30 April 2008

Violence Prose

By Jove, Mr. Bones! If General Gage had only heard of the PubDip -- "public diplomacy" -- product and deployed it as enthusiastically as today’s specimen invasionites do, doubtless Boston would still be Brit-occupied and none of that bad former-Iraq stuff would ever have happened.

Coalition and Iraqi forces killed or captured dozens of terrorists and criminal militia members during multiple engagements in Iraq yesterday, military officials said. In Suq Ash Shuyukh, southeast of Nasiriyah, Iraq, a combined force of more than 300 Iraqi Army, Iraqi Police and Iraqi Special Weapons and Tactics personnel, advised by U.S. Special Operations Forces, killed 40 criminal militia members and arrested an additional 40 after the Iraqi forces were attacked by the militia members. Using assault rifles and automatic weapons, the criminal militia attacked Iraqi Security Forces in the morning. Regional police and Army forces on alert in the area responded in force, overwhelming the outnumbered criminal militia fighters. Facing a combination of armored vehicles and suppressive fire, the criminals retreated to a building that contained the local Sadr Trend office. With Iraqi special weapons and tactics personnel providing support, additional security forces launched a counter attack, overrunning the remaining enemy defenses. [Huh? Who let that in?] The ISF entered the building and cleared it of the remaining criminals.


Hmm. Isn't "counterattack" all one word? Though perhaps if the outnumbered CMM’s had entrenched themselves in a retail outlet . . . .

The spirit is willful, but the flesh is weak, even amongst PubDippers. I am sorry to say they cannot keep up that rate of fire indefinitely. Though they get off six (6) rounds of the magic C-word in the first 150, the whole scribble, which comes in just under one thousand, has no more than twenty (20). A sad fallin’ off! No wonder the neocomrade scribbler did not want his name attached, for all that anonymity coexists oddly with the disclaimer

Note -- The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, and/or philosophy of The Family Security Foundation, Inc.

27 April 2008

Who is John Ging?

I should hesitate to take my facts about Palestine, or about much of anything else, from the Daily Torygraph, but assuming that JC implicitly vouches for them, let us have a closer look, Mr. Bones:

Gaza depends on Israel for all its fuel. However, Israel reduced supplies to pressure the Hamas authorities into stopping militants firing rockets across the border. The flow was turned off completely a fortnight ago after militants attacked an oil terminal on the Gaza border, killing two Israeli civilians.

Mr Ging ["director of the main UN aid agency in Gaza"] criticised the militants but said that Israel was wrong to retaliate with sanctions. "Irresponsible acts of one side do not lift the clear legal responsibilities from the other side," he said. "Under international humanitarian law Israel has a responsibility to provide supplies for the civilian population of Gaza." Israel responded by saying that the crisis was being engineered by Hamas for propaganda purposes and that it was allowing in some humanitarian supplies.

However, Gazan truck drivers have gone on strike, claiming that the piecemeal distribution of these modest fuel supplies was not cost effective. Their action was described by a senior British aid worker as "an industrial hunger strike." Louis Michel, the European Union Humanitarian Aid Commissioner, said. "It is unacceptable that public services, such as garbage collection, sewage treatment or hospitals, are at the brink of collapse because of a lack of fuel."

That is the conclusion of the DT article. Part of my dissatisfaction is that it began with what pretends to be, or was intended to be, but in fact is not, a still briefer summary of the same muddle:

The United Nations says it is being forced to stop delivering food aid to Gaza because of the fuel shortages caused by Israel's response to militant attacks. Almost a million Palestinians will go hungry if the UN stops deliveries . . . .

Those two little words "caused by" can get twisted out of shape beyond recognition rapidly when they fall into the hands of ax-grinders. And nowhere are there more ax-grinders per square metre than in the conceptual vicinity of the Palestine Puzzle.

The DT crew take a stab at even-handedness, sort of, by offering their customers a response-based cause. Unfortunately intellectual visibility is only decreased by their ploy: I cannot make out whether to blame the militants of Gaza or the statespersons of the Tel Aviv régime first. And those militant attacks can easily be understood as a response to some other factor located even farther back chronologically. The so-called ‘occupation’ for example.

It is tempting, but probably ridiculous, to fly to the opposite extreme -- to pick out the nearest rather than the most remote Real Basic Cause -- and blame the (alleged? anticipated?) hunger mainly on those damn truck drivers. "Once let the unions in, ma’am, and you’ll have no end of trouble!" At the Daily Telegraph that motto may seem suitable to pretty well any occasion, though they do not parade it too prominently in this case.

Mr. John Ging thinks like an attorney rather than a unionbuster, starting from "the clear legal responsibilities" of Tel Aviv. Clear enough, except that ‘responsibilities’ is not exactly the name of a cause. If Jewish statists were to be seized by an overmastering wish to meet their responsibilities as an Occupying Power, that psychological event, or more likely its stimulus, might make a presentable cause. The responsibilities as such do not make one, being only abstract entities that could effect nothing even if complied with in full.

Being an attorney, real or virtual, Mr. John Ging attaches a great deal of importance to legal standing. He takes for granted that truck drivers cannot be encumbered with obligations under international humanitarian law, not even when it sounds as if the immediate crisis could be resolved if they would simply deliver fuel at a financial loss to themselves or their employers. A more practically minded relief administrator might be presenting his begging bowl to the august International Community so as to be able to compensate the teamsters of Gaza and their bosses eventually.

Whichever particular Jewish statists it was that replied to Ging on International Humanitarian Law are almost laughably on a different level. "She hit me first" ("the crisis was being engineered by Hamas for propaganda purposes") is irrelevant juridically, and the announcement of partial compliance with one’s obligations ("[Israel] was allowing in some humanitarian supplies") only makes everything worse by recognition that some such obligations do exist, thus instantly raising the question of why full compliance should be refused. Possibly the Daily Telegraph received some account of the second point that it decided not to pass on to its customers. Everybody is free to guess that the pols of Tel Aviv do not consider fossil fuel a properly humanitarian commodity, since very few people die directly from the lack of it. That view may make a certain appeal to untutored common sense, but with international humanitarian law it has nothing much to do.

JC provided a quick summary of his own, though linked to the Telegraph’s:

The Israelis already have the Gaza Strip under military siege, carefully controlling what and who goes in and out of it. They have now cut off most fuel, and the United Nations has been forced to stop distributing food aid. This Israeli government action is an unvarnished war crime. It is known as collective punishment. There was already hunger and malnutrition among Palestinian children, which will now be worsened.

A blockade is not technically the same thing as a siege, of course, but never mind. JC thinks far more like a barrister than like a brigadier, so what matters is chiefly two very short phrases, "war crime" and "collective punishment." As with Ging, Esq., the practical side of the matter does not present itself to Prof. Cole first. It is interesting to find that one member of his peanut gallery does think more pragmatically:

I am also sure that if for example the European Community would send boats whith food to Gaza, the Israelis would not use force against them.

An airlift would be speedier than boats, and there are lots and lots of agenicies in the world, private as well as governmental, native as well as Western, that might mount at least the beginnings of one, but nevertheless, Anonymous@1937 does show definite signs of being more interested in fixing problems than in orating about them. [1]

_____
[1] A pity he defines his problems so vast as to be unfixable: "Not only Israel is to blame but also nearly everyone of us that does not fight these criminal governments." He means the régimes at Crawford, Tel Aviv and Cairo, certainly enough to be getting on with. The rest of "all the prowestern puppets and western governments" can wait till later, hopefully.

Unguided Fissiles

The gentry of Lynx, Badger, Iconoclastes LLC don’t often expose their trade secrets for inspection by the vulgar, but today is exceptional:

(The Aswat al Iraq English language version of this refers to "fissile bombs", which is a little hard to understand, possibly leading to people overlooking this. The type of bomb in Arabic is "inshitariyya" from a root meaning dividing or splitting, and it can only refer to cluster bombs. If it was an actual fissile bomb, they would have needed only one, and there would be no one there to report on it).


At New Soli they say "fissile bomb," evidently. Or possibly that was Ms. Malaprop.

Anyhow, the received Arabic for "cluster bomb" is qunbula ‘unqúdiyya. It is so well received that there is even an article thus titled in the East-of-Suez edition of the Wikipaedia.

25 April 2008

Big Management F-Words It Again

It appears , Mr. Bones, that the grand coalition of AEI and GOP and DOD have scarcely any notion what their local levies -- "Marvin the ARVN (the Iraq Organisation)" -- are up to out there in Peaceful Freedumbia:

The U.S. military (..) does not have an accurate tally of the number of Iraqi security forces who have been trained or who are present for duty, according to an oversight agency's analysis of Pentagon reports that was released Thursday.

After sixty-one (61) months of unrelentin’ and steel-claptrap-minded aggression and occupation, "no accurate tally" is a notable managerial accomplishment indeed, one that the High Mammonites of the Harvard Victory School ought to signalize in a suitable way. A public bonfire of revoked MBA diplomas might do, assuming that they retains copies of such things for their own records. [1] In a pinch, revocation without bonfire would suffice to satisfy me for one, although the good post-textual folk out in Televisionland really ought to be invited to enjoy the show as well, if possible. Those of ’em not besotted with Boy and Dynasty and Party and Ideology have not extracted any pleasure from "their" neocolonies for a long time now. I fear they simply lack the background to profit from the funny side of Rear-Colonel F. von Kagan and the other merry men of Kennebunkport-Crawford.

But before continuing in that vein, sir, let us shoot the messenger a little. The messenger above was ’Aswát al-‘Iráq, an organ which may be in mortal throes even without any additional shooting. It is no good sign that they have started to emulate the greedies of Slogger City and recycle material from the Los Angeles Times (in today’s particular case ) or from the Anglo-Arabian Press Trust instead of themselves providing invasion-language and Sunninterni journalism with fresh facts and original analysis from Tigris River City and all the diverse regions and well-fruited provinces of Peaceful Freedumbia.

If the voicesters are terrorized of getting themselves assassinated should they wander more than five or ten klicks from the International Zone, it would be very heartless to call upon them to do so. Far be that from us, Mr. Bones! If so, however, the signs of the times are looking gloomy for many others beside themselves -- fat Freddy of AEI, to begin with. Whatever the cause or reason, the fact is that VOI did not adopt the inglorious scavenger life style until perhaps a week or ten days ago. [2]

Meanwhile, back at Rancho Crawford,

The study was done by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. Reinforcing earlier findings, Special Inspector General Stuart W. Bowen Jr. and other officials said the data being provided to the U.S. military were inaccurate. "If you say you have 10 people ready to fight but three are injured or killed, you don't have 10 people ready, you have seven," said Kristine R. Belisle, a spokeswoman for the inspector general. "So it is a very misguided and misleading number." The study, which reviews Pentagon progress reports on Iraq, also notes that there is no way of knowing how many of the men who were trained remain in the force. As a result, the U.S. military lacks an assessment of training rates.

