| the Washington spin machine seems to have gone into neutral, with the Ambassador continuing to tout security improvements, while the news reports nothing but renewed violence. The uncertain direction of the spin is leading to signs of unusual disunity in the Washington "policy community": STEPHEN, it seems, is breaking with MICHAEL and THE OTHER GUY over some aspect of Iraq policy. And the hottest question of all: Was COLIN Kahl too optimistic? |
"The other guy" can only be Neocomrade K. M. Pollock, Director of Research, Saban Center for Middle East Policy to the Brookings Institution (may the shadow thereof be lengthened!).
Goofville suffers from swollen head as well as delusions of triumph, and I fear we may be partly to blame, O Bones! Are not thee and I those who feigned an Omniscient Triunity of Miss Lynx and Mr. Badger and Dr. Cartoonoclastes? Enough to go to a certain class of self-esteem artist’s head, that sort of thing! True, we sufficiently understand the less entertaining reality of impotent lone goof plus keyboard plus Arabic dictionaries all along, but what is the Use of Phantasy™ [1] if one cannot get a little farther out of one’s own box than that?
Be the cause what it may -- and perhaps we ourselves are blameless for a change -- Cartoono the Magnificent seems to have worked himself up into a late summer snit against Stephen and Michael and Colin and Quartus, those more empowered sort of whippersnappers whose keyboards might conceivably have a detectable impact upon the unhappiness of the former Iraq. [2]
Party Proconsul R. Crockerius, mark thee, does not get the buddy-buddy treatment. Even goofs possess a sort of grudging respect for Sole Remainin’ Hyperpower and its credentialled reps, I daresay, that holds them back from fake-casually referring to that Imperial worthy as "Ryan." [3] However, with his boss lady just recently in town, perhaps we too may pass Ryan over, spinmachinewise, and go straight for the particular capillary that Dr. Cartoonoclastes has singled out, the WPC, "Washington ‘policy community’ ".
The S-’n’-M (‘Stephen’ and ‘Michael’) gossip goes like this, giving Steve’s side of things first
| "We want to have our cake and eat it too, support Maliki and the Sons of Iraq. . . . Maliki wants to make that as hard for us as possible. He wants us to choose him," said Stephen Biddle, a Council on Foreign Relations defense expert who has served as an advisor on strategy to Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq. "What it looks like we are getting is a Maliki government that won't behave itself and wants to crush the Sons of Iraq." [4] |
Mike, not without Ken, presumably thinks eating the cake that one has is a perfectly feasible operation.
Presumably. I fear the source that Dr. Cartoonoclastes ‘borrows’ from [5] does not actually quote any WPCer who disagrees with Stevie. (Collie is quoted as agreeing with Stevie; we will get to that in a moment.) So strictly speaking one cannot derive a Sign of Unusual Disunity -- of any disunity at all -- from the tea leaves as presented. Still, if we look rather at the substance of what Neocomrade S. Biddle told the Los Angeles Times, we may guess that some of the WPCers would pick poor M. al-Málikí on his own terms if forced to choose, whereas others, like Stevie and Collie, would opt for some post- or at least extra- Málikiyyan option or another, if givin’ the distinguished statesperson a sound kick in the head or two does not cause him to straighten out and fly right. Though Dr. Cartoonoclastes be pleased for goofball reasons of his own to assume and assert "unusual disunity," is it not much more likely that all the WPCers want to try the kick-in-the-head method first, and disagree only about what should come next if that approach fails?
An objector might object that some of the WPCers may account poor M. al-Málikí’s head quite kickproof and therefore propose to omit a step than cannot be successful. This is not impossible, but it is the sort of question that one needs better than random cartoonoclastic evidence to pronounce upon. While waiting for such evidence to turn up, let us listen to Collie supporting Stevie:
| ... Colin Kahl of CNAS ... is also reconsidering his former optimism ... "There's even some evidence that he wants to start a fight with the Sons of Iraq. Al-Maliki doesn't believe he has to accommodate these people. He will only do it if we twist his arm to the breaking point." Kahl -- noting the slowdown in absorption of Sunni militia members into the Iraqi military and the assignment of humiliating jobs to those who were being incorporated into the central government's payroll - stated "The last time we humiliated thousands of these guys is back in 2003, and we got the insurgency." |
Collie probably was not deliberately tryin’ to be oracular there, but he manages to achieve it. Does "to the breaking point" anticipate that the Hannibal of Da‘wa will give in at the last moment before his humerus snaps or that he will not give in? It is an important point, surely, for what paleface planmonger can wish to have poor M. al-Málikí around in a condition too badly damaged for him to be able to help her impose her own chosen druthers on the former Iraq? Still, Collie may not know himself what would happen. Like Stevie, Collie seems to think it an experiment worth lookin’ into.
