Dr. Cartoonoclastes Amongst The Bedouin

What's up with Maliki's latest tribal-council proposal? On Sunday June 29, Maliki hosted a meeting of notables from the Jubbur tribe, where he spoke glowingly of the role of tribes and clans in Iraqi society and history, adding that he proposed to set up a national council of tribes, which would work hand in hand with the government in such important tasks as applying the law and so on. It was not a widely-noticed meeting or statement.

Self-praise seems to be trendy in amateur Morgenlandkünstlerisch circles just at the moment, Mr. Bones, so let thee and I gloat brazenly that WE had already widely noticed it, well before the firm of Badger, Lynx, Cartoonoclastes LLC got through wrangling with Prof. Dr. Lynch and that demented Talismaniac. Assuming they are through wrangling and self-promoting, that is, of coarse. [1]

Averting our glance piously from the Silly Season snakepit of gossip and backbiting and auto-back-pattery, where , but for the grace of Hubal, go we!, let us look quickly through ThunderWord's sentbox for ... ah, there it is! "Up from Civilisation" and "6/29/2008 5:59PM" externally for the traffic analysts, and internally not much more contributed from thee and me for the cryptanalysts but the cheap and obvious antithesis "Up from Civilisation, ON TO TRIBALISM!" and a newspaper photograph of the Hannibal of Da‘wa in the middle of cuneiform and chickentracks from Sawt al-‘Iráq of "2008-06-28."

Five days is a long time in blogghiatura, butI fear I recall only too correctly that it was Juan the Wicked who caused us to widely notice ... hmm ... "tribally based party lists are now campaigning in Diyala Province and hope to do well," no, that was deciphered from al-Hayát ... "The governor of Maysan, Adil Mahudar of the Sadr Movement, said that there had been extensive coordination with tribal sheikhs and with civil society organizations" is al-Sharq al-Awsat ... well, perhaps it was not Juan the Wicked after all. Aha! It must have been Aardvark the Obnoxious, over there on the left side of the screen, with

Maliki calls to establish a national council of tribes to support government and state Worth keeping an eye on to see if this amounts to anything - could be read in different ways.[2] This report from SotalIraq.

Cartoono summatorializes "Baghdad reporter Zaid Al-Zubadi" as follows,

There was a time ... when the Americans and Maliki felt that the Shiite South-Center was under control, but faced with local elections and the difficulty in getting agreement on a long-term security agreement, that view changed, and one result was the military campaigns in Karbala, Basra, Amara, Sadr City and so on. The victor in some sense was Maliki, but in terms of popular support, he and his Daawa party emerged empty-handed, apparently leaving (on the tacit assumption of no Sadrist resurgence) the Supreme Council top dog in the South-Center. Hence this new plan to salvage something of popular, and American, support.

Unless cartoonoclastically misparaphrased, ZaZ of New Baghdád is skating over thin ice here. Is one to assume that They-The-People and "the Americans" support, or used to support, more or less the same I.Z. pols and policies? Hubal forbid! Though to be sure, he does seem to account the Sadr Tendency "popular" par excellance -- an amiable error if it is an error at all. [3]

There is a possible confusion of fact as well as of value here. Is it the post-Iraqis of the southern provinces, or the AEI-GOP-DoD coalitionites, or both, who find tribalism congenial and look to it as a probable font of "popular support"? ZaZ must be a city boy himself, Mr. Bones. Thee could have worked that out even in the absence of erudite program notes from Dr. Cartoonoclastes. [4] ZaZ no more supposes the backward Bedouin to be Them-The-People of the former Iraq than thee and I and most sane Heimatlanders would suppose the like of Appalachia and the Hookworm Belt. Hannibal Redux and the Supreme Hakeemes are obviously only trying to fadge up some façade of obsolete rural folkways that ignorant invasionites and other outsiders might mistake for "popular support." Anyway, it is obvious that ZaZ of New Baghdád thinks that, and I’d say thee and I would do well to agree with his estimate.

