"Time for a Persian Sistani," or, Neotourism Unmasked

Neocomrade R. Cohen limps along behind the main body of the caravan, no doubt, but he seems to be gettin’ there all the same. And he’s certainly headed in the same general direction that the self-appointed neoguiders of his Demographic have decreed de haut en bas.

Now decrees emanatin’ from weekly standardisers and Wall Street jingos and the august fastnesses of Castle Podhóretz, ever neoresplendent City on a hill that it is, do indeed emit a special whiff. Neocomrade R. Cohen characterizes the Demographic’s neoguiders as "the Iran-as-Nazi-incarnation-of-evil school," which seems to me not altogether accurate, even apart from the NYTC neocomrade’s personal parti pris. Viewing the colourful caravan of the Demographic from very, very far off (and, needless to say, from a position of categorical inferiority), I cannot find the distance between Neocomrade R. Cohen and (say) M. de Nétanyahou or Neocomradess C. Glick of the Jerusalem Post anywhere near as important as these gentlebein’s find it. (Mais que scay-je?)

Still, there it is: viewed from Mars or from Dhimmi Corners, USA, the Demographic as a whole, with only the extremest of Messrs. les prétendues ennemis de soi excluded, have trouble imagin’ any evil whatever that is *not* Nazi-like. On the flip side, that which is good for the Demographic is -- obviously -- good simpliciter. Neocomrade R. Cohen may not altogether hold with the flipped notion, and of course he is probably burstin’ with wrong ideas of what will benefit the Demographic’s caravan most beneficially in the long haul.

Just like everybody else in the caravan. Their Demographical comedians make "tot Hebraïci, tot sententiae--et nonnullae aliae" jokes all the time. To be sure, when the stern Neoguiders get their way unchecked and unbalanced, that sort of humor will probably have to go extinct. Stern neoguidance aims, in effect, at makin’ the Demographic an S.R.H., "sole remainin’ hyperpower," in its own right, a status obviously inconsistent with village curs and bitches bein’ allowed to bark at the caravan as it passes. Oderint dum metuant! has its virtues, no doubt, but to encourage laughter is not among them.

Almost as obviously, stern Neoguidance and stand-alone Hyperpower will (would) not be easy to reconcile with permittin’ much dissent inside the Demographic itself. Anythin’ noncomformist beyond narrow questions of ‘existential’ tactics and neo-expediency will lead to the sort of trouble that Neocomrade R. Cohen is pityin’ himself over already. Fifty or a hundred years hence, the Neoguiders in plenitudine potestatis eorum will have to expunge idiots like him from the Demographic altogether, or else, what is a thousand times more likely in my view, Neocomrade R. Cohen III will just keep his damnfool mouth shut if he can’t get his mind right. A policy conducive to lower life insurance rates, that is, but not good for stand-up comedy.

All of which, not accidentally, sounds rather like Neocomrade R. Cohen’s tourist impressions of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

No better than tourist impressions are they, I fear, unless we suppose that the laggard neocomrade is very imperfectly acquainted with the dhimmí tongue in which he chooses to scribble. For example, if the Rev. Khamene’i and his allies were really "bent, in the name of money and power, on the bludgeoning of the Iranian people," it ought to be a cinch to find official documents headed with In nomine Pecuniae Potestatisque or the like. When native Anglophones act "in the name of So-and-So," we do not (often) hide the authorizing N-me under a bushel and hope nobody notices it. What native speakers of Cohenesque do, though, I must admit that have no idea. [1]

More to the immediate point is the alleged bludgeonin’. Neocomrade R. Cohen may not yet have climbed as far down the slippery slope as Castle Podhóretz, but he is definitely on his way. That is the sort of word that would be resorted to by a Demographic chauvinist who considers nothin’ really evil unless it be Hitleroid. It goes with the ‘existential’ neomindset to assume that enemies of the Demographic act out of sheer malice. R. Cohen is not quite there yet, since the NSDAP itself would not have been truly Hitleroid if it had been acting "in the name" of Geld und Kraft. But there is nothin’ in sight to stop him from ascendin’ to truly Podhorétzian neodepths at any moment, perhaps by askin’ himself exactly how the alleged bludgeonin’ makes the Rev. and his merry men richer and more potent. Sooner or later, it seems to me, even a Neocomrade R. Cohen is bound to notice that in fact Geld und Kraft are very secondary objectives of the veláyet-e faqíh crew. The chances that he will guess their real motives bein’ infinitesimal, it seems safe enough to conjecture that he'll wind up with the C. Glick or A. von Liebermann view of what the Qommie fiends are up to, viz. sheer unmitigated Nazi fiendishness.

***

Another sign of slippage upslopewards is that Neocomrade R. Cohen makes no clear policy recommendation to anybody except the Qommie fiends themselves, who are to shape up at once and wash behind the ears and, above all, get right with History:

It is time for a Persian Sistani. The sons and daughters of disappointed revolutionaries do not seek renewed bloodshed. They seek peaceful change that will give meaning to the word “republic.” Khamenei, bowing to superior learning, in the best tradition of Shiism, should listen to the wisdom of Iran’s late turbulent priest [the Rev. Montazerí]. Iran would thereby preserve its independence, the proudest achievement of the revolution, while better reflecting the will of its people, who overwhelmingly favor normalized relations with the United States. It is time to retire the stale slogans of a bygone era. It is time for Iran to follow China’s example of 1972 in adapting to survive. Perhaps Khomeini, like Mao in Deng Xiaoping’s famous formula, was 70 percent right — and some brave Iranian leader could say that. He would thereby open the way for one of the Middle East’s most hopeful societies to move forward. (...) "At some point something must give." With the birth of the Green movement, and in the spirit of Montazeri, something has given. The further, critical “giving” has to come in the supreme leader’s office, where the 30 percent error of 1979 has entrenched itself and so denied Iran the governance and society its vibrant population deserves.

Thus sloganises Neotourist R. Cohen, about as ‘stalely’ as can be imagined. That stuff is almost as stale as Neotourist Th. Friedman sloganizes. And Little Tommy with the big moustache sets a very stiff standard.

It is fun, however, to guess what an evil Qommie would make of bein’ lectured by Neotourist R. Cohen that he ought to behave like a wise and virtuous Chicom. Whatever other reactions such a neostimulus provokes, there would probably be a significant element of resentment of the "one size fits all" assumption that seems to be fundamental to neotourism as such. If the fiends pay any attention at all to flat-earthers from the New York Times Company, that is, as presumably they will not.

Meanwhile, I betcha the weekly standardisers, and the Wall Street jingos, and the staff and management and bloggership of Common Terror magazine will pay Neotourist R. Cohen attention enough to render him even more self-pitiful still. Militant extremism bein’ what it is, they are assuredly not goin’ta forgive such a shameless traitor to the Demographic as poor ol’ muddlehead Roger any time soon!

AFZKB.

Healthy days.

___
[1] Again looking forward a century or so, I presume that Telavîvestán will, like India and Belize and doubtless other candidates, have evolved a patois that is nominally still English, but getting pretty distant at points from Westminster and Washin’ton. And Father Zeus knows best!

