Fear of Cleanliness ...

... comes right after Fear of Godliness. Everybody knows that.

And nobody fears godliness more than your rigidly nonsectarian zealot for the TwentyPercenters of ex-Iraq and the Sunni International:

Behind the Supreme Council concerns about a coup: Baath-phobia (...) Lest we dismiss this writer, with his phobia of the Baathists, as an outlier in the Supreme Council milieu, recall (...) [Supreme Hakeem fiend] Saghir sees the hand of the Baathists ready to exploit voter discontent with the government; similarly ... [Supreme Hakeem fiend] Mahdi sees the hand of Baathists behind the militarization that he warns could conceivably lead to a military coup.

Miss Lynx and Mr. Badger and the erudite Dr. Cartoonoclastes seem perfectly willing to believe in ‘militarisation’ -- at least if they get to explain it and decide whom to point a finger at [1] about it. But only children believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and the ‘Aflaqí Ba‘th.

Given that there is no such thing to be afraid of, the fearmongers are in like Flynn. Ba‘thophobia can be turned off and on like ... well, like a bathtub tap, actually:

[‘Iraqologist’] says the reports of Mahdi's remarks on this have been overwrought ... be that as it may, and whatever the underlying possibilities may or may not be, it is at least worth the effort to try and understand the mind-set of the Supreme Council people who are obviously concerned about this. But when he says "This media speculation is about 1% substance and 99% hype," it sounds a little as if [he] knows as well or perhaps better than the people in the Supreme Council milieu when it will be time to actually worry. Hopefully when he thinks the ratio of substance to hype changes he will let everyone know.

Rumours that the United States Institute of ‘Peace’ is run by Supreme Hakeem fiends, or vice versa, may be a tad overwrought as well. Yet Goofville would not be Goofville without a consistent pattern of overwreaking. Be that as it may, the student ought to ask herself whether USIP is really the most convenient mechanism available to Fiendishness on Earth. [2] That Orwellian monnicker is bound to make USIP seem more important to Parmenidean appearance-despisers than it really is. Most likely the Supreme Hakeem fiends are really run out of an obscure basement in the Department of Agriculture. [3] Everybody knows that is how you are supposed to do it.

As might be expected, the announcement about "at least worth the effort to try and understand the mind-set of the Supreme Council people" leads to exactly zero (0.00) follow-through and/or follow-up. Shying away from one’s own ingenuities the way Cartoono does here could give a hostile observer the impression that the Sunninterní Lobby suffers from a certain sort of Ba‘thophobia of its own: once admit that 1958 and All That is maybe a little better grounded than the Tooth Fairy narratives are, and who knows? A Pandora’s box might open under one’s feet at every step! Zero follow-through may not be very gallant, but the prudence of it is impeccable. Better History should continue to begin in March or April of A. D. 2003 -- no doubt about it! [4]

Like Kennebunkport and Crawford, Goofville continues to think that its team is fated to ‘win’ definitively in the former Iraq, and win very soon. Though this outcome is not likely, one may wonder exactly what would become of the Supreme Hakeem fiends if it happened. Would they gnash their teeth in internal exile and obscurity forever? Would Sunní Ascendancy Redux make some effort to be reconciled with its former victims? Would the neovictims rush off to the evil Qommies and thus run us Greater Euros through another Cycle of Cathay™, returning in a dozen or twenty years to take a second stab at dhimmifacture [5] of the Natural Masters of Mesopotamia? Would Domino Democracy™ and Iraq-the-Model™ suddenly break out all over?

But lo! spoofery overcomes me. I had better desist.


____
[1] No prize for guessing who gets the conspiratorialisin’ gentry’s finger:

[I]f you are wondering what could possible keep alive this kind of phobia in the military/intelligence area, consider the following piece this morning's Al-Hayat. It's headed: "American source to Al-Hayat: Director of the De-Baathification Agency provided information that helped 'special groups' kill Iraqis", and it quotes an anonymous American official to the effect that Ali al-Lami, director of the De-Baathification Commission, arrested recently (Aug 28) by the Americans, used his position to feed specific information on Baathists to Shiite death squads.

[2] Al-’ifsád fi l-‘ard.


[3] Q. "It is 0515 hours. Does anybody know where Ollie North is?"
A. "You might try over at the Casino of Human Events ."


[4] The Supreme Hakeem fiends have written up their own martyrology quite elaborately -- five big volumes of martyrs from only the First Family of Najaf proper. So the world does not exactly need any follow-through from Cartoono the Magnificent as regards the general outline of events. Cartoono feels much more comfy going on about "Shiite death squads" and one may as well leave him to it since one has no better way of interfering with him than to poke fun and detect fallacy, measures which have rarely impeded ideobigots.

It remains a bit distressing that the Mu’ámara Junction gentry will probably credit themselves with having profoundly sympathised with the absurd phobias of the Supreme Hakeem fiends before detecting the absurdity, whereas in fact they have only mentioned the abstract possibility of "effort to try and understand the mind-set."

Oh, well, "Life is unfair"!


[5] Anythin’ Mme. Bint Yeor can do, we can do as well!