Aha! The voicesters passed over the minor detail that "their" own "countrymen" are accused of supplying the Occupyin’ Party with phony data that are [?] not what data ought to be. Very watan-nationalistic of them, I’m sure. The firm of Lynx, Badger, Cartoonoclastes ought to put them in for a gold star, second class. Myself, though, I’d have told it like it is and then editorialized a little about the Division of Labour. It is, by and large, GOP geniuses rather than Marvins the ARVN who come equipped with Harvard Victory School MBA’s, after all, so wouldn’t aggressions and semiconquests and occupations be conducted for Uncle Sam on a sounder and cost-efficienter basis if Big Party palefaces did the accountin’ jobs? [3]

But God knows best. Happy days.

_____
[1] I assume, admittedly without inquiry, that the archpriesthood by the Charles have managed to keep proper track of their shock troopers. Probably it is mainly when spendin’ other people’s trillions that the HVS QC systems tend to break down.


[2] Their fluency in the Language of Invasion has been declining gradually for a more extended period of time. Still, if they now have to hole up in the IZ and stand a seige, literal or virtual, perhaps they will have more opportunity to spiff up their Texan. Might they have been relying on some expat Brit to correct their copy who has fled in (unwarrantable) alarm at the prospect of a personal Saigon-helicopter moment? Though Teddie Tarjuman might equally well have switched to a different hotel lobby and taken a job with the slogger bozos at ten times the salary....

They may have started scavenging well before I noticed, because I would have sailed straight by this specimen, had I already looked at the Times.


[3] Not even worth hooting at is the objection that a sensible practical arrangement like my humble suggestion might somehow infringe one of the Four Pillars of Piffle, the sovereignty and independence and constitutionalism and democracy of the I.Z. neorégime.

Let us please attempt to be serious, ladies and gentlethugs!

The Spirit of Saladin

It was Dryden, not I, who decided to write Annus Mirabilis as a serious and lofty historical poem on what he regarded as the ‘successes of a most just and necessary War’. If, after that decision, he describes the enemy as

Vast bulks which little souls but ill supply,


then we have every right to tell that a nation of reasonable men, not to say men of courage and honour, are very ill-celebrated by the insinuation that their enemies are lubbers.

This kind of thing runs through all Dryden's attempts at the graver and more enthusiastic kinds of poetry, and it must be remembered that such attempts make up a large part of his work. The sin is so flagrant that I cannot understand how so cultivated a critic as Mr Eliot has failed to see the truth; which truth had now better be stated quite frankly. Dryden fails to be a satisfactory poet because being rather a boor, a gross, vulgar, provincial, misunderstanding mind, he yet constantly attempts those kinds of poetry which demand the cuor gentil. Like so many men of that age he is deeply influenced by the genuinely aristocratic and heroic poetry of France. He admires the world of the French tragedians -that exalted tableland where rhetoric and honour grow naturally out of the life lived and the culture inherited. We in England had had an aristocratic tradition of our own, to be sure; a tradition at once more sober and more tenderly romantic than the French, obeying a code of honour less dissociated from piety. The Duke and Duchess of Newcastle were perhaps its last exponents. But Dryden seems to know nothing of it. He and his audiences look to Versailles, and feel for it that pathetic yet unprofitable yearning which vulgarity so often feels for unattainable graces. But the yearning does not teach them the secret. Where their model was brilliant they are flashy; where the Cid was brave, Almanzar swaggers; refinements of amorous casuistry out of the heroic romances are aped by the loves of grooms and chambermaids. One is reminded of a modern oriental, who may have the blood of old paynim knighthoods in him, but who prefers to dress himself up as a cheap imitation of a European gentleman.



Ordinarily it would be unreasonable to demand chivalry over and above mere decency or respectability, Mr. Bones. The Third Estate triumphed a very long time ago, sir. Lord Mammon put down Zeus and Caesar both so many years ago that by now even the little friends of Eddie Burke have learned how to do the ‘unbought grace of life’ shtik fearlesly and shamelessly. Ordinarily calling General David Petraeus or Mr. Spencer Ackerman an "ass-kissing little chicken-shit" ’ would have to be accounted mere de gustibus stuff in this year of religionism 1429/2008 insofar as it may seem to be incompatible with the Spirit of Saladin. [1]

Materially, Mr. Ackerman’s apostasy from himself is so blatant it can only be treated seriously if it is treated as a bad joke. The badness cannot be smoothed away with the quibble that after all, he did not announce that he personally respects the most respected general officer of his generation. "Respectable" is a sort of semi-performative expression, Mr. Bones: if one wishes to be included out of the respecters that one mentions, one must make that point expressly. The ’asl, "default assumption," is that one corespects. [2]

Formally, one could make a case for the apostasy along Dr. Pangloss’s lines and Dale Carneigie’s, perhaps. Mr. Spencer Ackerman has learned to see good where before he did not: vos plaudite!. However only a wannabe biographer of Mr. Spencer Ackerman will much care about this happy news, and one suspects that the set in question is empty. [3]




____
[1] To regard such a goofball vivacity as an attempt at serious contribution to biography or Weltpolitik is another question. So considered, the difficulty is entirely intellectual rather than ethical or sentimental: the biographical goof does not know enough about her victim to make such a judgment, and the Weltpolitik goof errs in drawing the line properly between gossip and her announced business. The doin’s of the Doctor General -- or the l*b*r*l scribbler. or the rigorously nonsectarian Sunni-lover, or anybody else in politics and politics criticism -- will be neither better nor worse because of the motives that produced them.

The only exception to that canon that I can think of, Mr. Bones, would be if such doings were presented as typical of this or that broader class of public actors and operatives. That exception has no application to the present case. Mr. Ackerman was not arguing (on Pass One) that the Petraean ambition and the alleged Petraean sycophantism are precisely the commonest faults of AEI and GOP and DOD, just the way such folks naturally would run off the rails. Nor do the Mu’ámara Junction gentry take Mr. Ackerman’s change of heart or coat or whatever as but one example out of thousands that might be adduced.

I daresay the MJ gentry could do that if they chose, but they are not at all likely to so chose, because the holy Homeland does not much interest them in the first place, not compared to the fate of the Sunnintern. When they do on occasion take cognisance of Yank affairs, they run to a facile populism that would not be edified by the suggestion that ambition and sycophancy are Jonathan’s characteristic sins. Alio modo: the staff and management and peanut gallery of Lynx, Badger, Cartoonoclastes LLC are not at all likely to rave against the ass-kissing chickenshit of all those voters who, as Mr. Gallup and King Zog and the rest of the pack assure us, used to support the aggression of 20 March 2003 but have since changed their hearts or minds or coats or whatever.


[2] Anybody who insists on "just the facts, Ma’am" would have to allow that Dr. Gen. Petraeus of Princeton and Crawford and West Point wins in the Most Respected General Officer category a fortiori, him bein’ the only known neo-Hannibal as far as Televisionland and the electorate are concerned. The former Adm. Fallon’s name recognition, for instance, or the former Gen. Abizaid’s, must be about on a par with that of Marie of Roumania.

However, this is not what S. A. meant. We were intended to understand that the Doctor General is well though of at the Tanks of Thought and amongst the classes that deploy PowerPoint® rather than brains to keep their ears apart.


[3] Non-goofs will notice that the culprit disagrees with the Dr. Gen., and if they are non-goofs who happen to disapprove of aggressions and occupations, they should find Mr. Spencer Ackerman at least as uncongenial as D. Hannibal Petraeus. Unfortunately S.A. is in fact typical of an important slice of opinion in America’s party, those Democrats who want to shake off the albatross of Peaceful Freedumbia only so as better to wage a Long War against Global Tourism. The implication is that although the bushogenic quagmire long since reached the point where it is beyond repair, next time things will go much more cheerfully with Sec. of War Albright (or equivalent) in charge rather than GOP geniuses and Harvard Victory School MBA’s. There is no reason I know of to suppose that Mr. Spencer Ackerman has ever changed his mind (or whatever) about that preference, and every reason to consider it far more significant that the respectability of an individual D. H. Petraeus.

Mr. Ackerman may have misunderstood where the Dr. Gen. actually stands, however. Chickenhawk control of the military makes it difficult to discern what Uncle Sam’s violence pros really think before they retire and tell us how everybody else screwed up in their memoirs. Will D. Hannibal really "oversee" "battlefield victories" in such a way as to interfere with the Long War against Global Tourism? Mr. Ackerman quotes that language from a Chiarelli groupie as a thing to be agreed to, but should we be well advised to agree, Mr. Bones? I have no idea worth mentioning on the subject. Do you?

Happy days.

24 April 2008

"The Naked Public Square"


Wherein the International Zone neorégime goes after the real root causes of things:

Operations room at the Iraqi Ministry of Interior (MOI) issued on Wednesday instructions to remove all pictures and partisan or belief slogans from all Basra public places, streets, and squares, said a media source from Basra police. "Today, and depending on these instructions, security forces started a campaign to remove all those pictures and slogans from the city's center and suburbs, until Basra gate (12 km northern the city)," the source told Aswat al-Iraq – Voices of Iraq – (VOI) on condition of anonymity. He underlined that this phenomenon will be completely eliminated.

Will Presbyter Neuhaus be complaining about this outrage? Probably not. Just as those other friends of the Boy-’n’-Party aggression who do business as The National Rifle Association are unlikely to be pestering’ their Congresscritters about the parallel measure announced by Hannibal II of Da‘wa:

"MOI also stressed arresting bullets shooters, regardless of their official or unofficial positions, and their reasons, even if it was for private occasions," he added.

23 April 2008

"mook-TAH'-duh al SAH'-dur"

US commander hopes al-Sadr will stop attacks
Associated Press - April 23, 2008 10:23 AM ET

BAGHDAD (AP) - A U.S. commander in Iraq is hoping a top Shiite cleric will use his influence to stop attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces.

Clashes have spread to the outskirts of Baghdad. [huh?]

The U.S. military says 21 suspected gunman were killed in Shiite militia strongholds. Iraqi officials say 15 civilians are among the dead.