General Lord George Wont

Why do thee suppose, Dr. Bones, that General Lord George Will was all gung-ho for aggression into and occupation of the former al-‘Iráq, but now cares not at all about creatin’ the happiness of the former Khorasán?

America's finest are ... in Washington's hands. This city should keep faith with them by rapidly reversing the trajectory of America's involvement in Afghanistan, where, says the Dutch commander of coalition forces in a southern province, walking through the region is "like walking through the Old Testament." U.S. strategy -- protecting the population -- is increasingly troop-intensive while Americans are increasingly impatient about "deteriorating" (says Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) conditions. The war already is nearly 50 percent longer than the combined U.S. involvements in two world wars, and NATO assistance is reluctant and often risible. The U.S. strategy is "clear, hold and build." Clear? Taliban forces can evaporate and then return, confident that U.S. forces will forever be too few to hold gains. Hence nation-building would be impossible even if we knew how, and even if Afghanistan were not the second-worst place to try: [t]he Brookings Institution ranks Somalia as the only nation with a weaker state.

Happy days.

A Word about Power-Affirmin’ Nationalism

2. The very feature that makes Lieberman distasteful to many Westerners — his power-affirming nationalism — may make him more respected and, frankly, understandable in other parts of the world, especially in places like Russia and Latin America, where strongmen are respected rather than reviled.

Although this commonterrorist (Neocomrade D. Hazony) has nicely delineated the slippery slope down which Jewish Statism has been consistently proceeding for quite a while, I would not venture to estimate exactly how much "strange new respect" for Hyperzion will be forthcoming in the short-term future. [1]

As a purely rhetorical shtyk, the trope about Jewish Statists bein’ impeccable third-worlders themselves, kitted out with a bonä fide National Liberation Movement just like any other, is almost as old as colonialist mendacity itself. "Places like Russia and Latin America, where strongmen are respected rather than reviled" were never the least bit impressed with that self-servicin’ baloney that I noticed.

To be sure, previous strongpersons of colour obviously thought that product baloney even when they were selling it themselves, so perhaps if they become convinced that the J. S. crew have now really converted to their own brand of strongpersondom sincerely and irrevocably, they will reconsider. Neocomrade D. Hazony might worry a little, though, about how prominent, and how off-puttin’ to mainstream strongpersons of colour, the remaining shreds and tatters of liberalism and Aufklärung inside the Tel Avîv statelet actually are. Doubtless such things are only junk left over from yesterday rather than accurate indicators of future performance, but I am not at all sure that "places like Russia and Latin America" pay enough attention to the neo-Levant to abandon all reasonable doubts as to exactly what direction Hyperzion is degeneratin’ in.

Neocomrade D. Hazony and the CommonTerror crew definitely ought to worry about what they are doin’ if, as appears from the rest of today's scribble, commendin’ themselves to global strongpersondom with "power-affirming nationalism" is only half of their nifty new Weltpolitik -- and possibly the smaller half at that. The other half looks like this:

There is something ingenious about Netanyahu’s deployment of his foreign policy assets, from his assignment of Lieberman to places where he is most likely to be respected and his positioning of Michael Oren ... as ambassador to the U.S., to [M. de Nétanyahou's] æown rallying of Israeli public support against Obama’s firm stance on settlements. It is indeed way too simplistic to look at Lieberman as having been swept under the rug for inner political reasons. That this narrative has carried the day is itself one of Netanyahu’s most impressive diplomatic achievements.

Considered purely æsthetically, is that not, Dr. Bones, the sort of Weltpolitik ideally suitable for weekly standardisers? Indeed, it even pushes the TWS envelope a little to assume, in effect, that not all the benighted heathen and poorly illuminated dhimmís of the world are living in the same policy week at any given moment

On the other hand, should you happen not to care for that sort of thing, I daresay you will feel fully warranted to make some rude remark about Hyperzionism talkin’ with forked tongue, presentin’ itself as "power-affirming nationalism" to "places like Russia and Latin America, where strongmen are respected rather than reviled," whilst continuin’ to agitate and propagandise in Old Europe and central North America along the traditional lines -- i.e., by representin’ the Tel Avîv régime as unique in its immediate vicinity because it alone has no time for, or sympathy with, strongpersondom.

Now in theory Jewish Statism could get away with the nifty Liebermann-Hazony approach toWeltpolitik as long as the outright heathens and we dhimmís of the holy Homeland™ and similar abodes of bliss never venture to compare notes. Yet how likely is that nowadays? Surely it is almost impossible for any neocomradess or neocomrade to start agitproppin’ for Hyperzion in one market stall without bein’ overheard by pretty well the whole súq? The practical consequence of the whole world hearing or overhearing the Tel Avîv government's apologists bein’ "all things to all men" simultaneously, St.-Paulin’ it in the common presence of all their separately targeted dupes and marks are . . . well, let's just say these consequences are easy to foresee and unlikely to be of much benefit to the Jewish Statist cause. [2] [3]

Neocomrade D. Hazony really ought to have noticed that M. de Nétanyahou's "something ingenious" is one of those swell ingenuities that should never be let out of the seminar room at a Prussian-style graduate school where it was first hatched.

In this particular case, however, I reckon the hatchin’ will have taken place at one of the Wingnut City or Telavívestání Tanks of Thought. The learnèd wikipædiatricians advise us that

David Hazony is an Israeli writer, and a regular contributor to Contentions, the blog of Commentary Magazine. Until 2007, he was a fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, founded by his older brother Yoram Hazony, and from 2004-2007 served as editor in chief of Azure, its quarterly. He has a B.A. and M.A. from Yeshiva University. He is an expert on the Jewish philosopher Eliezer Berkovits. [4]

Happy days.

___
[1] You will remember, Dr. Bones, how the wingnuttes and wingnuts used to complain that grown-up journalism always says something like "Senator Specter has been viewed with a strange new respect in unlikely quarters of late" whenever some pol whom Hooverville and Rio Limbaugh had thought reliable begins to wobble in the direction of moderation.


[2] If you insist, Dr. Bones, on my not shirking the task of practical consequence formulation, perhaps it may suffice to point out that every heathen and every dhimmí would furnished with an excellent argument for not paying any attention to Hyperzionistical protestations ever again. Or, in the vernacular: "Any fool can plainly see that those clowns at T. A. are willin’ to say just simply anythin’ at all!"


[3] On re-reading, it occurs to me that one might take Neocomrade D. Hazony quite literally when he announces that "power-affirming nationalism — may make [Neocomrade Gospodin Minister A. von Liebermann] more respected and, frankly, understandable in other parts of the world.

That is to say, D. Hazony may be bankin’ on the assumption that even if the marks and dupes in some other market stall than the one immediately targeted were to overhear a Hyperzion agitprop product tailored for quite a different audience, they would not be likely to understand what they overheard well enough to compare notes about it with other heathens and dhimmís in any way practically dangerous to Jewish Statism.