It is antecedently probable enough, perhaps, that other WPCers rule that sort of experiment in political vivisection out on principle. However our general impression of Mikey (not without Kennie) does not suggest that he/they would take that line. And indeed, the antecedent probability question is not altogether easy in general. None of the WPCers have any conscientious objections to invasionism as such, let alone to opportunistic impositionism in the wake of an aggression disapproved of. For the head of poor M. al-Málikí to be perfectly immune from kickin’ by X, X would have to seriously believe in the Four Pillars of Piffle, namely the sovereignty, independence, democracy and constituitionalism of the International Zone neorégime. None of the WPC kids are in Mister X’s case. Mikey and Stevie and Kennie and Collie might advise the Powe®Pointe®s proper that it would be inadvisible for thm to be seen too plainly to regard all that as piffle, but there can of course be no question at all of honourin’ one’s own piffle at face value.
Does the Hannibal of Da‘wa realize this? Now there’s a really hard question! Let us skip it and ask rather with Dr. Cartoonoclastes, "Was Colin Kahl too optimistic?"
Of course he was. They all were, and I refer to an ALL vastly more comprehensive than just the WPC. Almost everybody from the most gung-ho Occupational Therapist to the goofiest goofball tiersmondiste has been far too optimistic about the benefits of pandering to the TwentyPercenters. Of the few of us who never cared for that conventionally wise malarkey, most were, naturally enough, interested parties, Free Kurd hillbillies or Twelver heretics who would have to be taken from in order that the TwentyPercenters might be given unto more abundantly.
The moral of the tale, valid against thug planmongers and goof planmongers alike, is perhaps that of M. de Kirkegaard: "Purity of heart is to will one thing." At any rate, willin’ percentages and proportions is what has created so many pesky little problems of success for Team Aggression and so much goofiness from Lynx and Badger and Cartoonoclastes. (Not even to mention the Righteous Virtue of Reidar Visser!)
The former Iraq might theoretically have been returned to normalcy by restoration of the old Sunni Ascendancy IN FULL, but nothing can come of mucking about with mere Affirmative Action™ schemes. The Natural Masters of Mesopotamia naturally (I suppose it is) want mastery, not just two-and-a-half votes instead of one. Some sort of Vast Cartoonoclasm was bound to occur eventually, though not necessarily the sort of cartoonoclasm that seems to be going on at the moment, which consists in the Hannibal of Da‘wa having become strong enough (he figures) to insist that it is not ‘fair’ that the TwentyPercenters get two-and-a-half votes apiece. Alternatively, there might have been a Bushie-Ba‘thí Pact of Steel, prominently featurin’ a Pipesovitchian "pro-democracy strongman" less implausible than poor M. al-Málikí. Yet that plan would not have worked in practice either, because the TwentyPercenter theocommunity has been smashed to smithereens. The Natural Masters almost certainly could not have held up their end of the traditional racket even with Château Kennebunkport and Rancho Crawford solidly behind them.
Least troublesome for everybody would have been to give poor M. al-Málikí -- or rather, the heretical theocommunity as a whole -- more or less what he has recently started to grab for himself, a plan which never crossed the mind of Sappy Conventionalis and her countless fans. As matters stand at the moment, the "not invented here" syndrome will probably kick in and make sure that Hannibal II does not get very far in the direction he is headed, while also making sure that nobody else gets very far in her direction either. [6] Were I a conspiratorialising goof, I might conclude with Cartoono the Magnificent that the saps must be acting sappy on purpose:
| On the underlying question of the Awakenings, the funny thing is that the "policy community" isn't drawing any connection between the Maliki crackdown on the one hand, and American attempts to get him to sign a bilateral security agreement on the other--involving, for instance, possibly giving Maliki the green light for a purge, on the idea that this will not only please Maliki as part of the bargaining, but will also generate feelings that perhaps the American troops are in fact needed for just a little longer, depending on circumstances of course. |
But it will not do to suppose what the gentry of Mu’ámara Junction suppose about the character and motives of AEI and GOP and DoD and USIP and EIB and . . . . Team Aggression are simply not bright enough to come up with the ingenious schemes that Goofville keeps attributing to ’em. [7]
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[1] Thee are to imagine an unread and perhaps unreadable poem from Century XII/XVIII thus entitled to match The Pleasures of the Imagination .
[2] ("He’s jealous.")
[3] Thee might alternatively conjecture that the Lynxes and Badgers and Cartoonoclastes of our alien and bewildered world do not seriously respect anything much that is not a PowerPoint.
Too prolonged an immersion in rigorously nondenominational pro-Sunnianity might have that tendency also, since both the TwentyPercenters of ex-Iraq and the ever-august Sunni International more broadly are rather fonder of "Clubs are trumps" than seems quite decent to Königsberger wimps like thee and me.
[4] http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-sons23-2008aug23,0,2435302.story
begat http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2008/08/malikis_aproach/ begat Cartoono’s latest, linked too from the e-roof of our own humble abode.
[5] The second URL in note [4] above.
[6] That Kiddie Konstitution krafted by Feldman of Harvard and Khalílzád Pasha of AEI and GOP is of great importance in this connection. Cartoono is not interested in such things, and neither are Mikey and Collie and Stevie and Kennie. So much the worse for them!
[7] Cartoono is very weak on Crawfordology. In addition to not being intelligent enough to come up with any of his nifty scenarios, the cowpoker vigilantes usually would not behave like that even if they thought of it.
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