it exposed how the Iraqi Army remains unprepared — even now — to fight by itself. |
Like Father Aardvark, Aunt Nitsy professes to have spotted one good move in a generally unpromising neighborhood recently, but alas! it is not the same move. [2] The two moves are not even rhetorically or polemically parallel, for you will mark, sir, how quickly Nitsy twists hers into a stick to bash the Crawfordites with.
Father Aardvark is above all petty partisanship, prescriptively as superior to Nitsy as educationism is superior to journalism. He undoubtedly wants gobs and gobs of Affirmative Action hiring for the poor oppressed TwentyPercenters for its own sake, certainly not for any factious reasons. He may logically subordinate it to the erection of a proper MaxWeberian State amid the ruins of the former Iraq, but there is no scandal in that subordination, surely? Is not the MaxWeberian State by definition a nonpartisan affair? [3] No, Mr. Bones, the most likely chink in Prof. M. Lynch’s conceptual carapace is probably located over on the low empirical side, in the assumption that Affirmative Action laid on with a dump truck for Arabophone Sunnís, and especially as regards the armed forces and the ordinary police and (above all!) the secret state police, would in fact tend towards MaxWeberian Statism. M. Lynch might, after all, be empowered to lead poor M. al-Málikí around with a ring through the nose and impose any impositions he pleases, and yet with no happy event if what he is trying to impose happens not to work.
It would be ghastly blasphemy to announce that the MaxWeberian State "happens not to work," but that is not the point at issue. Mr. Bones. We are, at this stage of the aggression, only speaking of roads that purport to lead to the establishment of the MaxWeberian State in the Peaceful Freedumbia of AEI-GOP-DOD, and it would be no miracle if some of the roads that look promising to some of the pilgrims should turn out to be headed elsewhere. The sage himself was a social scientizer rather than a historian, remember: St. Max undertook to define der Staat on the basis of communitarian phenomena current in 1919-1922 without reference to details about how those phenomena came into existence earlier. [4]
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[1] In resisting the extortion, M. L. incidently spoke of the goofs’ "grand theory of civil-war promotion," thus indicating that he can spot conspiratorialism sufficiently well not to be antecedently disqualified to discuss the wonderful Middle East. On the other hand, his little zinger was strategically located to be as unobtrusive as possible. It may easily have escaped the notice of pretty well everybody save thee and me, Mr. Bones, in both his own peanut gallery and the Mu’ámara Junction peanut gallery. I infer that the professor is happy enough to be mistaken for some kind of dove. Is it his fault that passionately partisan lay sheep do not peruse his oracles more attentively? (No, sir, it definitely is their own fault.)
Lynx Badger Cartoonoclastes LLC have yet to respond to yesterday’s post and very likely will not trouble to. But I think Dr. Cryptohawk may have blow his cover even so, because the zealot goofs did pick him up on
| Unlike many public diplomacy scholars and practitioners, I have no principled objection to strategic communications and agree that they have an important place in national strategy. (...) It's one thing to "fabricate stories" [he's talking specifically about AQ, but think about the Sadr City issue here]... It's another when such information operation stories then filter back into our domestic policy debates or into the policy-making process, (or, worse yet, if shaping the domestic arena is actually the point--but that's a slightly different set of issues). |
The actual Lynchian position on lying abroad for one’s Cause is perhaps not quite as unedifying as the MJ gentry took it to be. He's definitely against Honesty whenever it is demonstrably not the best policy, yet when Honesty seems policy-neutral, I believe he is prepared to tolerate it. Even the full original blogghiatura is inadequate to establish his exact stance, however, and that despite a sort of set of solved problems tacked onto the abstract exposition:
| * Do I think that the US should have agents participating on jihadist forums in a misleading or disruptive way? Yes. * Do I think that the US should have agents reading jihadist forums to extract information about their thinking and attitudes? Yes. * What happens when the second group of agents (or regular old analysts like Evan Kohlmann and me) reads the stuff planted by the first group, if it isn't somehow flagged as disinformation? Um... |
(In textbooks of mathematics and physics the student does not often run into the "ummm" solution. I daresay the social scientizers are working on its elimination even as we keyboard, Mr. Bones.)
The problem set constitutes a separate addendumb added as an update. It is not clear that the MJ gentry were aware of it when they issued their denunciation. They were reading a completely different post from the one Prof. Lynch posted in any case, as witness
| As you can see ... there has been something of a discussion about this question whether or not it is possible to keep the lying overseas, and not have it come back and corrupt the purity of the American democracy. (...) It's what they call a thumb-sucker, and there apparently are going to be whole seminars on this question of large-scale, public lying for purported national-interest reasons. Meanwhile the damage in Sadr City is already being done, and it will get worse, if we can't find people with the courage to stand up and say this is a policy that is as damaging to America morally as it is brutal to its direct victims, and the Democrats shouldn't be silently lining up behind it. |
M. Lynch is, of course, a credentialled practitioner of tertiary educationism. To treat him as a footstool to be kicked every time "the Democrats" fall afoul of one’s partisan commitments in the Greater Levant is childish.
[2] To be fair, Prof. Lynch did not claim that the Senatorial hand-wringing was the only good move in Peaceful Freedumbia to have come to his attention. He and Nitsy and Miss Sappy, the sapientia conventionalis gal, have always supposed that pandering to the Arabophone Sunní theocommunity is a sine quâ non for eventually drying up the bushogenic swamp. Hannibal of Da‘wa panders pretty well on the military side, it seems to me, even though he remains reluctant to pander when it comes to jobs for the bhoys.
If poor M. al-Málikí consciously thinks about his collaborationism in such terms -- which is very unlikely -- he may be cleverer than we have given him credit for, Mr. Bones. The TwentyPercenters will, many of them, be pleased to watch the clobberation of Master Muqtadae. Given the low level of political consciousness in the former Iraq, few of them will notice that they don’t actually gain anything more enduring from the spectacle. And those TwentyPercenters most likely to notice are probably shooting at the operatives of AEI and GOP and DOD and at Marvin the ARVN (the Iraq organisation) every chance they get, which is to say that no possible concessions from the International Zone neorégime or anything remotely like it will win them over. Ergo, Hannibal of Da‘wa manages to pander where panderation is feasible and he loses nothing that he actually possessed even a prospect of obtaining where panderation is not feasible -- all without giving any TwentyPercenters anything permanent they will be able to use against him and his own theocommunity tomorrow or the day after.
That is so nifty and Machiavellian it is sort of a pity that NKaM is not doing it on purpose. Naturally the GOP geniuses cannot be doin’ it on purpose either. In addition to them not bein’ smart enough, the whole object of the exercise is meaningless to them. They could not care less whether the horn of Najaf is exalted.
[3] Actually, if one goes by the strict wording of the bond , there is no reason but the word legitim why the MaxWeberian State cannot be as tendentious and preferential as almost anybody.
[4] A speculator might speculate whether any Staat or Rechtstaat or MaxWeberian State was ever arrived at by the highway of Affirmative Action. Such a voyage seems improbable to me, although only a genuinely universal historian would know for sure. To this amateur, it certainly looks as if there would have to have been a State in existence already before it could act affirmatively -- or act any other way, for that matter. But possibly I misunderstand what agent or agents the AA theorists suppose to be acting. And God knows best.
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