I admit that this hypothesis is more than a little improbable, but I do not know the particular commenterroriser well enough to be quite sure it can be ruled out. To rule it in more clearly, it would have been nice if he had spelled out the vice-versa case, the case in which well-meaning, but dim-witted, holy-Homelanders™ and old Euros dismiss as incredible primâ facie the notion that the Telavívestánís and their fellow-travelers chez nous could really be serious about alignin’ themselves with the two-hundred-proof political heathen on a platform of "power-affirming nationalism."

In the long run this point will not matter, though. that sort of primâ facie incomprehension has a limited shelf life. Once Hyperzion has actually behaved on the basis of "power-affirming nationalism" often enough, it must inevitably face a day of reckonin’, the day when all but the blindest must see what has been goin’ on. At that juncture, if not before, comparison of notes by the various victims or patients of Nétanyahou-Liebermann-Hazony Weltpolitik will be unavoidable.

Even at that point, however, the two-hundred-proof heathen may decide not to admit the Tel Avîv régime to the Strongperson Club. The current membership could easily decide that "power-affirming nationalism" is not, after all, their Club’s only raison d’être. Thus it may be that Neocomrade D. Hazony et al. will end up not gettin’ that mess of pottage no matter how much of the now useless bric-à-brac left over from their previous, their bad and juvenile, Western Sieve period they manage to jettison in pursuit of it.

No real Realpolitiker can, I suppose, find anything very favourable to say about a plan to "sell out" that leaves the seller-out unpaid. But Father Zeus knows best.



[4] OK, sure, Dr. Bones, why not? Even the most useless looking scrap of knowledge might come in handy someday. One can never tell in advance.

The core of his theology [that of Neocomrade Herr Prof. Dr. E. Berkovits, obit anno Christi 1992] is the encounter as an actual meeting of God and human at Mt. Sinai. The encounter is paradoxical in that it transcends human comprehension, yet it demonstrates that God cares about human beings. He teaches that once human beings know God cares for them, they can act in ways that seek meaning, accept responsibility for their actions, and act with righteousness toward others. This implies the keeping of the commandments, ethical concern for others, and building the State of Israel.

It would perhaps not be entirely absurd and arbitrary to link the Berkovitsian theôria with the Nétanyahou-Liebermann-Hazony degeneration in praxi. My understanding, conceivably mistaken, of specifically Hebrew Christojudæanity, as that ideology stood before the late Dr. B. started remodelin’ it, is that to "accept responsibility for [one's] actions and act with righteousness toward others" is mandatory on everybody irrespective of theophanies. That weird word ‘Noahide’ tends to crop up in such discussions.

The Berkovitsian new-modelin’ has what I suppose Castle Podhóretz would regard as the merit of puttin’ the recipients of authentic theophany safely outside the legitimate perimeter of evaluation by heathens and dhimmís.

The bad news (?) is that it is not easy to see how the lucky few could ever be real allies with anybody at all.

But Father Zeus knows best about authentic theophanies.

Appeasing The Jihád Careerists

... [T]he United States is becoming as culpable as Europe, its liberal news media and college campuses willfully refusing to acknowledge the danger posed by radical Islam and opening their pages and seminars to those who seek the undoing of the very tenets that allow liberals — and everyone else — their freedoms[, and] refusing to highlight the Islamist threat while swallowing the claims of figures like Tariq Ramadan, a supposed moderate who ... is “a habitual practitioner of the Islamic art of taqiyya — which essentially means saying one thing in Arabic and another thing in English or French.

Now although the grandson of M. Hasan al-Banná’ would make a very notable convert to the ’Imámiyya, Dr. Bones, yet somehow it is easier to believe in a Big Management Party neocomrade [1] talkin’ ignorant nonsense rather than in M. le Dr. Ramadán having suddenly detected the infallibility of the Fourteen whilst thinking in either Arabic or Frankish.

The New York Times Company appears to have assigned Neocomrade B. Bawer’s phobic scribble to its ninth-best book reviewer [2]. This ploy is perhaps excusable, considering that B. Bawer despises poor old Aunt Nitsy in lockstep neocomradely fashion: "Bawer devotes much of his book to an attack on The New York Times for refusing to highlight" --and so on as already quoted. Of course it is absurd to suppose it possible to appease militant extremism, so Nitsy really ought to have lowered the heaviest boom available on Master Bruce. That would make quite clear which side she's on, even if it does not actually frustrate any of jihád careerism's knavish tricks. Flying one's true flag is not altogether a matter of expediency and cost-effectiveness, after all! Plus playing this game is a little tough on the customer who just wants to be told what is in the book.

In any case, our ninth-rater does not tell us exactly what the accused has said or written or thought in Indo-Germanic that he won't repeat in Semitic, or vice versa. And it's doubtful, at best, that he (Neocomrade S. Pollard IX) knows the true account of taqiyya to tell it, even if he did not mind embarrassin’ B. Bawer. Oh, well!

You had better read the whole megillah for yourself, Dr. Bones. It's a swell treat, but not quite good enough for me to swipe it in toto.

On the other hand, let me spoil your fun and reveal how it (the ninth-rate review) ends:

“Surrender” is, at times, hard going. In part that is because of the level of detail Bawer offers in support of his argument. But “Surrender” is hard going in another respect as well. Bawer is unquestionably correct, and that fact is quite simply ­- terrifying.

Happy days.

____
[1] Who says wingnutettes and wingnuts can never insinuate themselves into the ranks of the learnèd wikipædiatricians?

Bruce Bawer (born October 31, 1956 in New York City) is an American literary critic.... (...) His most recent book (2009) is Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom. Eliot Weinberger, one of the board members of the [National Book Critics] Circle, when he presented the list of nominations for the award, stated that Bawer's book was an example of "racism as criticism." Following that, the president of the Circle, John Freeman, declared that "I have never been more embarrassed by a choice than I have been with Bruce Bawer's When Europe Slept. Its hyperventilated rhetoric tips from actual critique into Islamophobia." Comments such as those from Weinberger and Freeman came as no surprise, as Bawer was expecting a considerable amount of criticism from politically correct officials, and responded by pointing out that he never criticized a race, only Islam as a political ideology.

[2] A surname to make one wonder irrelevant things, though its bearer is presumably a Brit:

Stephen Pollard, the editor of The Jewish Chronicle, is the author of Ten Days That Changed the Nation: The Making of Modern Britain.

Welcome to Bernieworld!

[T]he June 4, 1967, border is not feasible, but the principle of defining a border on the basis of June 4 certainly is. America needs to offer support, and fast, for a 1:1 land swap to insure that territories allotted to Israel and Palestine are equivalent in area to what existed on June 4. It should appoint a Quartet commission, answerable to Senator Mitchell, to suggest a map. Palestine is not Israel's internal affair, nor will Palestinians ever accept the border envisioned by Netanyahu. Only a new "international" map will reconcile the Arab League peace initiative with the difficulties of moving settlers back into Israel. Sketching a border will bring obvious immediate benefits, such as helping government officials, businesspeople and others on both sides to plan and invest. But it will also help prepare the ground to evacuate those who must ultimately be moved.