Lieutenant General Lloyd Austin is not directly attributing violence to Mutqada al-Sadr's (mook-TAH'-duh al SAH'-durz) followers. But the number-two U.S. commander in Iraq does acknowledge that the radical Shiite cleric could stop the attacks. Al-Sadr threatened over the weekend to unleash his Mahdi Army militia in an "open war," if the Iraqi government crackdown persists.


(( Never any harm in hopin’ . . . . ))

22 April 2008

The CORRECT Convergence of Qommies and Crawfordites

Miss Sappy’s fan club [1] would fare better if they always stuck together as they chance to do this morning, though mutual admiration festivals and exclamation points might be dispensed with:

Kudos to James Glanz and Alissa Rubin of the NYT for getting the story! They point out that the US and Iran are on the same side in southern Iraq, both fearful of the nativist Sadr movement. This correct narrative is completely the opposite of what Americans have been spoon fed on television and by Bush / Pentagon spokesmen. I had pointed out this Bush- Iran convergence last week and also pointed out that US intelligence analysis admits it.

Now when the World’s Greatest Area Student informs one that the Sadr "movement" is "nativist," Mr. Bones, one dare not be so Philistine as to doubt or contradict, but it should be safe enough to wonder what Himself understands nativism to entail in the peculiar conditions of GOP-infested Mesopotamia. Today’s awardees over at the New York Times Company did not use that word, [2] and I do not off-hand recall anybody else conventional using it either.

If the Reverend Señorito was a "nativist" in our holy Homeland sense, he would, in the absence of a suitable "Mayflower," claim pure Sumerian descent or, maybe even better, claim that his ancestors inherited the land after the battle of al-Qádisiyya in the year of religionism 0014/0636. Sure enough, the latter is more or less what he does claim. And lo, his claim is widely acknowedged! Hath not Dr. Gen. Petraeus of Princeton and West Point condescended to refer to the lad as "Sayyid"? (Also Party Proconsul Crockerius, just the other day.)

This is well enough, and after a fashion it explains why the neo-Májús should not much care for him and his "movement." Unfortunately it is most unlikely to be what Himself means.

Suppose we start from Mr. Glanz and Ms. Rubin, who have written at greater length in the immediate vicinity. Unfortunately they do not describe Master Muqtadae’s character flaws directly, they only indicate certain policies of alien aggressors and collaborationist locals which they news-analyze the Sadr Tendency to be standing in the way of:

[T]he geopolitical calculus ... has to do with what kind of Shiite government they want in control: (...) [t]he Supreme Council advocates a large, semiautonomous region in the south, similar to Kurdistan in the north, made up of the nine southern provinces. And because many of the council’s leaders lived in exile in Iran during the rule of Saddam Hussein, Iran has political ties to the group. Coupled with Iran’s shared Shiite heritage, such a region would amplify Iran’s influence over the oil-rich area. (...) [AEI-GOP-DOD] have treated the Supreme Council as an ally from the beginning of the fight against Mr. Hussein. Its members were guaranteed safe passage when they returned from Iran and were made charter members of Iraq’s first governing body after the American-led invasion toppled Mr. Hussein’s regime. Since then, the United States has backed the Iraqi government, which in turn relies on the Supreme Council to stay in power in the country’s parliamentary system.

Mr. Glanz and Ms. Rubin are not very good at the news analysis racket, I fear, all kudos from Ann Arbour to the contrary notwithstanding. The rigmarole just quoted signally fails to explain what the AEI-GOP-DOD coalition of the willful sees in the Supreme Hakeems. I skipped the part where "one [militant Republican] general said, ‘They aren’t trying to kill us’ ” -- which is obviously no positive description of the allies of Baní Crawford. There are still quite a number of parties and factions and "movements" in the world that do not literally shoot at agents and operatives of AEI and GOP and DOD, despite all the ingenious steps that the latter have taken to minimize the number and maximize that of the shootists.

In addition, G&R give the worse than questionable impression that down at the ranch the cowpokers still like the Supremes for the same (unexplained) reasons that applied in 2002. That mistake underestimates Monsignore ‘Abd al-‘Azíz al-Hakím's flair for sucking up to the Occupyin’ Party, a practical art in which AAH stands second only to the redoubtable M. le Docteur. A. Tchélabí himself. [3] Naturally outsiders cannot know exactly how Chalabí and al-Hakím softsoaped their marks whilst talking to GOP geniuses behind closed doors, but any news analysis that is aware the softsoapin’ process goes on beats a news analysis that is unaware.

The World’s Greatest Area Student briefly news-analyzes as follows:

... Iran supports al-Hakim's ISCI in its bid to create a Shiite superprovince in Iraq's south. I've never been able to discover what the Iranians feel about this and had wondered if they weren't at least a little bit worried about a soft partition of Iraq because of its implications for Iranian Kurdistan, which might become restive and seek to join Iraqi Kurdistan. But it is plausible that Tehran might risk this scenario in order to gain a permanent regional ally in the form of the Shiite Regional Government in southern Iraq.

(If JC, the WGAS Himself, cannot penetrate the enigma of the evil Qommies, perhaps mere mortals should leave it alone altogether?)

But seriously, what would be less surprising than for a Power to intervene abroad on some principle that would be ruinous if applied to Herself? Why, Prof. Cole’s own holy Homeland behaves like that frequently enough, after all!

The crux of the matter, I take it, is that when one really is a Power, one can make quite sure that no such impertinent application comes to pass. Do the evil Qommies qualify as a proper Power, then? Miss Sappy and most of her devotees certainly talk at the moment as if they do qualify, as for instance "amplify Iran’s influence over the oil-rich area" already adduced. The WGAS has been a little more cautious, notably when he was worried that AEI and GOP and DOD were totterin’ right on the brink of "Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" with J. Sidney McCain. In those phases, the WGAS has pooh-poohed both the present influence and the projected amplification. This morning Himself is in the manic phase, however, and accordingly we hear "risk this scenario in order to gain a permanent regional ally." [4]


____
[1] The aiders and abetters of sapientia conventionalis.


[2] It would have been slightly remarkable if they had. There are limits to Aunt Nitsy’s willingness to sound like a certified organ of Tertiary Educationalism rather than a humble corporate newspaper.


[3] Most likely Glanz and Rubin are only trying to hornswoggle their corporation’s customers -- and who knows? maybe its editors also -- into thinking that they have been close students of native politics in Peaceful Freedumbia all along. Plainly they have not.


[4] Remember, Mr. Bones, that wunnerful though it may be, Area Studies is only Area Studies. It is not Pol. Sci.

That means, sir, that you are not to go carping at the WGAS merely because Himself is no Niccolò Machiavelli and does not pause to wonder whether the evil Qommies might not find it even more attractive to become best international buddy to a Twelver neorégime that controls a good deal more than eight or ten eighteenths of the former Iraq -- one possibly controlling even Free Kúrdestán itself and thus obviating the WGAS’s objection on that score. The last bit is almost inconceivable, but even without it, to control the controllers of 5/6ths of the whole loaf rather than only 1/2 of it, how about that? On the other hand, a Ja‘farí Republic of Iraq with as much petroleum and as few nawásib as possible must have charms as well.

(( It occurs to me quâ sub-Machiavellian, Mr. Bones, that the Glanz-Rubin misanalysis might profitably be reversed at one point, making the evil Qommies rather than the cowpoker vigilantes the victims of inertia and policy stagnation. To be sure, one has "never been able to discover what the Iranians feel," but judging from how they act, which can never be totally concealed, does it not look a little as if they are the party that still likes the Supreme Hakeems for no more compelling reason that they used to like them years ago? But God knows best. ))

21 April 2008

Au moins, il est différent

Well, and what have we here, Mr. Bones?

Two days ago, I [ ‘Abbás b. al-Walíd b. Jaháma b. Hawázin al-Na‘ímí ] watched an al-Khoei family member [Jawád b. X b. Muhsin (... b. al-Husayn b. ‘Alí b. ’Abí Tálib ... b. Quraysh) al-Khú’í] on al-Arabiya, he said that Muwaffaq al-Rubiaye came to talk to him about reopening the case, he seemed a little irritated [to be involved at all]. First he said that al-Khoei's case was never closed in the first place so that is shall be reopened, which directly contradicts what Rasim al-Marwani, a Sadrist cultural advisor, who repeatedly said that al-Khoei family themselves had "dropped the case which was setted in good will." And second he said that too many people have used al-Khoei's murder as political leverage, which is of course a direct jab at Ibrahim al-Jaffari's stint as PM in 2005 during which he ignored the murder due to the backing of the Sadrists which directly gave him the PM position, but he could have also been referring to this recent request by al-Rubaiye, especially as he didn't really seem to be supportive of it and seemed rather annoyed at all of them.

Another al-Khoei family member, Hayder al-Khoei, writes in his blog "Eye Raki" about this recent development, expecting an ominous showdown (of course, being a member of al-Khoei family it's understandable for Mr. Eye Raki not to be really objective about anything involving the man who killed his father, that is if he is indeed Hayder the son of Sayyid Majid, but re-reading Eye Raki's blog with this fact in mind the guy seems to be incredibly reasonable and objective about Iraq in general, and that is damn impressive considering his family is an extremely respected religious family which is expected to be subjective, to say the least, he is much better than other Iraqi Shi'i (and Sunni) blogs.


The blogmonger who decides to call her playpen "Eject Iraqi KKK" (rather than, for example, "Just World News") and then posts an item called "Government Aims for Muqtada’s Balls" (rather than, for example, "Fear and violence: Lessons from John Woolman" ) cannot be all bad, Mr. Bones. At least she must possess that precious "sense of measure" that M. Ourousoff used to recommend to me back in prep school. She understands that she will not be imposing her own pet druthers urbi et orbi any time soon.

The exact nature of the pet druthers in question is more difficult to establish than to commend: who belongs to the Klu Klux Klan’s branch in Peaceful Freedumbia? Where is their ejector wannabe coming from, over and above the Royal Hashimí Transjordan that she admitted to, or pretended at, in her autoblurb? A quick glance around the joint reveals

Iraq is fucked up, here's why, I must say that Patrick Cockburn is go(o)d.