ZaZ then escapes from the shackles of MJ paraphrasis, saying

Observers think that Maliki emerged from these fights (in Basra and elsewhere) empty-handed, while the biggest beneficiary on the sectarian front was the Supreme Council ... while at the same time the idea of renouncing sectarianism was taking hold of the Iraqi street. These observers think the latest call by Maliki for the creation of tribal support councils could be the last card he has available to preserve any remaining popular and American support[.] In other words, having prevailed in the sectarian activities, he now wants to hitch himself to the tribal gangs in order to preserve his influence.

That passage makes clear why ZaZ can appeal to us as well as to Lynx, Badger, Cartoonoclastes LLC. The conspiratisin' gentry applaud him thinking that their own brand of strictly impartial pro-Sunni antisectarianianism is -- once again! just like it always used to be!! -- "taking hold of the Iraqi street." We like ZaZ for Mr. Mencken's simpler reasons, simply for being no good buddy to hicks and rubes and tribal remnants of futilism.

As analyst, ZaZ of Tigris River City is not particularly impressive. I can't make out whether he thinks Hannibal is winning or losing. Can thee? From the summatorialising, thee would gather that poor M. al-Málikí has his back to the wall of the last available ditch, but then we are assured in direct quotation that he has "prevailed in the sectarian activities." What that means, exactly, Hubal alone knows for sure, but still, "prevailed" can't be all bad, can it? Is one perhaps to imagine that ex-Iraq is functionally partitioned between a "sectarian sector" in which everything is already going the way of Da‘wa and the Supremes (and presumably of the Baní Crawford as well), and a "nonsectarian sector" dominated by "tribal gangs" that poor M. al-Málikí must make an arrangement with if he is ever to hannibalize himself for real? That may not be anything like the true correlation of farces, but at least it makes sense. On the other hand, the intrepid Mr. ZaZ did not actually express that notion, thee and I made it up for ourselves to puzzle him out. [5]

Cartoono runs with the last ditch element in isolation, most likely out of knee-jerk Panglossism:

Zubaidi thinks this last-resort explanation is what accounts for the penchant of Daawa leaders Maliki, and Jaafari before him, to flatter the tribes, and the thinking would be that the Supreme Council, by contrast, is satisfied with the evolution of events, leaving it with "a monopoly in the 'Shiite field', following the blows delivered to its fundamental rival, the Sadrist trend." That's Maliki's plan, Zubaidi or at least these observers think. But there could be one or two flies in the ointment . . . .

Grown-ups may prefer to notice the rather obvious point that the Supreme Hakeemes come equipped with a real "tribal gang," a militia, whereas the IDP has never had one and has not (yet) succeeded in renting somebody else's. If Hannibal could be 100.0% sure that his willful coalitionite friends from AEI and GOP and DoD would not abandon him even if worst comes to worst, -- i.e., if Commanderissimo J. Sidney McCain does not make the cut -- he could treat the Big Management Party's armed operatives as in effect the Minutemen of Da‘wa, instantly takin’ point and set and match from all comers, Badr and pershmerga and Mahdí Army alike. Hannibal has not much to fear from B. Hussein Obáma in one sense, for obviously there will be Responsible Nonwithdrawal™ of some sort no matter what happens.

But ensuring a Responsible Nonwithdrawal™ product that privileges the Islamic Da‘wa Party specifically is a different affair. Team Aggression has never passionately cared exactly who gets to run the International Zone neorégime: any pack of natives who will grant Dr. Gen. Petraeus of Princeton and Party Proconsul Crocker the sort of liberum veto that prosurgency and Party-of-Grant glory demands will do nicely. The Supreemes are neither better nor worse than IDP is from the Beltway City standpoint, and the Bribe-a-Tribe™ pensioneers and even the Free Kurds are not very different either. As long as the former Iraq does not succumb to Ladinists or Sadrists, what paleface planmonger really cares who or what it succumbs to?