There are some proper nouns and adjectives in that prose pudding that sound vaguely familiar, Dr. Bones, but naturally the writer cannot be talking about our planet. Political sci-fi, I guess it must be, parallel-universe stuff.

Evidently "George Mitchell" is the Vespasianus or Titus of Planet Avishai, except that instead of a Roman Empire he commands a "Quartet" endowed with superimperial powers to "define borders" and "offer support" and "ensure equivalency" -- and so forth and so on down through "evacuate evacuees."

A positive John Galt of the diplomatic world is the "George Mitchell" action hero! ZAP!!!

With his Tonto-like "Quartet" behind him, "George Mitchell" is unstoppable--unless perchance some other fictionizer grabs the Avishaian keyboard and manages to write the next thrilling chapter on different lines.

Yet perhaps the current narrative management was aiming at Dean Swift rather than at Miss Rand? Maybe this scrumptious piffle is goal-oriented satire rather than idle fantasy?

Perhaps we (the odious human race) are supposed to wonder why it is that we can NOT successfully behave as if all the world were our conquered provinces unless we actually do, very tiresomely and at great expense, march out and conquer them?

What is it about our Terra, as opposed to the feigned Planet Avishai, that prevents a few hundred thousand charter members of "the international community," journalists and pols and PowerPointers and blogmongers and social scientisers and the like, all the usual suspects!, from designing and implementing and enforcing a real-world Mitchellian Quartet that will then let (or say 'make') everybody--natives and locals and international communitarians all alike--live happily ever after? With, needless to say, each living happily in her proper Quartet-specified place?

I mean, what's the actual hold-up, my fellow Yahoos? Don't you guys want to be Galt-and-Mitchell-worthy Houyhnhnms?

Now, if Father Zeus had asked me for advice on Day One, Dr. Bones, why . . . .


Happy days.

"a wind of 18 months to 2 years"

Headmaster J. C. Manners recently gave us at the Ann Arbour Idiot Academy a stiff pep talk about always washing behind our ears and worrying sufficiently about ‘our’ Afghanistan -- and look what has come of it: no two idiots have a common theory of what ‘we’ are doing wandering about in the wilds of Khorasán in the first place!

The only primâ facie presentable khabar wáhid is second-hand and belongs to Shaykh Pepe Escobar -- not exactly a first-rate transmitter, despite his impeccable tiersmondiste orthodoxy. A second glance at the account indicates it is not the article wanted anyway, though it might do if the unaccountable mucking-about had begun "In the past month." Of course one could always fantasize that ‘we’ knew years and years ago that last month was coming and were trying to get ready. [1] On the other hand, if you believe that, you’d believe anything.

The idiocy about "hell bent on setting back the clock to another epoch, which ... simply should not allowed to happen" has already drawn some fire, so rather than pile on, let’s be perverse and see if we can find a pony in it somewhere.

There certainly do exist folks (off the AAIA campus) who take that line, though possibly it is more a tautology than a profundity, inasmuch as ‘we’ are in Afghanistan (one presumes) because SOMETHING or another "simply should not allowed to happen." The challenge is to think of any one definite ‘something’ that does not apply to forty-six other nations and provinces and administrative districts as well.

This challenge I cannot meet, and, more to the point, as far as I can make out, nobody at Le Club Colonial can meet it either. Take the Commissariat for the New American Innovation™, that liberal, or at any rate bushevik-free, octopus of a thousand tentacles. [2] The violence-professional neocommisars of CNAI go on and on, drearily enough, about their Petræo-McNamaran COIN ("counterinsurgency") product, but they never explain how ‘we’ came to be a Sole Remainin’ Hyperpower awash in a sea of surgency, or spell out why those forty-six other candidates should not get COINed as well. They would rather die than talk policy.

Now it is not only true, but obvious, that ‘we’ can definitely not afford to run the whole world at the same rate per capita of natives and locals that ‘we’ now run [3] Afghanistan and the former al-‘Iráq. The neocommissars, however, are so pluperfectly devoted to Mr. Blake’s notion that "To generalise is to be an idiot," that one will not catch them coming even that close to a statement of High Policy rather than mere strategy and operations and tactics.

Their evasion might pass for humility: violence pros and PowerPointers know their place as hired hands and avoid getting uppity. "Civilian control of the military," don’t you know? Very pretty! -- if only it did not seem so probable that these neogentry are actually making most of the imperial and colonial decisions that get casually attributed to ‘us’ and to poor buck-stopping Mr. Obama. [4]

Our Academy’s esteemed Head has guessed as follows:

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, cautioned that there is hard fighting ahead in Afghanistan. He sees a wind of 18 months to 2 years during which the US and its NATO allies must reestablish as much security as possible even as it trains tens of thousands of new Afghan troops. The window is probably how long the Obama administration expects there to be support for the Afghan war in the US Congress.

That’s not much better guesswork than kiddies’ own, is it? But here, too, one can always do a pony quest, and take the paragraph to be not really a guess about Afghanistan but a satire on Capitol Hill, where one can always count on a couple years of support for anything at all, as long as one relentlessly refuses to explain it.

(( There was, I believe, an eighteenth-century projector who announced "An Undertaking of the greatest possible Publick Utility, but nobody to know what it is." [5] ))

Happy days.


___
[1] Somebody should command the good and forbid Shaykh Escobar to keep working from those delightful Victorian maps of "the vast network of oil and gas pipelines that crisscross the potential imperial battlefields of the planet" that he finds in his Collected Works of Rudyard Kipling.

Another of us id..., of us Kolean kiddies, that is, offered a YooToob from beautiful downtown Asmar in the Outer Khorasánian province of Kúnar. Folks who seriously project fetching petroleum from the Caspian Sea by that route probably favored the plan, mentioned right before the March 2003 aggression, of placing one of ‘our’ aircraft carriers in the Cap so as to have the Beast of Baghdád surrounded.

And Pepe’s, remember, is the BEST kiddie notion going. Kyrie eleison; Christe eleison; Kyrie eleison!


[2] The tentacle du jour calls itself The Center for a New American Security and is not to be confused with, say, The Center for American Progress . And of course not with The Project For the New American Century -- that one is the bad guys.

There are several more neotentacles -- I keep meaning to take a complete inventory but do not get around to it.


[3] There is a strong case for shudder quotes around ‘run’ too. But God knows best.


[4] It’s no worse than any other AAIA guess to propose that the COINsters chiefly need Afghanistan as a sort of sandbox in which to play their Petræo-McNamaran games. But the guess is no better than the others either, because there is no glimpse in it of why our current neogentry should consider that proficiency at precisely those games is urgent and critical.

With their predecessors, the Yoos and Feiths and von Wolfowitzen and especially Viceroy R. B. Cheney, it was at least easy to know wrong what they were up to, viz. that were doin’ it all for dear old Zion. Or, alternatively, to demonstrate their hereditary flair for Big Management.

Whereas the Commissariat of Innovation is blankly inscrutable. As the current Idiot Academy performance indicates, one can scarcely make even a good wrong guess about their knavish tricks.


[5] Not bad for a quotation from memory at several decades’ distance! The exact wording runs "A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is."