That's in the PREVIOUS POST dated 18 Rabí‘ al-’Awwal 1429 intitulated "Iraq is fucked up and here's why I must say" [presumably the saying was, on that occasion, that Mr. Cockburn is not only virtuous and meritorious but immortal and possibly omnipotent]. Those expletives get boring fast, yet once again, anybody who wants to burn incense to that kind of PC cannot be all bad. On the other hand, Ms. Ejectrix (let us dub the Cockburn groupie provisionally) is not any more all good than is her Brit guru. She does not care to expose herself to being contradicted, for one thing. [1]

Her pal "Eye Raki" is simply not in the same class. Sayyid Haydar b. Majíd b. Muhsin b. ... b. Quraysh must have intended that monnicker as some sort of joke, but who can make out what joke it was supposed to be? Something about washing the proverbial beam out of one’s eye with brandy, perhaps? "Does not parse, does not construe." Plus M. Raki is well off the right edge of the earth, Mr. Bones. Take a look at his list of IRAQI BLOGS, which is as impeccably sectarian as the opinion columns of the Wall Street Jingo: nobody is goin’ to develop a taste for Prof. Cole or Cartoonoclastes or "Riverbend" if he can prevent it! [2]

Ms. Ejectrix herself is no foul-mouthed variation on the rigorously impartial Sunni-lovers of Mu’ámara Junction, she seems more a cross between "Ibn Warráq" and Henry Louis Mencken, to judge by her "monkeybrains" and her "boneheaded supernatural take [on] the world." Voicì:

Everybody in the government, including the Sunnis, and most recently, Iran, have supported the government against Muqtada, who has came back to Najaf ; recent news items talk about Basra breathing a little air after months of religious monkeybrains. So why is this happening all of a sudden, I don't want to get my hopes up as the Badrists/Iraqi Government/and even the Amreekan have played forbidden detente football with Muqtada for years now, so what has suddenly prompted this sudden rush to crush him? (Amreekans still seem reluctant about it.)[2]

Nobody knows for sure, maybe they were encouraged by Muqtada's declaration to disappear for a while and focus on his college education, but the obvious reason is the municipal council elections, which sits as a pragmatic selfish explanation that sits in line with what has been happening in Iraq until this point, however, even if that is indeed true, I do wish that the Sadrists are destroyed in the long run and are not as powerful as everyone expected them to be, first, having one militia around is better than two, and second, the Badrists, as evil as they are, seem to be more negotiable than Qrazy Qaddo and his boneheaded supernatural take of the world, the only people who expressed sympathy were either opportunists who calculated so as to slide with the more populist Sadrists to advance their own careers such as Ibrahim "Lazga" Jaffari [3] and Ahmed "Slimesnake" Chalabi, or Ba'athis who really have no love for them but use them to prove that their resistance is pan-Iraqi [4], the Sadrists have completely destroyed their own nationalistic credentials in their post-2006 killing spree, before which only Badr, with its covert sneaky assassinations, were being pointed at as the extremist Shi'i.


But then the rest of it -- which I shan’t swipe, look at the trouble Dr. Tchélabí got himself into by swindlin’ Royal Hashemite Transjordanians! -- would pass for ordinary Sunninterní rah-rah-rah in isolation -- "Abu Deraa is back, and now it’s to be 'No more Mr. Nice Guy'!"

Oh, well. God knows best. Allow me to wish thee happy days, O Bones!


____
[1] Perhaps that foible mostly only proves her a true blue sea-might Levantine? Perhaps.


[2] Did she scribble that before Miss Condoleeezzza went to New Baghdád to hold Núrí Kamál's hand, like Thetis with Achilles? Or does Ms. Ejectrix maybe think the nature of that human event was not what the invasion-language press makes it out?


[3] Possibly "lazija a (lazaj, luzúj) "to be sticky, ropey, gluey, viscid; to stick, cling, get stuck (bi- to)" at H3 864a. And possibly something else altogether.


[4] Possibly a (hostile, bless her heart!) student of Dr. Cartoonoclastes and Ms. Lynx. And possibly not.

20 April 2008

"poisonous atmosphere of treachery and paranoia"

Clerics and politicians speak in hushed tones about the names drawn up for assassination. Guards stand outside their compounds clutching assault rifles, and handguns rest on desks. No one can be trusted. All sides fear that dark times are coming to Najaf, the spiritual capital of Iraq's Shiite Muslims. "The situation is mysterious," said Sheik Ali Najafi, the son and confidant of Grand Ayatollah Bashir Hussain Najafi, one of the four senior most Shiite clerics in Iraq, who guide the country's majority faith and counsel its politicians. Like elder statesmen, the four have found themselves ensnared in the conflict between the Shiite-led Iraqi government and an upstart young cleric, son of a revered grand ayatollah: Muqtada Sadr.

The poisonous atmosphere of treachery and paranoia has consequences far beyond the alleyways of this ancient shrine city.


Isn’t that the sort of purple passage that the late M. Eduard Sa‘íd of Columbia would classify as orientalisme? "Poisonous atmosphere of treachery and paranoia," for gosh sakes! Though to be sure anybody who lacks ... lemme see, ... who lacks a "grand theory of civil war promotion" [1] is likely to be as much in the dark as thee and me are, Mr. Bones.

The good news is that however literarily deplorable, poisonous atmospheres of intrigue have been able to produce an invasion-language news story about Peaceful Freedumbia not datelined from the International Zone. Mr. Parker of the Los Angeles Times must have actually travelled down to the Bible Belt to have a look first hand. Happily, he follows that woozy incipit up with a caption for wooze-impaired grown-ups:

Najaf may hold the key to Iraq's stability; if it descends into violence, the entire Shiite south will almost certainly follow suit. U.S. forces will be stretched, the chances of a troop drawdown diminished. The Shiite parties involved will probably look to Iran to broker an end to the crisis. And chances for real political process will be on hold.


What could be adultier, higher and drier, than that semicolon after ‘stability’? As political analysis, though, I wonder: the entire Shiite south did not go bananas in 2004 when CIA asset ‘Alláwí took a whack at the Rev. Muqtadae, and I don’t instantly see why it should do so now that poor M. al-Málikí has stepped up to the plate. Perhaps we had better extract what there is of Mr. Parker that rises above the cartoonic and touristic levels:

(...) [A] Salah Obeidi, Sadr's official spokesman ... [said] "We are afraid the situation from now till October won't be stable for the Sadrists" (...)

[B] "Muqtada would covet the kind of Shiites Najaf holds," said Vali Nasr "Sadr is popular politically, the grand ayatollahs religiously. There is a tense standoff between them. They both hold power and popularity, and that is what makes the situation so tense and volatile." Najaf's merchant elite and clergy have long viewed Sadr as a rabble rouser, able to mobilize the Shiite slums and rural masses for violence. (...)

[C] Three days into the Basra campaign, Grand Ayatollah Najafi issued a fatwa, or religious opinion or edict, that declared the Iraqi government as the only force in the country with the right to bear arms. His son [said] "We see this as a positive improvement. . . . The people want the government to control the streets and the law to be enforced. No other groups." (...)

[D] An influential cleric who is knowledgeable about talks between the Sadr movement and the grand ayatollahs described the situation in bleak terms: the government is weak, and Sadr aides now acknowledge privately that they have lost control of members who are receiving support from Iran. "There are groups in the Mahdi Army who are kidnapping, killing and stealing. They don't listen to Muqtada. They are openly operating with Iranian interests. ... In the beginning, it was Arab countries playing a negative role. Now after Qaeda has fallen, it is Iran. Iran wants to control Iraq, and change the hawza from Najaf to Qom." (...)


The Rev. Dr. Influential, who "asked that his name not be used because he feared assassination," is obviously Mr. Parker’s heavy hitter. He possesses a tolerably grand theory of civil war promotion, though Qom v. Najaf is not the sort of civil war that Mu’ámariya Junction gentry and the wider Sunní International are likely to want to burble about much, rigorous nonsectarians that they are. As to the absolute merits, can Mr. Parker have made a mistake about degrees of influentiality amongst the beards and turbans? The strategy that Rev. Influential imputes to the evil Qommies borders on the dotty, [2] although to be sure the Islamic Republic is not the best-run political railroad in the world, and perhaps one of the squid’s tentacles may indeed be playing such a game. [3]

The secondary theme of this pudding (after "Eeek, the evil Qommies must be behind it somewhere!") is that Master Muqtadae and his juvenile delinquents are bad for business. Like him or not, Lord Mammon has a better nose for reality than high-flying First Estate champions do, so there is much more likely to be at least a little something to that.


_____
[1] The ML-on-ML backbite may be found over in that left column that we never attended to before, unaware that that it is an annotated pornography of Levantine events.


[2] The primâ facie and ẓáhir undotty course would be for the evil Qommies to take over the former Iraq through Hakeems and Supremes. What kind of "control" will they ever have if their preferred instruments are rogue elements of the Muqtadáwiyya?


[3] I should guess, admittedly on the basis of very little, that Mr. Parker overestimates the high-mindedness of the evil Qommies, who do not seem to be any keener to make spiritual conquests than worldly ones. Or to say the same thing bottom-up: can even ‘Alí Cardinal Khamene’í seriously suppose that if the once takes over the Learned Hawza at Noble Najaf, he will have not much trouble with the rest of the former Iraq?

Holy Hibernia comes to mind again, where the Sassenachs expected the R.C. clergy to do much more for them by way of turning Paddy’s superstitions of divinity into quietism and obedience in politics than ever got done. More of M. Sa‘íd's orientalisme that was; it amused the WASP God Folk to exaggerate Paddy’s quaint backwardness.

Sons of Yorktown

The British-trained Iraqi Army's attempt to retake Basra from militiamen was an "unmitigated disaster at every level", British commanders have disclosed. Senior sources have said that the mission was undermined by incompetent officers and untrained troops who were sent into battle with inadequate supplies of food, water and ammunition. They said the failure had delayed the British withdrawal by "many months". Their comments came as the Iraqi army, this time directly supported by American and British forces, began a second operation in Basra in an attempt to find insurgent weapons caches.

Right-wing navel-gazing is always funnier when somebody else’s wingnuts are doing it, Mr. Bones. Imagine a parallel universe in which Marvin the ARVN (the Iraq Organisation) had indeed been produced by Airstrip One single-handed. After that, sir, you may imagine this universe’s Dr. Gen. Petraeus of Princeton and West Point reactin’ to the Torygraph’s latest scoop , for of course it was by trainin’ Marvin that the great white hope of Grant’s Party got launched on its present trajectory in the first place.

As ever, plucky little Marvin is a swell guy personally, once you get to train him. The cock-up is not Marvin’s fault. The real trouble was located much higher up the Great Chain:

Gen Mohan Furayji, the Iraqi commander who was in charge of troops during the operation, was described by a senior British staff officer as a 'dangerous lunatic' who 'ignored' advice. The British officer, who is based at the coalition headquarters at Basra Air Station, said that the decision to allow Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister of Iraq, to run the operation had been a "disaster which felt as though an amateur was in charge".