But I beg thee's pardon, Mr. Bones, I interrupted just as Mr. ZaZ was about to be allowed to speak for himself again:

"However, this tribal policy of Maliki is still surrounded by the murky question of the American attitude to it, after all the problems that the Awakenings have caused, having shown their bloody side, and the situation having gone so far that there is criticism about ‘not being permitted to kill suspects,’ the killing of prisoners on their release by the occupation forces, struggles for influence, and the start of inter-tribal fights in place of sectarian fighting."

(Tribalists will be tribal, it looks like!)

By accident, I have just demurked Team Aggression’s "murky attitude" myself. The perps mainly don’t give a hoot, an attitude which is clear enough as long as it is recognized for what it is. As noted, Mr. ZaZ has a goofball conspiratist side to him as well as a sensible adult side, and on this point the former carries the day. He has trouble grasping that AEI and GOP and DoD can really be so alien -- and so vulgar! -- as not to care about east-of-Suez differences that are crucial and more than crucial to himself. After starting with that failure to be communicated to, ZaZ of New Baghdád is naturally shocked that these albino weirdos should insist on obtaining that liberum veto of theirs: they don't understand anythin’ at all, practically, about their semiconquered provinces in Mesopotamia, and yet they want to dictate quite a number of things!

It really is pretty shockin’, Mr. Bones, at least if thee think with M. Pascal and me morally, but murky it is not.


___
[1] Golly, Mr. Bones, forty-six (46.0) peanut-gallery-level responses to first off this ain't no diss record and still counting as of {07/02/2008 04:50AM}!

What can thee say after thee have once quoted "The smaller the teacup, the fiercer the tempest"?

And now, enough of that.


[2] If we pass over Cartoono's characteristic goofballism in the Gossip Wars, it would be rather unfair to pick on Associate Professor Facing-Different-Ways for, well, facing different ways, until a decent interval of time has elapsed.

On the other hand, FDW might conceivably justify himself in policy terms, as being an amateur Orientalizer avowedly in favour of pretty well anything that a MaxWeberian Staat might eventually congeal around in the former Iraq. Maybe Petraeus and Crockerius, maybe Hannibal and the nomadic element, maybe M. von Tálebání and the Safavid Connection, maybe . . . or ... will prove the bit of grit that finally accrues the Pearl of Statism. AA can claim that he is not facing everywhichway about what he desires to impose upon the neo-Iraqi subjects of AEI and GOP and DoD, only looking in every quarter available for an imposition mechanism that would function reliably.

Intellectually, if not ethically, this stands several cuts above the watan-nationalistic goofballism of Mu’ámara Junction. Miss Lynx and Mr. Badger and Dr. Cartoonoclastes have not advanced far analytically beyond deciding who their friends are. It is, for all practical purposes, simply the friends themselves that they crave to impose.

AA does not possess that sort of friends. Different views may be taken as to whether nonpossession of (indig) friends makes one a better liebhabende Morgenlandkunstler or not. There is no good reason that I know of to swallow the late Prof. Sa‘íd whole in this matter and summarily rule for Cartoono and against Prof. Lynch. But God knows best.


[3] ZaZ plainly guesses that poor M. al-Málikí had permission in advance from Rancho Crawford to set up as the Hannibal of Da‘wa, a conjecture that is not amiable but merely, as I consider, erroneous.


[4] The first time through, I thought Cartoono’s specification of a "Baghdad reporter" was either gratuitous Mu’ámariyya Junction goofery or else an attempt to insinuate that ZaZ might actually know something about the former Iraq despite working for the Anglo-Arabian Press Trust. But in fact it is pertinent, though not strictly necessary.


[5] The goofball gentry must interpret the Zazian tea leaves some other way, because that conjecture of mine is not at all flattering to un- and anti-sectarianism, whether impartially pro-Sunnintern or tamely impartial.