As you may read at URL cit. (p. 65), this intrepid forerunner of the Petræo-McNamaran whizkids seems to have made a success of it.

Harrop et Ramázání Frères S. A.

The Performers

American and Iranian revolutionary traditions surprisingly have much in common. When Americans celebrate the 4th of July, they often forget that the core purpose of the famous document penned by Thomas Jefferson was to declare independence from Great Britain. Had the colonies failed in that struggle for freedom to govern themselves, the Declaration of Independence's famous "unalienable" rights to equality, liberty, and life would have been rendered not self-evident. Like America, Iran's 1979 Revolution, had much to do with throwing off perceived shackles of foreign domination. One hundred years ago, imperial Britain and Russia strangled Iran's first Constitutional revolution. Similarly, in 1953, the US CIA orchestrated the overthrow of a democratically elected government. Restoring the Shah to his throne caused subsequent repression to be seen as made in America. (( snip )) Earlier this year, the Iranian and American presidents both stressed the importance of "mutual respect," of recognizing what independence, equality, regional leadership, and freedom mean to both countries. For Iran, an open question is how will it respect its own people and heal the deep fissures recently opened. This need not be a clash of alien values, of America vs. Iran. One hundred years ago, Howard Baskerville, a 24-year old missionary educator, became Iran's American martyr while trying to help Iranians then struggling for freedom. He's still admired in Iran; in 2005, former President Mohammed Khatami unveiled a sculpture of Baskerville in Tabriz's Constitutional House museum. Before his death, Baskerville explained to skeptical friends that "The only difference between me and these people is my place of birth, and that is not a big difference." He was right.

The Critic

...you have picked up ... the slogans of both countries, rather than the historical and cultural contexts and differences .... ["Posted by JES at July 5, 2009 02:55 AM"]

Indeed, indeed, Mr. Critic, but what else is a decent, self-respecting (not to say "respectability-crazed") ‘you’ to do on a purely ceremonial occasion?

Of course it could be fun to break this flimsy butterfly on a wheel, and fun well short of solemnly doubting that the earnest respectabilitators have any adequate grasp of what went wrong in the early 1860's.

Why, I myself could easily get worked up about how an elegant imported article like M. de Ramázání manages to overestimate the ignorance of the holy-Homelanders™. Wombschoolin’ and Niederdümmung have taken a grave toll, doubtless, but can it really be the case that most Yank sweet puppies are unaware that "the core purpose of the famous document penned (sic) by Thomas Jefferson was to declare independence from Great Britain"? [1]

On the fun side, one should cherish the prominent "Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?" aspect of that attempted mass defamation of poor old Sam’s idiot nieces and nephews: Et vous, M. le Professeur, qu’est-ce que vous gardez dans votre boîte de pain? [2]

Have a nice Silly Season, everybody.

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[1] Few things are more annoying than that perpetual comfy wallowin’ of U. S. rightists and neorightists in the supposed wonderfulness -- the ‘exceptionalism’, the ‘indispensibility’ -- of Wunnerful US. But there is another side of the horse to fall off as well. Verb. sap.

It's rather a shame that the good folks who would be most irritated by this little exercise in Selbstelitismus are extremely unlikely to encounter it. Certainly anybody who dwells within the penumbrae et emanationes of Planet Justworld is bound to be well washed in the blood of this lamb already.


[2] Very likely it contains the collected addresses of Th. W. Wilson and M. M. Litvinov instead of anything less nutricious from Pepperidge Farm. La paix est indivisible is especially delicious with bologna and fresh aruguletta and mayonnaise.

"As he wrote a couple of weeks ago"

The most predominant mentality in right-wing discourse finds expression in this form: "I am part of/was born into Group X, and Group X -- my group -- is better than all others yet treated so very unfairly" . . . . Here again we find the same adolescent self-absorption: the group into which I was born and was instructed from childhood to believe is the best [] is, objectively, superior. It is so much better than everyone and everything else that even to suggest that we have flaws comparable to others is to engage in "false moral equivalencies." To do anything other than emphatically proclaim my group's objective superiority is to treat my group unfairly.

And perhaps we ought to have a little of what he wrote only the day before yesterday, Friday 27 June 2009, as well:

UPDATE III: Goldfarb replies ... with the full array of textbook neoconservative platitudes. The only point worth noting is that he agrees with the observation I expressed last night that Goldfarb's views (like those of most neoconservatives) "ultimately come down to nothing more complicated than: what we do is Good and Right because we are superior and because they are inferior." Goldfarb admits he thinks torture is tolerable when we do it to Them but not when They do it to us because -- as he puts it -- "Of Course We Are Superior and They Are Inferior" (that, of course, is the very definition of "moral relativism," which Goldfarb and his allies like to pretend they oppose even as they exemplify its core premise). And -- other than a view that Muslims generally are inferior -- what possible ground is there for claiming moral superiority over the numerous detainees at Guantánamo and elsewhere who, even by the Bush administration's reasoning, were guilty of nothing? (...) Goldfarb's reply is a pure expression of that warped and self-glorifying mentality.

And then there was Señorito Miguelico de Goldfarb

itself. Apart from what Mr. Prosecutor has already been quoted as quoting, there is a little bit of miscellaneous self-wunnerfulness worthy of notice:

... Greenwald thinks I'm guilty of applying a double standard -- concern for the treatment of uniformed hostages and ambivalence toward the treatment of terrorist detainees. Well, guilty as charged. I really don't care about the rough treatment to which men like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were subjected even for the chance of gleaning valuable information. Gilad Shalit, on the other hand, is a uniformed combatant entitled to all the rights and protections afforded by the Geneva Conventions.

Obviously Mr. Greenwald thought and said nothing of the sort. After that ringin’ declaration of self-superiority in its headline, the neocoward chickens out rather remarkably by pretendin’ that the WUNNERFUL US on behalf of whom it self-superioritises is really nothin’ more excitin’ or controversial than WAUC, the World Association of Uniformed Combatants. Sure. Of course. Right!

The señorito elaborates its irrelevant alibi at considerable length:

The United States, Israel, and the rest of the civilized world do not target civilians, do not hide weapons in mosques, do not use our own children as human shields, do not send our own children to their deaths as suicide bombers, do not seek the extermination of an entire race of people. Terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, and the regimes that sponsor them, do. That is why we are morally superior to them, and they are morally inferior to us. And that is also why I'm confident that Gilad Shalit would give anything to have spent the last three years at Gitmo -- playing soccer, watching TV, getting three squares a day -- instead of being a prisoner of Hamas. Because even though they don't deserve it, we still treat our detainees better than terrorists treat theirs.

Everybody must decide for himself, Dr. Bones, but personally I do not feel my pulse rate much stirred by honoris causâ promotion to membership in what a Neocomrade M. Goldfarb is pleased to define as the civilised world. ’Tis a pity, though, that the irrelevant WE into which customers of The Weekly Standard get dragooned on this occasion should be called "the civilised world" and not rather "Western Civilisation." If China and Peru cannot be reliably counted on to care far less for human life than WE do, well, times have certainly changed at Wingnut City! Probably it was just an accident, though: the señorito was, after all, hastily changin’ its standard from a uniformed combatant Wunnerful Us to a civilisation-based Wunnerful US. If suitably cross-questioned, I daresay it would be willin’ enough to include a few Huntin’tonian Clashist™ refinements omitted in the scramble.