That’s a good beginning, but incompetence and dereliction are not tracked to the very end of the chain. Colonel Carp (let’s call him) did not reveal to the Torygraphists the name of the person who disastrously decided to let poor M. al-Málikí run the show [1] as if he was President of the Council of Ministers of a sovereign/independent/constitutional/democratic neorégime almost as good as South Vietnam. More to the violence-professional point, as if N. (J.) K. al-Málikí was Hannibal come again.

But not so fast: do the Torygraphists and their Carp know what they are going on about? Look at this bit, Mr. Bones:

More than 15,000 Iraqi troops were ordered to seize control of the city last month following an uprising by the Mehdi Army , the powerful militia group which is largely trained and financed by Iran. President George W Bush described the battle for Basra as a 'defining moment' for Iraq, while British officials at the time praised the professionalism of the Iraqi army. However, the operation ended in a stalemate, with the Iraqi government agreeing to a ceasefire.

Now I was not there personally either to tell you precisely what did not happen, Mr. Bones, but the Rancho Crawford cowpokers dispensed with the customary Reichstag fire this time, no? Didn’t they -- quite remarkably, really -- omit to solicit belief that there had been any "uprising by the Mehdi Army"? When Little Brother was settin’ forth a preliminary rationale for the latest twist in the Big Party’s aggression policy -- at that press event with the Australian PM, 28 March 2008 -- did he not in effect repose himself upon St. Max Weber and the need for poor M. al-Málikí to look more like a violence monopolist in places like Basra? I speak of chunks of the former Iraq of which NKM had never been weberianly in control in the first place that anybody should uprise against him. [2]

Carp's rhetoric does possess a certain charm for anybody who basically sides with the Rev. Señorito rather than with the paleface invasionites from Mars and Airstrip One:

"There were literally thousands of troops arriving in Basra from all over Iraq. But they had no idea why they were there or what they were supposed to do. It was madness and to cap it all they had insufficient supplies of food, water and ammunition. One of the newly formed brigades was ordered into battle and suffered around 1,200 desertions within the first couple of hours - it was painful to watch. ((Was Carp ‘literally’ present to watch and ache, then?)) They had to be pulled out because they were a busted flush. The Iraqi police were next to useless. There were supposed to be 1,300 ready to deploy into the city, but they refused to do so. The situation deteriorated to the extent where we [the British Army] were forced to stage a major resupply operation in order to stave off disaster.

"The net effect of all of this is that the British Army will be forced to remain here for many months longer."

There are a number of oddities in that passage, not the least being how the alleged net effect was computed. (Why shouldn’t the Redcoat Folk scuttle immediately?) But that type of calculation is outside Colonel Carp’s remit, and outside the scope of his eye’s witness. When he claims that he himself supplied Marvin the ARVN with bullets and bread and water, we may take his word, but beyond that, I dunno. Even as regards the logistics of the Second Muqtadan War, I am puzzled why poor M. al-Málikí, who does not mind calling in AEI-GOP-DOD air strikes against his nominal subjects, could not simply have let leaderless Marvin live off the country, or rather, off the city. Basra was, after all, in enemy hands and that was not a recent development. Ammunition might be tricky to loot, though Peaceful Freedumbia does often seem the Utopia of the NRA, but surely food and water might have been requisitioned.

There is no call for thee and me to play Alexander and Gustavus Adolphus with poor M. al-Málikí and criticise Col. Carp in detail about violence-pro questions. After all, we still do not know (1) who started the Second Muqtadan War, (2) who won it, and (3) what happened in between. There is no reason to suppose the Torygraphists are better informed.

Meanwhile over in a parallel universe where things work out better for invasionism,

The Sunday Telegraph has also learnt that British commanders had devised a plan for Gen Mohan. The plan came with the caveat that it should not be started until mid-July because Iraqi troops were not ready. But the officer said that the Iraqi general had ignored the advice. He said that a British liaison team was sent to the Iraqi army headquarters during the battle. "They were greeted by a group of Iraqi generals sitting around a large desk, shouting into their mobiles without a map in sight. Chaos ruled."

If that quotation also comes from Colonel Carp, we may flush his "uprising by the Mehdi Army" straight down the toilet. His crystal ball will have been preprogrammed for that sighting to happen at the beginning of July, obviously.

Most mysterious of all is why the Torygraph should want to print such stuff. If there had been an attempt to blame it all on New Labour, one would know in a flash what is going on. But they don’t. God knows best. Happy days!

_____
[1] Could the misdecider have been D. Hannibal Petrolaeus himself? Not impossible, yet not likely: the Dr. General has emitted noises in public that suggest he would have preferred to leave Master Muqtadae and his juvenile delinquents alone if possible. As sheer guesswork, I can disclose that the Second Muqtadan War was poor M. al-Málikí's own idea that was never mentioned to his Big Management Party minders because he was aware they’d tell him to forget it. The Third Muqtadan War, which rages at the moment, will also not have been DHP’s idea -- which raises the interesting question of whose idea it is. Like "Zal" before him, Khalílzád Pasha, "David" has lost his lease on Little Brother’s brain. Either some person or persons unknown have acquired the lease, or the premises are bein’ left vacant -- that is to say, Little Brother reckons at this point that He does not require anythin’ fancier than "Stay the course!" to bridge the interval until J. Sidney McCain takes the helm. We shall see.


[2]
"John, any government that presumes to represent the majority of people must confront criminal elements or people who think they can live outside the law. And that's what's taking place in Basra and in other parts of Iraq. I would say this is a defining moment in the history of a free Iraq. There have been other defining moments up to now, but this is a defining moment, as well. The decision to move troops -- Iraqi troops into Basra talks about Prime Minister Maliki's leadership. And one of the early questions I had to the Prime Minister was would he be willing to confront criminal elements, whether they be Shia or Sunni? Would he, in representing people who want to live in peace, be willing to use force necessary to bring to justice those who take advantage of a vacuum, or those who murder the innocent? And his answer was, yes, sir, I will. And I said, well, you'll have our support if that's the case, if you believe in even-handed justice. And his decision to move into Basra shows even-handed justice, shows he's willing to go after those who believe they're outside the law."

Do you spot any uprising by the JAM in that dungheap, Mr. Bones? I sure can’t.

19 April 2008

That Sure Explains That

The White House says it shares the view that Iraq must shoulder more of the costs, and insists that Iraq is already beginning to do so. But the administration continues to dismiss criticism of its spending.

“Fighting terrorism and taking care of our veterans is not inexpensive,” the budget director, Jim Nussle, wrote in a letter this week. “We acknowledge that. However the economy also benefits when terrorist attacks are prevented and we doubt any critics of the level of spending take that into account.”

J. Sidney McCain Meets Al Kayduh

You must recall, Mr. Bones, at your advanced and immortal age, that before the human race acquired GOP geniuses and HVS MBA’s to spare less evolved monkeys the difficulties and tedium of policy making, the future was widely regarded as unpredictable. Monkeys who are scared and worried tend to make jokes, and accordingly there used to exist specifically mellontic jokes, like "Predictions are tricky, especially when they are about the future." Ha, ha.

The vast saga of Peaceful Freedumbia from well before March 2003 illustrates how totally obsolete the mindset underlying that jest has become. Nowadays the future has become a great deal better known than the past, and also less subject to change. St. George Orwell notoriously had a vision of how the likes of AEI and GOP and DOD would deal with res actae once they had become empowered and emboldened enough to do so. He did not, however, stress the other side of the medal, the res acturae side. Readers of visionary fiction might have felt overstuffed if he had, because as Big Brother was altering the past with her right hand, her other right hand was busy protesting that the past remained quite as immutable as Enthusiam and Superstition have traditionally supposed. "We have always been at war with Eastasia" is, I believe, more or less what not uneducated persons retain on this curious topic after forgetting most of the details of 1984. The future as such hardly came into the Orwellian narrative at all, though obviously it was bound to be perfectly dreadful.

"That was then, this is now." (That baloney, by the way, appears to be the Greater Texan translation of Our Ford's "History is bunk." Both O.F. and His apostle Aldous have been relegated to the bunker by Niederdümmung and the wombscholarship movement. Oh, well, "Change and decay in all around....") At the moment, then, [04/19/2008 03:07AM] we still have Little Brother, George XLIII Bush of the house of Kennebunkport-Crawford, in charge of our planet, Harvard Victory School Big Management is never far to seek, Peaceful Freedumbia has been petraeomorphed into almost the Garden of Eden again. Et cetera. [1] What was it Roebuck keeps saying chez Arnold? "I ask you whether, the world over or in past history, there is anything like it? Nothing. I pray that our unrivalled happiness may last."

Now should our even more unrivalled present happiness, not without that of the former Iraq, in fact last, Mr. Bones, they must necessarily last into the future. (You certainly cannot deny that, sir. I defy you to attempt it!) And as I have been preluding, it is a new and different kind of future that we have nowadays, one much more decent and stable than our ancestors ever dreamed of, even so recent an ancestor as St. George Orwell. Thus we arrive at our President-Presumptive, J. Sidney McCain, and his views on conquest and occupation policy:

“Al Qaeda is on the run, but they’re not defeated” is his standard line on how things are going in Iraq. When chiding the Democrats for wanting to withdraw troops, he has been known to warn that “Al Qaeda will then have won.” In an attack this winter on Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the Democratic front-runner, Mr. McCain went further, warning that if American forces withdrew, Al Qaeda would be “taking a country.” Critics say that in framing the war that way at rallies or in sound bites, Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, is oversimplifying the hydra-headed nature of the insurgency in Iraq in a way that exploits the emotions that have been aroused by the name “Al Qaeda” since the Sept. 11 attacks.