’Twas probably a technical misjudgment to stick in "do not target civilians": the Tel Avîv government’s political assassinations are no secret. If this señorito were in a different mood, or in a different polemical pass, very likely it would positively boast thereof. ’That nifty plan is ever so much more cost-effective than bumpin’ off a whole lot of lovely native ladies and cute local kiddies under the rubric of "Damage, Collateral", don’t you know? Anyway, that’s the theory of it at Tel Avîv. And Father Zeus knows best how it works out in practice....

Omitting what the novoseñorito has to say against Jimmy Crater, I arrive at its bottom line:

I wrote that Israeli public opinion was Obama's "best leverage" over Netanyahu. Greenwald may not support Israel, but most Americans still do, which means that withholding or threatening to withhold aid, weapons, or diplomatic support from Israel is lousy politics for an American president, even if it would be a dream come true for Greenwald.

Though it is scarcely a secret that weekly standardisers and commonterrorisers think such threats in private, they do not often actually emit them. Miguelico really ought to have looked at a mirror to make sure it was properly attired to address the Naked Public Square™!

What the specimen actually does in that sentence is rather hard on public opinion in the Tel Avîv statelet, nicht wahr? In what I skipped, it spoke of JC as a ‘dupe’ and "an annoyance to presidents of both parties for decades." A large number of run-of-the-mill Jewish Statists are evidently a Carter-like annoyance to the weekly standardisers: Barák Husáyn Obáma is only too likely to trick them into attitudes and behaviours that must prove counterproductive from the alone true jewishstatist perspective.as promulgated de haut en bas from Castle Podhóretz.

Mr. Greenwald’s "Group X" analysis is admirable as far as it goes, yet when it restricts itself with "into which I was born and was instructed from childhood" it runs off the rails to some extent. Nobody was ever born a militant extremist vanguardite of the Commonterror magazine type. As to instruction, there is no need to assume that Pipes Minor and Kramer Minor and Podhóretz Minor and Kristol Minor and all the rest of the novoseñorito element were deliberately brought up to be what they are like a whole gaggle of John Stuart Mills. No real aristocracy ever worked that way; to suppose it of this sham neoteric crew is perfectly gratuitous.

Indeed, if one were to take "into which I was born and was instructed from childhood" in earnest, the entire Hate-’68 Movement would become unaccountable. The neogentry’s favourite prefix, after all, proclaims that they arrived at their present illiberal and antidemocratic faith precisely by breakin’ with all that sad palæorubbish that they were born into and instructed about. To be sure, now that Hate-’68-ism is into its second or even third degeneration, this is not literally the case with its novoseñorito element. Specimens like M. Goldfarb were presumably born into their self-wunnerful neotericity, but surely they had no need to be specially instructed in it. They will have seen how the servants and the peons defer to their Daddy and drawn the obvious conclusions quite informally and maybe even quite unconsciously, just as (say) a certain Louis de Bourbon had supposedly managed to do by the age of five in 1643. [1]

Happy days.



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[1]

When young Louis was four, his father fell gravely ill with tuberculosis. Knowing that he was about to die, the king ordered that his eldest son be baptised (which normally would have taken place when the prince was seven). At the ceremony the boy was given the name Louis Dieudonné, or "Gift of God," because his birth had seemed so miraculous. Afterward he was brought to his father's deathbed. "What is your name?" Louis XIII asked. "Louis XIV," the little boy replied. "Not yet, not yet," said the king."

The Apotheosis of Princess Neoterica

Thus we still live in an era in which you have to have been wrong to be respectable. You’re not considered serious about national security unless you were for invading Iraq; you’re not considered a serious political analyst unless you spent the last three years of the Bush administration predicting a Republican comeback; you’re not considered a serious economic analyst unless you dismissed the idea that the Bush Boom, such as it was, rested on a housing bubble.

Thus we still live in an era in which Professor Krugman's principal column for the New York Times Company is very weak whenever it lifts its nose from Lord Mammon’ grindstone. The scribble that quotation comes from is admirable, and admirable as political analysis, but its is squirreled away in mere blogghiatura where not many Homelanders™ will see it, even amongst NYTC customers.

Notice that PK is effectively accusing his dimwit respectables of agreeing to solemnly pretend that they dwell in some holy Homeland™ of militant extremism rather than in the humdrum United States of America. His account of HOW the dimwits behave is excellent, but when it comes to WHY they behave that way, he disappoints:

[M]any people in the news media, especially at the managerial level, decided a long time ago that movement conservatism was The Future — and that the sensible thing, whether or not you yourself were a conservative, was to go with the wave. That meant treating right-wing politicians and media figures with great respect, while ridiculing the opposition as the Incredible Shrinking Democrats or the Incredibly Shrinking Democrats, or whatever. And anyone who didn’t treat the right with great respect, who didn’t get with the program, was a flake, a moonbat.

"The sensible thing [is] to go with the wave" is an impeccably polite way of describing selfish ambition and crude lust for Ehre, Macht, Reichtum, Ruhm und die Liebe der Frauen[1], but if Prof. Krugman does not intend us to make that equation that I just made, then what he did intend is hidden in obscurity. Doubtless he did not care to say very much about motivations when it comes to people he has to live with and market his scribbles to.

More worrisome for me is that one cannot make out Dr. Krugman’s estimate of his dimwits’ sincerity. Can the accused really have believed "that movement conservatism was The Future"? I am not sure what the ‘right’ answer to that question would be, whether the dimwits look dimmer as (1) incompetent, but honest, prognosticators, or as (2) shameless cynics and liars. To the extent, though, that PK has them behaving the same dimwit way even after 4 November 2008, one must suppose that notions like shamelessness and mendacity and cynicism have probably occurred to the private Paul Krugman, whether he writes such fugitive thoughts up for publication or not.


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[1] Perhaps it is crude of me to say ‘crude’, though, for Dr. Freud of Vienna attributed these objects of ambition to der Kunstler, not to every Tom, Dick and Harriet that comes down the pike.

The One-Fifth Column Hypothesis

Exhibit A.

Only ONE IN FIVE Israeli Jews believes a nuclear-armed Iran would try to destroy Israel and most see life continuing as normal should the Islamic Republic get the bomb, an opinion poll published on Sunday found. The survey, commissioned by a Tel Aviv University think-tank, appeared to challenge the argument of successive Israeli governments that Iran must be denied the means to make atomic weapons lest it threaten Israel's existence. Asked how a nuclear-armed Iran would affect their lives, 80 percent of respondents said they expected no change. Eleven percent said they would consider emigrating and 9 percent said they would consider relocating inside Israel.

Exhibit B.

Mir Hosain Mousavi was a plausible candidate for the reformists. They were electing people like him with 70 and 80 percent margins just a few years ago. We have not been had by the business families of north Tehran. We've much more likely been had by A HARD LINE CONSTITUENCY OF AT MOST 20% OF THE COUNTRY, who claim to be the only true heirs of the Iranian revolution, and who control which ballots see the light of day.

Exhibit C.

[C1] Barack Obama Democratic Illinois 69,456,897 52.92% John McCain Republican Arizona 59,934,814 45.66% [C2] The voter turnout for this election was broadly predicted to be very high by American standards, and a record number of votes were cast. The final tally of total votes counted was 131.2 million ... [which] ... could reflect a turnout as high as 63.0% of eligible voters, which would be the highest since 1960. This 63.0% turnout rate is based on an estimated eligible voter population of 208,323,000. Another estimate puts the eligible voter population at 212,720,027, resulting in a turnout rate of 61.7%, which would be the highest turnout rate since 1968. [C3 (Analysis)] 0.4566 * 0.617 = 0.2817

It is reasonable to assume--is it not, Dr. Bones?--that only twenty McCain voters in every twenty-eight supported the Fabulous Flyboy primarily because of his Party's militant extremism. Some of J. Sidney’s voters lived in Maine, for instance, and there are lots of other reasons to discount that 28% a little.

The alternative would be to decide that militant extremism flourishes here in the holy Homeland™ more than amongst the lesser breeds without -- a conclusion even my own cosmopolitan deracination would not be pleased to have to draw.

Anyhow, sir, there is the conjecture, all set for Popperian refutation:

Let observation with extensive view,
Survey mankind, from China to Peru:
How everywhere doth Wingnut City thrive,
Yet not beyond one faith-crazed part in five.

This Is Why One Laughs At Them

(B) On religious tolerance, [the President] gently referenced the Christians of Lebanon and Egypt, then lamented that the "divisions between Sunni and Shia have led to tragic violence" (note the use of the passive voice).

No Noah Webster is Neocomrade Ch. Krauthammer! Still, he does let me recycle today's cartoon, because

"Obama Hovers From on High" is how the Washin'ton NeoPost titled the scribble.

Small world!

Happy days.

Gleichschaltung im Morgenland

I find it impossible, Dr. Bones, to think of the Beirut statelet without recalling Patwell's First Social Law™, "The smaller the teacup, the fiercer the tempest."

That is a teacup insider viewpoint, naturally. Miss Alice and the dormouse and the mad hatter and everybody else at the spread are more like to yawn than to rave when some reveler mentions Lebanon: de minimis non curat grex, don’t you know? [1]

Teacup outsiders are far from models of good judgment, however. The infinitely remote superterrestrials at Planet Justworld have recommended the election analysis by M. Qifâ de Nabkí, which we will get to in a moment. Meanwhile, the superaliens and the local boy who went to H*rv*rd, between them, mention various noteworthy dottinesses from further-outsiders, like (1) Obama made them do it; (2) Joe Biden ("who?") made them do it; (3) "Christian animosity towards Hizbullah [&] Saudi money [&] the Maronite patriarch" made them do it; (4) The God Party not really wanting to win accounts for it . . . . And so on.

You can roll your own, Mr. Bones! Something about sunspots might do? Or how about Cedar Flu?

For its own part, Infinite Remoteness LLC appears to have been sadly disappointed in M. le général de ‘Ayoun:

Hizbullah's allies in the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) apparently lost in a major way to supporters of March 14 who are also members of extremely well-entrenched political "families" and ardent supporters of the present system of Christian political privilege.

Come to think of it, though, that is scarcely an explanation. Did the free patriots lose because of insufficient ardour, or merely because of insufficient entrenchment and not enough relatives and clients and retainers? Out at St. Helena galaxy in the immense inane, bias is freely admitted:

The FPM and its leader, General Michel Aoun, had offered a clear alternative to that system, as well as a strong political platform for this election. For those reasons, despite some other other misgivings I have about Aoun (and about Hizbullah), I wanted their alliance to win. Hizbullah, by the way, also supports a "de-confessionalized", one-person-one-vote system in Lebanon.

But thee know how those superterrestrial folks are, Dr. Bones: the Justworldings doubtless suppose that the only ‘bias’ they suffer from is disinterested zeal for good government, for un état libanais laïque [2] that the Vermont League of Women Voters would be proud to have caused.

Before we call on M. Q. de N., we might try an equal-but-opposite dottiness approach: how if the locals and natives took exactly the VLWV and Planet Justworld view of what was at state, but then arose in horror and protest, resolved as 54% of one man person that the very last thing in all the world that they want is "a 'de-confessionalized', one-person-one-vote system"?

Thee heard it here first, sir!

Was it worthy hearing? Probably not, if thee take it for Pol. Sci. and Comp. Gov., but taken as mere humble political criticism and philosophy, I think there is a little bit to it. The superterrestrials are, in a perhaps subliminal and slightly backhanded way, taking The Master's

side here: far out in the St. Helena Galaxy Cluster they pretend, conciously or unconsciously, to care about the Form of neo-Levantine politics. They accuse their opponents, implicitly, of not givin’ a hoot about forms, but of wallowin’ in mere matters.[3]

In the "One man? It depends which man!" mire do the forces of M-14 wallow like swine! And all because the existin’ LB racket gives them more votes per capita than it gives the God Party and their fellow-travelers! [4] Easy to see how that show might look displeasing at a distance of thirteen godzillion kilometers!

The "back-handed" part that I alluded to is this: infinitely remote supraterrestrials have a tendency to believe that their own pet natives and locals object to such disproportionalities entirely because they constitute injustice in the abstract, quite without reference to the fact that it just happens to be themselves who are getting shafted. A little of that brand of backhandedness goes a long way with the Muses and thee and me, Dr. Bones. After all, what could be in more flagrant violation of

travaillons donc à bien penser? But bear in mind, sir, that although this badly thought attitude makes the native plaintiffs and their alien patrons insufferable, it does not make them wrong about either facts or law. It does not oblige us to decide the case in somebody else's favor.






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[1] I only say "more likely." The next statelet south along the coast is not much bigger or much less peculiar, yet down there nobody's Social Rules apply, nobody from Emily Post to Mr. Huntin’ton of H*rv*rd legislates socially for that mob!


[2] Ars longa, vita brevis: Who can spare the time to work out the French for ‘deconfessionalised’? (And then only to talk about LB after one finds it!)


[3] Though I should not care to insist on the point, it occurs to me that precisely because the Beirut statelet is such a tiny and contemptible teacup, considered materially, it may be a very suitable jumping-off point for those who aspire to lift their minds to questions of Form. BGKB.


[4] It cannot be that St. Helena, patron saint of the extraterrestrial justworldly, does not admire her own high-mindedness, but I doubt that she conceives of it as an Aristotelian high-mindedness. The Master smacks too much of lowly Terra for that palate, I fear. Yet pretty clearly she wants to be praised for the tenderness of her sentiments rather than for the solidity of her arguments, which means that the Plato and Parmenides crowd cannot wish to be affiliated with her much more than we do.

Nevertheless suum cuique tribuere, Dr. Bones! Give credit where credit is deserved, even when the credit cannot be comprehended, much less reciprocated.