Aunt Nitsy’s scribblers keyboarded that to ‘chide’ J. Sidney for scarcely knowin’ al-Qá‘ida from K-Mart. A harmless pass-time, though unlikely to do anybody much good, and JSM least of all.[2] It is more useful to give that data point a nudge or two so it fits in the 1984 mold: "Extremist Republicans are always goin’ta be at war with Al Kayduh." (Poor Al!) Alternatively, "Al Kayduh will always be on the run, but he will never be defeated" and, much more cheerfully, "Mr. Kayduh will never take a country, nor will he ever have (definitively) won." The last version of the fortune cookie may be a tad too cheerful, though, because (popular support for) the Kiddie Krusade would collapse in a flash if the kiddies (or their dupes) ever started makin’ realistic risk assessments. [3] So the fact that Al Kayduh’s prospects of victory are zero is really bad news, not good, for Boy and Dynasty and Party and Ideology. Regardless of goodness or badness, it is news that requires to be suppressed as much as possible for the convenience of Big Management, who find themselves in the spiritual position of aspirin vendors: it goes without saying that in some sense they wish there were more headaches around. [4]

* * *

J. Sidney’s cerebrations about Peaceful Freedumbia (and ’most everythin’ else) are not worth making fun of, so let us make fun of a hired hand’s instead:

Randy Scheunemann, Mr. McCain’s senior foreign policy adviser, said during a recent conference call with reporters that in the event of an American pullout, “you might not necessarily see a single entity taking charge.” But such a withdrawal could empower Shiite militias in the south and Kurds in the north, leaving Al Qaeda “free to try to impose its will” and lead to increased sectarian violence that “would be very likely to draw neighbors into the conflict,” he said.

If ‘empower’ means the ordinary English thing to Party neocomrade R. Scheuerman, Mr. Al Kayduh would be left trying to impose his will on only the non-heretic and non-hillbilly provinces of the former Iraq. But Al is a Sunni and thus does not differ from his supposed subjects or victims sectarianwise. [5] The neighbors might intervene all the same, to be sure, and for that matter, Free Kúrdestán and the Ja‘farí Republic of Iraq would presumably count as neighbors themselves to the Islamic State of Iraq. There may be hope for R. Scheuerman, in the same way that there used to be hope for neocomrade Rear-Colonel F. Kagan of AEI and GOP. He does, and Freddy once did, show a few faint signs of desirin’ to limit his liabilities rather than surge ’em. In principle, the bushogenic quagmire could mostly be boiled down to solving the problem of how to maintain elementary law and order in the TwentyPercenter districts. No such boil-down has yet taken place in the mind of R. Scheuerman, however, because if it had, he would speak more kindly of neighborhood intervention and be on the look-out for an external Sunninterní patron to run the Islamic State of Iraq and police it internally and keep it in line vis-à-vis Free Kúrdestán and the Ja‘farí Republic -- as well as Kankakee and Kalamazoo. [6]

(( By the way, Mr. Bones, at Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh the sweet puppies will really have some cause to complain that this piece bears no warning label like "news analysis." ))


_____
[1] Notably gone missin’ since Mission Accomplished Day, 1 May 2003, are only Yoo, Esq., and General Gonzales. The latter can’t seem to find a job, and the former is said to be in danger of losin’ one. These two neocomrades must be the proverbial yeggs that must be broken if there is to be an omelette. Hopefully they find consolation in that reflection. Others may notice the emblematic appropriateness of their plight: Big Management is nothin’ if not supralegal, so once the holy Homeland is converted into a thoroughly supralegal state, many fewer lawyers will be required. The point is plain as day the instant one chances to think of it.


[2] Old dog, new tricks, ’nuff said.


[3] Should J. Sidney stumble on the way to his coronation, which one does not expect to happen, the question of how far it is possible to conduct a proper krusade in the absence of popular support would become less academic.


[4] You are not to think that thought in any crude sense, Mr. Bones. I do not mean to insinuate anything like "The Big Party perps wanna declare a phony emergency and grab power, exactly the same way they accuse others of doing with anthropogenic climate change." GOP geniuses sincerely believe in their own baloney, sir, or at least 99.947% of ’em do. Such belief implies an almost incredibly bad assessment of risks. But look at their record, sir, and decide for yourself whether they are not genuinely unreality-based and unreality-basers in the highest degree.

There is a tactical and polemical advantage in accusing the militant GOP and its tanks of thought of imprudence rather than cynicism, over and above that being the way it is. If Ms. Chicken Little is a cynic who does not believe the tripe she preaches, it makes no sense to question her courage as well as her judgment. Indeed, her judgment ought to be accounted excellent too, as soon as one detects what she is tryin’ to achieve. Whereas the Big Party perps are in fact fools and poltroons simultanously.

On that basis they cannot be knaves as well. If you go about accusing them of logically incompatible deficiencies, Mr. Bones, the natural result is that nobody will take any of your accusations seriously. That approach also reduces you to the goofy level of the Mu’ámara Junction gentry, who continually imply that their faction’s enemies are not only more fiendish than Satan, but more intelligent to boot. A totally ridiculous way that is to think about either Little Brother that is or about the Commanderissimo who is yet to come. "The Devil is an ass."


[5] It is unlikely that an R. Scheuerman knows enough about Islám or Peaceful Freedumbia to have meant by these remarks that Mr. Kayduh would be attempting to impose controversial salafí views on his Sunní cosectarians. Taken that way, the neocomrade need not be quarreled with. Yet if that was what he meant, he is aware of what a total smash-up the former Sunní Ascendancy has become, and must be accounted a cynic rather than a Chicken Little groupie when he tries to frighten the kiddies and the NYTC with Al Kayduh’s Mesopotamian franchise.

A theocommunity as divided as the TwentyPercenters of ex-Iraq are does not very urgently need to be conquered for Big Managerial and libido dominandi purposes. Furthermore, the presence of petroleum in frabjous quantities has not been definitely established. Should many Big Party neocomrades start thinkin’ along those lines, they might well retrieve that nifty Roach Motel Paradigm™ from the memory hole and allow the TwentyPercenters to fight it out in the Islamic Sate of Iraq undisturbed by AEI and GOP and DOD so that none of ’em come and make trouble in, for instance, Kankakee IL.

It is fun to play the vigilante cowpokers’ cards for them, and it might be maintained with a straight face, I think, that their Roach Motel Paradigm™ would make a very fittin’ euthanasia or apotheosis of their Bribe-a-Tribe™ scheme. "The Salvific Awakeners shall always be at war with Al Kayduh! (But we’ll sit here safe and brag and blow / Maryland, my Maryland!)"

Great fun, but I doubt R. Scheuerman and J. S. McCain would enjoy it much, and I am quite confident they never thought of it for themselves.


[6] If the neocomrade only modifies J. Sidney’s vision of fifty or a hundred more years with the AEI-GOP-DOD coalition as Occupyin’ Party by restriction of occupation by forces from the holy Homeland to the ISI rather than tota Mesopotamia from Zakho to Fao, he makes things worse for himself and his boss, not better. In addition to not having a port to get occupational therapy equipment in through for Dr. Gen. Petraeus and his successors, the ISI would lack not only a port to get the oil out through, but (apparently) the oil itself. That plan would leave the Big Management Party engaged in a sheerly humanitarian enterprise -- keepin’ the Party’s peace for the sake of peace alone, with nothin’ but glory in it for the Party -- a thing quite incredible, and even unthinkable of, in connection with Grant’s Old Party.

18 April 2008

On Dealing With Conspiratorializers



Now there is a pregnant icon, Mr. Bones! Doubly pregnant, or pregnant with twins, in fact:

(1) We would have sailed past without stopping had we not just dissected the new rhetorical look over at Lynx, Badger, Cartoonoclastes LLC . The ideal way to poke fun of antidolic zealotry would be to draw caricatures of it. Unfortunately the best that we can do personally on a good day with wind behind back and pencil in hand is to produce a square or a triangle that will be generally recongnized as such. [1] Happily verum et furtum convertuntur, what we cannot make, we can swipe. And ’tis a pleasure indeed to swipe from the Wall Street Jingo.

So much for the formal side. On the material, the slave of Murdoch draws as if she had carefully studied our exegesis of the new Lynx, Badger look:

(bedtime story) + (PARTY line ) --> "story line"


(( It is quite impossible that she actually did study it, for nobody but the Muses and ourselves ever scores a hit on this gaggle of webpages. Others who find themselves confronted with should check to make sure that they exist. Thus we vindicate the maxim of E. Allen Poe that plain sight is the best container to hide discreditable things in. Plain sight, or on occasion double parens. ))

Meanwhile, back in that lewd, disgusting c*rt**n [2], both components are present by sheer serendipity. One slight flaw is that the idol specifies the critic of Party lines and Party liners as a child beyond a shadow of a doubt, which the phrase "bedtime story" does not quite do. There seems to be no way to portray a specimen of those "youngsters from eight to eighty" that the commercial twistifiers allude to. Even Rembrandt coud only do eight OR eighty. "Life is unfair." Or to be exact, Art is unfair.

The second slight flaw is that in the bushogenic quagmire there is no single "the other side" for a grown-up critic of human events to demand an account of. There are more "sides" in the former Iraq than you can shake a stick at, and especially amongst the TwentyPercenter clients of Lynx, Badger. [3] Even inside the goofy cartoonoclastic 'narrative' itself, there are least the Noble Nationalists of ex-Iraq on the one hand, opposed by a ragtag of bad guys, including of course TwentyPercenter renegades [4]

***

(2) It is picturesque to run into this particular idolette on the op-ed pages of the Jingo, which vies with America’s Moonpaper in its struggle to present a totally unified ideological persona and never let dissent get a word in edgewise. "Rupertofascism," anybody?


____
[1] Do we mock those who can do what we cannot? Perhaps at times, but technically speaking, we are at the moment defending rather than attacking the Picture People.


[2] We spoof the goofy again, primarily, but at the same time this is not in itself a good cartoon, Mr. Bones. There is no visual joke; without the caption it would not signify anything in particular. There would be zero information loss if the funny were framed with words instead of an idol, "Daddy was tellin’ a bedtime story to Dubya at Château Kennebunkport one evenin’, when . . . ."


[3] Dr. Righteous Virtue has just dredged up and exhibited "the Sayyid ash-Shuhadá’ movement" as if every schoolboy had heard of them fifty times before. However he fails to make that crew functionally distinct from the abominable Hakeemites, so perhaps we are not missing much, Bones.


[4] Conspiratorializers without renegades would be like salt without savour.

17 April 2008

Brookings Say the Darndest Things

Understanding the mood and opinions of the Arab public is a critical challenge, given the continuing struggle for peace, economic growth and stability in the Middle East. As the people of the region respond to a wide range of dynamics, including American efforts to jump-start the Middle East peace process, stabilize Iraq and counter Iran's bid for hegemony, accurately gauging Arab public opinion is an imperative.


(( I believe we had better spare Aardvarkville this one, Mr. Bones, and sing it for the Muses and ourselves. Over there they are bewitched by PubDip, "public diplomacy," and would find our heresies heretical in a flash. ))


"Life is unfair," but there it is -- tank-grown thought imported from Harvard Yard and Mass. Ave. NW and so on is a good deal more likely to influence the governments of the Middle East than "the mood and opinions of the Arab public."

Dr. Telhami did not have Mr. Zogby ask the street Arabs about their own masters, though (1) such investigation is hardly necessary, and anyway (2) a certain amount of indirect light is cast on the subject by enthusiasm for outlandish Nasralláhs and al-’Asads. [1]

Prof. Lynch’s commentariat responds in a conventional way: like majorities, polls are self-evidently dispositive when they support the policy that one proposes to dictate, but easy to pooh-pooh as inaccurate when they do not. That has never seemed a well-thought-out position to me, but maybe Dr. Pollock’s book will justify it.

Until corrected, though, I wonder whether polling that can not ever ask a question like "If the presidential election were tomorrow, would you vote for J. Sidney McCain or for Lucy P. Loser?" is really the same institution as polling that asks it frequently. Ordinarily that is the only question with an answer not only within the range of the patients’ knowledge, but under their control as well. Accordingly, it might be regarded as the sole genuinely political question in so-called political polling, the rest being sociology fodder in the West, primarily of interest to the secret state police elsewhere. [2]

Dr. Telhami, or whoever wrote that silly-to-detestable blurb, cries "critical challenge" and "imperative" without any explanation of why anybody in particular should care what the subjects of Levantine régimes think about matters of state. If the street Arabs were on the point of rising to replace the existing government rackets with mob rule, one would naturally want to guess in advance what the mob might do with power if they get it. Yet surely they are not at any such point? And surely Dr. Telhami does not suppose them to be? So what is it "imperative" that the Masters of the Universe should DO with this "critical" data?

Happy days.


___
[1] Dr. Telhami’s own recommended silver lining is his least uninteresting discovery, namely "the emerging popularity of modernizing Sunni Arab leaders, particularly Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid al Maktoum of Dubai, when respondents identify the two leaders they admire most." His Emirial Serenity only gets six percent of the admiration, however, the same slice as that other modernizing Sunni, M. Bin Ládin. (Cf. "Slide 68 of 83.")


[2] Everybody’s mukhábarát has been in roughly this line of work for a long time without waiting for the Brookings Institution. Since those good folks do not often publish their findings, Dr. Telhami and Mr. Zogby are undoubtedly making a contribution. Granted. But what is critical or challenging or imperative about their contribution?

Taken as para-academic knowledge obtained and valued for its own sake, who could object? But that is not at all the way the product was advertised.

16 April 2008

Cartoonoclastes Goes Sarkastic

Naturally, the US policy establishment and their enablers will be devastated by this, because their whole objective in Iraq is stability and peace. We can be sure that the firefights and airstrikes in Sadr City and elsewhere are being carried out with the deepest regret by the American authorities, who want nothing more than the integration of all political trends, including those for and against the occupation, without discrimination, into a democratic government of peace and stability. If you don't believe me, just read today's AP story, the latest version of the outstretched-hand story-line, purporting to dissociate the Americans from Maliki's anti-Sadr hard line.


’Tis a pity, Mr. Bones, that nowadays everybody and her daughter-in-law should be ferociously partisan and narrow, and yet never come very close to what is properly to be called ideology -- the "science of idiocy," as some Frenchman jested back around when the word was first discovered (in French). We endure only what might be called per contra the Witchcraft of Idiocy™, a product that makes much the same claims to gratify heart and mind and self-esteem as ideologies used to, but without explaining how it works. Without there existing any explanation of how it works, that is, for the point of distinguishing the WI product is not that only a small group of Obamoid elitists understand the mechanisms but decline to explain it to their cultural inferiors. Mamma Chiesa has been offering that swindle for centuries, and for that matter, so did the Lenin-Gorbachev racket, so does every vendor of consumer appliances that rely on electrick fluid. [1]

Nobody sane, not even a kangaroo, would lynch a poodle on the basis of indictments brought by the Mu’ámara Junction gentry. Yet Ms. Lynx and Mr. Badger and Dr. Cartoonoclastes are not infallibly over-the-top and around-the-bend. In any case, the latest thought crimes that they impute to the Associated Press and Juan the Wicked may serve to illustrate the nature of the Witchcraft of Idiocy™. Such an exhibit will do for exempli gratiâ purposes even when it is not altogether to be classified as non-fiction.

Observe, O Bones, that we are spared the MJ faction’s characteristic verbal shtik this time: it is only the "latest version of ... a story-line" that Dr. C. wants to clast today. If I could be sure the rhetorical remission is more than temporary, I should praise it a little, despite the fact that it is not the judicial criticism of human events that the Cole Patrol endeavours to stress. We have never denied that there is something wrong, in most cases, with the off-the-shelf and one-size-fits-all opinion about the former Iraq and the Greater Levant such as Cartoono and Co. virtuously loathe. We admit that the patient is diseased, if you like, but we have not the honour to agree with the gallant and learnèd Dr. Cartoonoclastes about the diagnosis of the disease, let alone the therapy. He diagnoses most of his geistlich inferiors as victims of iconitis, a malignant inflammation of Trudeau’s gland. [2] Or, as a lay sheep might bleat out crudely, of "oversimplification."

The objection to this diagnosis is scarcely that it is erroneous: nine Kiddie Krusaders or antiwarriors in ten cannot get much beyond making up their minds which side they are on. We will certainly grant the MJ quack that point, as long as we get to word it carefully. When we think about the syndrome more extensively, however, we diverge from the Mu’ámariyya rapidly. Cartoono & Cie. give the impression, for one thing, that oversimplification as such constitutes a violation of the state of nature, as if every citizen of the holy Homeland would revolve subtle and nuanced views about ex-Iraq if only the AP and wicked Juan would stop hollering some dimwit downdumbed "story line" in her ear all the time. ("If you believe that, sir, you would believe anything," said the Duke of Wellington.)

For what it is worth, if one must start with that Panglossian baloney at all, it is more sensible to continue onward by way of "story-lines" rather than "cartoons." The latter misses the mark rhetorically, because real-world cartoons are once-off affairs, not a systematic campaign of tendentious oversimplification such as warms the heart of the conspiratorializer, and such as District Attorney Cartoonoclastes indites his alleged culprits for. "Story line" is far from perfect polemically, since stories do not necessarily get told over and over again, but unlike cartoons, they at least can be endlessly reiterated, and some in fact are. One of the more conspicuous gentrifications of the MJ gentry is that they have been spotted calling a story a narration, as if all the world were an Eng. Lit. department. One might, though the conspiratorializers themselves presumably do not, distinguish a "narrative" as the sort of story that nobody would care to hear again until the first audition of it had been forgotten. The Wings of the Dove, say, or Sidney’s Arcadia. On that basis, a story simpliciter would be something more like "Little Red Riding Hood," a tale capable of repetition and perhaps often repeated.

Given their Obamatesque view of the fickle mob, the MJ gentry might be regarded as implicitly meaning "bedtime story line." Doubtless that thought never crossed the mind of the rhetor, but some conflation of "story line" with "Party line" may have been more or less nonaccidental. That phrase, too, implies repetition. Taken with both "bedtime story" and "Party line" hovering somewhere in the semantic vicinity, Dr. Cartoonoclastes’ new shtik affords a marked improvement over the one that earned him his monnicker. But as I said, Mr. Bones, let’s not stand up and clap before the MJ gentry shtick with it for a while and eschew all countercartoonist operations.

Repetition once admitted on a par with oversimplification, the gentrified conspiratorializer view comes within hailing distance of our own. Naturally we dispense with the conspiratorializing, and they can not, so a complete and cordial unity of minds and self-esteems is as far off as ever. Oh, well....

Meanwhile, back in the former real world, there is some question whether Lynx, Badger, Cartoonoclastes LLC has identified this particular bedtime story line accurately. The GOP Secretary of War’s strikin’ remarks about Sadr III get folded into the cheeky generality "their whole objective in Iraq is stability and peace" somewhat hastily, I’d say. Maybe even a tad simplistically, Mr. Bones? The vigilante cowpokers have never been in complete agreement about their aggression and occupation policy, so why should they not be at odds with one another in the wake of the Second Muqtadan War? Neocomrade R. Gates wants to conciliate the Firebrand Renegade Cleric™, other invasionites would prefer to clobber him.

For a gentrified conspiratorializer, this can only be a discrepancy between the real intentions of the AEI-GOP-DOD coalition and their phony professions. Less abnormal persons remain free to think that maybe the Big Management Party perps simply disagree with one another, as lesser human beings have been known to do before now. In that case, the proper gloss on Juan the Wicked would be to point out that the hand extended was that of R. Gates, and is not to be confused with the hand of his uncle Sam, or with the hand of the Weltherrscher wannabes down at Rancho Crawford. [3]








_____
[1] In our sad and disregenerated age, poised on the brink of the Epoch of McCain, it would not surprise me at all to learn that there is a book for sale called Magic for Dummies. Maybe I'll send the google out to check in a moment. Even if one cannot order that tome, Mr. Bones, one ought to understand that Witchcraft for Dummies is a different product. "Magic" means stage flim-flam, smoke and mirrors. "Witchcraft" or "sorcery" is the Real Thing. Or it would be, if the product lived up to the advertising.

[2] Mr. Gary, not M. Pierre, of course.


[3] As every schoolboy knows in the holy Homeland, the favourite Hand of AEI and GOP happens to be invisible. The Rev. Señorito as-Sadr, though, may or may not be aware of this detail.

15 April 2008

Their Master Brooks

You would think that if you were a thoughtful presidential candidate, addressing voters in an economically complicated state like Pennsylvania, you would want to describe how these pervasive forces are shaping the lives of voters and how government should respond. But, then again, you are not ________________ .


This Big Management Party señorito's idea of pervasive shape-forcin’ -- or possibly I mean pervasive force-shapin’ -- is ... well, by the numbers added, Mr. Bones, here we go on a quick tour of the baloney factory:

A string of [1] technological revolutions have made American workers much more productive. Over the past 30 years, steel producers have reduced the number of hours it takes to produce a ton of steel by up to 90 percent. A [2] social revolution has radically increased the number of women in the work force and pushed down the wages of men. A [3] medical revolution has led to enhanced diagnosis and treatment but also rapid health care inflation that burdens American employers and eats into workers’ weekly paychecks. An [4] information revolution has increased the economic rewards of education and punished those who lack it. A [5] pedagogical revolution has led to ferocious competition to get into the top universities but a decline in quality at the primary and secondary levels. For the first time in the nation’s history, workers retiring from the labor force are better educated than the ones coming in.


"You would think if you was thoughtful," babbles Brooksie, though mere sanity should suffice to reveal that an electoral oration along those lines might not be too well received in Milltown of the Rust Belt. It’s a wonder that customers of the New York Times Company seem to want to listen to señorito-level [1] social scientizin’. It presses its luck very hard by supposin’ that "voters in an economically complicated state like Pennsylvania" crave that sort of fodder as well.

Considered as a sample of AEI-GOP tank-grown thought dating from the year of religionism 1429/2008, the babblin’ is of mild interest. "Aha!," thinks little orphan Annie to herself, "So that is the revolutionary new softsoap that Daddy Warbucks wants to wash my brain with! Let’s see how far he gets with it, Sandy!" [2]

The señorito’s fiesta of revolutions is a little arbitrary at certain points. Why on Gore’s green earth should medical technology have been revolutionated separately from technology in general? [3] Its fearsome sounding Paedagogical Revolution™ may have been invented on the spur of the moment merely because it happened to be thinkin’ ’bout doin’ an oblique hatchet job on a certain former editor of the Harvard Law Review. The Big Party neocomrades’ wombscholarship and Niederdümmung neither presuppose nor exhibit any peculiarities of technique, revolutionary or reactionary or any kind in between. Wombschoolin’ is only a question of which subject-matters the junior trainees are to be trained in and which they are to be tenderly sheltered from, lest they grow up to be Marcionites. (Or even Democrats, may Father Zeus forbid it!)

It is very señoritoly indeed, is Brooksie. It refuses to run off with the mainstream mob of Party base and vile to some virtual high-tech lynchin’, it prefers to say the same things against BHO that all the other neocomrades say

If you think your listeners aren’t sophisticated enough to grasp them ["forces"] , it’s much easier to blame those perfidious foreigners for all economic woes. (...) American voters aren’t so stupid as to think their problems are caused by foreigners and malevolent lobbyists.

but offer entirely different grounds for sayin’ them. The trouble with B. Hussein has nothin’ to do with clinging [4], thinks this specimen, and indeed, according to it, BHO is the clinger, not the Rust Belt folk. President-Presumptive J. Sidney McCain may have informed the ranch and the world that BHO is ‘elitist’, but what does he know compared to Master David?

Now if thee was a thoughtful pol in PA, Mr. Bones, wouldn’t thee spend most of every election event pointing out the beauties of Lady Nafta?

Me neither.

____
[1] I.e., amateurish and self-servicin’.


[2] Dr. Cartoonoclastes would be happy to learn I had to google up the doggie’s name.


[3] Not too hard a question, if approached by stealth from the cartoon side: real technology (computers and entertainment electronics, that is) keeps getting cheaper and cheaper, whereas quack technology leads only to "rapid health care inflation that burdens American employers and eats into workers’ weekly paychecks."

Brooksie outseñoritos itself by puttin’ those heavy-laden employers of his first. Since its purpose in scribblin’ all that guff was merely exempli gratia, to show what thoughtful people think when they think thoughtfully along the Big Management Party line, it lets the mask slip a little, as it were. If it was floggin’ the snake oil directly, it would have been more circumspect.

That is a fun reflection, Mr. Bones, when the real occasion of the scribble was an inadvertance on the part of B. Hussain Obáma. Though eternally young, señoritos are not often cute the way Brooksie is here.


[4] “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,”

13 April 2008

It's A Jugular Out There

In response, during the hearings, Petraeus told Lugar, "We've got to continue. We have our teeth into the jugular, and we need to keep it there." The general clearly likes that phrase, because he used it twice more [at a private séance with Mr. Broder and the Washington Post]. I can see why Bush admires his aggressive tone. And I can understand why his troops revere their commander. But when I asked him if there was a better answer to the question Lugar raised -- is there such a strategy [one that "that recognizes the time limitations that we face and seeks a realistic outcome designed to protect American vital interests"], -- his answer was murky. He began with the comment that "there has to be a regional approach," and he went off the record for a time, then came back with many references to Iran. When a colleague asked if we had a plausible strategy for engaging or persuading or coercing Iran to cooperate in that elusive regional solution, the answer was: We're working on it at many levels.

Meantime, Petraeus' suggestion is that we focus "less on an exit strategy from Iraq and more on an engagement strategy." I think the answer to the challenge Lugar raises will have to come from the presidential candidates, not the general. It certainly won't come from this president.


The Washington Post Company having re-reconsidered, they and their organ of journalism must for the moment be counted as generally in support of the 2003-2??? aggression. Mr. Broder himself perhaps knows better, but then again, maybe not. You can tell from the concluding microparagraph, Mr. Bones, that he will not be voting for J. Sidney McCain, but that is quite consistent with an underlying quest for more efficient and profitable invasionism down the road, the M. Albright aggression product rather than that of P. Wolfowitz, so to say.

Dr. Gen. David H. Petrolaeus of Princeton and GOP and DOD was not addressin’ a hostile audience, then, when he lunched with some of the hired-hand WaPos. It fits in nicely that Mr. Broder should burn a little incense to Big Party neocomrade R. Lugar -- "The Indiana Republican, one of the real wise men of foreign policy and an ally of the Bush administration." For lo! St. Dick gets the whole first half of Mr. Broder's column, in the form of "five ‘premises’ that he said should guide discussions on future U.S. policy." D. Hannibal only shows up afterwards to be judged by the Lugar Criteria and found at least slightly wantin’, as shown in Exhibit A above.

Why does Mr. Broder place inverted commas around the ‘premises’ of R. Lugar? Probably merely because the neocomrade used that very word. Hope is faint that Mr. Broder noticed, and tried to object to or subvert, the "Kindly let me know best!" aspect of St. Dick's premises. There's really no evidence, however, that Mr. Broder, and the Washington Post Company, and quite a number of other non-Party invasionites are not entirely content to have their discussions of Uncle Sams future invasions and occupations so guided. Viewed from that angle, perhaps D. Hannibal deserves some mild commendation for refusin’ to go along quiet: Let us "focus," said he, "less on an exit strategy from Iraq and more on an engagement strategy." [1]

What was it that turned mild-manered Dr. Gen. D. Hannibal Petrolaeus of Princeton (and elsewhere) into Jugular Joe? Well, according to Broder of the Baní WaPo, the immediate stimulus was this:

According to those premises, Lugar said, the questions before Congress and the country are much different now from those being asked when the surge strategy was launched. "Today," he said, "the questions are whether and how improvements in security can be converted into political gains that can stabilize Iraq, despite the impending drawdown of United States troops. Simply appealing for more time to make progress is insufficient. Debate over how much progress we have made and whether we can make more is less illuminating than determining whether the administration has a definable political strategy that recognizes the time limitations that we face and seeks a realistic outcome designed to protect American vital interests."


St. Dick can be rather a jerk, it looks like, Mr. Bones. What does that tripe amount to if not a touchin’ly poignant lament that R. Lugar cannot figure out what the [exp. del.] his Little Brother is up to in Peaceful Freedumbia, so perhaps D. Hannibal would like to take a shot at helpin’ him guess what it might be? (Yuck. Who elected these people?)

Trottin’ out anythin’ at all, even a jugular, would be better for D. Hannibal than to respond to that foolishness in its own terms. It is not for the ’umble likes of him to "determine whether the administration has a definable political strategy." As a matter of fact, D. Hannibal probably makes the AEI-GOP-DOD semiconquest and occupation policies more than anybody else does in this phase of the Mesopotamia caper, but technically he is not even a member of the Brat Administration, let alone a responsible spokesman. The Dr. Gen. can go do what he is told without worryin’ about whether his chickenhawk betters have a clue what they are doin’. R. Lugar does not seem to, that’s for sure.

On the other hand, Responde stulto iuxta stultitiam suam does apply here after a fashion. R. Lugar blathers as if he was runnin’ against his own Little Brother for the top job, so D. Hannibal blathers as if he was runnin’ himself. [3] Fair enough, although D. Hannibal comes off lookin’ a little better if one belives in "Boost, don’t knock!"

And again I say, "Yuck."

____
[1] DHP, who thinks with steel-claptrap mind in PowerPoint® instead of Greater Texan, may have seemed somwhat more ‘murky’ to WaPo prosemongers than he really is. For him, Policy and Strategy and Operations and Tactics are four clean different things that ignorant chickenhawks tend to muddle up even when they ask him to lunch or to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. An "exit strategy" from Peaceful Freedumbia, then, or alternatively an "engagement strategy" inside the bushogenic quagmire, exists at a different level of the chart than "the challenge Lugar raises."

Plainly Mr. Broder takes his Level Two remark as an answer to St. Dick’s Level One ‘premisses’. And plainly that is a boo-boo, even if D. Hannibal in fact wants to go for the Policy jugular as well as the Strategy jugular. Until the Ivy League’s Jugular Joe actually starts campaignin’ to put himself rather than J. Sidney in the White House, his fellow Americans probably will not know for sure where he stands on Kiddie Krusadin’ as a general ("Level One: Policy", cell A69) proposition.

Strictly or Princetonianly speaking, then, all D. Hannibal does in Exhibit A is decline to be evaluated by the Premises of Lugar. Whether he agrees or disagrees with them or just covers his best-belovèd ass by dodgin’ ’em right or wrong cannot be ascertained from Mr. Broder's account. It may tentatively be inferred, however, that D. Hannibal considers "exit strategy" rather than "engagement strategy" on Level Two to follow from the Premises of Lugar up on Level One. Even we lay sheep can make out why a braniac violence pro might think that, Mr. Bones: St. Dick’s oracles II through V all suggest that the way of the aggressor in the former Iraq is not expected to get easier any time soon.

Neocomrades more heartily loyal to Boy and Dynasty and Party and Ideology than the Indiana Solon might well find the Premises of Lugar decidedly unsatisfactory as a guide for discussions on future U.S. policy, were they clever and diligent enough to notice. (They are not.) Mr. Broder treats the Premises of Lugar as if every slave of Ms. Sapientia Conventionalis must agree with them. That may be a slight misunderstaning of the actual situation, as I'd conjecture. The truth may be that all of Miss Sappy's devotees will be about equally displeased by the Premises of Lugar, a distinctly different proposition.


[2] Mr. Broder's fancy is antecedently disposed to the running-for-President shtik, which may be why this scribble exists at all.