The Only Real Question (!?)

Q. [R. Fisk] The only real question, perhaps, is whether Obama has asked himself the most important question: does the "Muslim world" actually exist? A. Easy to see what answer this guy wants! And of course he has to be given it: "NO, there is no publicly known reason to suppose that BHO disbelieves in "the Muslim world."

One must gloss and distinguish a little, though: at the moment, Barák Husáyn XLIV Obáma, Chief Executive Officer of Heimatland Gottes GMBH, mistakenly believes in "the Muslim world." But maybe he will learn the sad Fiskean wisdom of disbelief? Maybe he will even learn it reasonably quickly? After all, the Cook County pol may actually be, say, one-tenth as clever as his campaign contributors and his journalists and his publicists and all the miscellaneous groupies and bottlewashers and hangers-on and hopeful parasites make him out, so it would be foolish to write him off as invincibly ignorant and incorrigible.

But we must start from where we are, and that is, as I say, Cook County. A long, long way from salt water. And we must be moderate in our hopes for amelioration, because one would have to be a writer of trashy rightist thrillers to come up with a scenario in which foreign affairs of any sort (let alone affairs of the neo-Levant or the Palestine Puzzle specifically) become more important to this President than (1) domestic economics and (2) domestic race relations. Give or take (1a) domestic health care and (1b) global greenery. Even if the pupil should eventually get to where he can pass Prof. Fisk's examination with distinction, he would still not consider the nonexistence of "the Muslim world" anything like as important as Prof. Fisk considers it. That must remain at best a third-rank sort of wisdom forever. Or even fifth-rank.

Should Muslims and neo-Muslims and their fellow travelers and their area students become bitter that the nonexistence of IslamWorld never does become hot potato #1 for Barák Husáyn, well, what is a rational animal to do but sigh and remark that Cook County is not the only stronghold of provinciality and parochialism and selfocentricity still going strong? [1]

But I get ahead of myself, because there do exist factors that might prevent BHO from ever mastering the Fiskean curriculum at all. Above all, it would be awfully convenient for BHO if IslamWorld did exist, so convenient that it is not difficult to imagine him spending eight years refusing to see through a mistake that ought to be transparent to the perspicuity of a former editor of H*rv*rd Law Review once he has been compelled to attend to the old neo-Levantine mess and the newer Crusade-Against-Terror mess in detail.

I can even invent a (not very thrilling) leftist scenario about it: "After two and a half years of appealing to IslamWorld in vain, Obama spent five years blaming IslamWorld for the unsatisfactory state of his foreign policy maneuvers, when plainly he would have done far better to blame himself and certain other interested parties." Thus (as I conjecture) might a historian of 2094 scribble if she is uncommited as to the existential status of IslamWorld. [2] Mr. Fisk will be one hundred and fifty years old in 2094; I daresay arthritis and rheumatism and another eighty-five years of the same old same-old will have made him far more judgmental than my Dr. Undecided.

Anyhow, that's the scenario, and it will be no great loss to anybody if it remains only a scenario forever.

Happy days.

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[1] ’Tis a mystery (Mr. Moralist pretended) why anybody sane would want the holy-Homelandic CEO job. Possession of Sole Remainin’ Hyperpower™ is absolutely guaranteed to bring zillions of "Drop everything else and attend to ME this instant!" fruits and nuts and cranks and shafts running. As wasps to honey, so they to Barák Husáyn XLIV.

(( Rather a suitable coincidence that "Middle East" abbreviates to the pronoun of the first person singular in the Chicagolandese dialect. Might some superintending [P]rovidence really be in charge of the Casino of Human Events despite almost all appearances? ))


[2] I take for granted, possibly mistakenly, that it will never become flatly impossible to believe in the existence of IslamWorld. "Where there is a will, there is a way" -- a way to Santa Claus’ workshop at the North Pole, for example. And though this is no place to discuss it, the attachment of Muslims and neo-Muslims to the fable of IslamWorld is not simply a matter of ‘convenient’ as it is for BHO and the rest of us denizens of Káfirestán and Dhimmístán.

Even the briefest allusion should stress that IslamWorld is not a formal article of Islamic religionism. Certain neo-Muslims may be trying to make it one, perhaps. More certainly, a number of jihád careerists in the former Christojudaeandom are trying to make it one -- for purposes entirely their own and nothin’ to do with the real McCoy whatsoever. But God knows best about jihád careerism!

Traffic Unbearable

And now! ... Princess Neoterica of Outer Pajamastán will introduce [1] this morning’s principal orator:

Robert Kagan on the new Obama Middle East strategy: “[B]y insisting that the Israeli government not only put a freeze on new settlements but also halt ‘natural growth’ in existing settlements, the administration has set up an unavoidable and possibly unpleasant confrontation with Israel, precisely at the moment it is importuning a truculent Iran. This sets up quite an image: Unclench the fist at a government that daily calls us the Great Satan, while balling up a fist at a longtime ally.” Is is almost incomprehensible, no?

(( Thunderous applause and brachial salutations from the Right ))

The Obama administration is either very courageous or very foolish -- possibly both. I had assumed that in a year in which the administration intended to take a soft approach to Iran, seeking talks, holding out inducements and never discussing penalties, bending over backwards to make accommodations, that it would not simultaneously pursue a confrontational policy with Israel. Such a policy would seem to be more than the political traffic at home could bear. I was wrong. Instead, by insisting that the Israeli government not only put a freeze on new settlements but also halt “natural growth” in existing settlements, the administration has set up an unavoidable and possibly unpleasant confrontation with Israel, precisely at the moment it is importuning a truculent Iran. This sets up quite an image: unclench the fist at a government that daily calls us the Great Satan, while balling up a fist at a longtime ally. There must be a brilliant strategy in here somewhere. But from the outside, it isn’t obvious where the confrontation with Israel is supposed to lead. While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can conceivably put a freeze on new settlements, it is unlikely that he can stop “natural growth” of existing settlements and still hold his government together. Indeed, it is questionable whether any Israeli government could. Perhaps the Obama administration is trying to bring the Netanyahu government down. Regime change! Clearly, this is an effort to shape Arab opinion and show that the Obama administration is more even-handed than its predecessor. But if Israel can’t or won’t deliver, what does the Obama administration do next? If it backs away from its demand, then it proves itself impotent in the face of Israeli intransigence, thus presumably weakening its standing with the Arabs. But if it doesn’t back down, what forms of punishment does it intend to carry out to force Israel’s hand? Will the administration place sanctions on Israel at a time when it is offering to lift sanctions on Iran?

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[1] There have been some shady doin's up the slippery slope at

Castle Podhóretz, Mr. Bones! For reasons inscrutable, Her Neocomradely and Imperial Highness has decided to withdraw Neocomrade R. Kagan's flot or jet from the public gaze.

Imagine me aghast when I went back to get the URL and found that the gem itself had been stolen!

Horizon of Hyperzion

Mr. Obama’s dilemma is that no speech, however eloquent, can disentangle U.S.-Muslim relations from the treacherous terrain of current events in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and the Middle East.

As you see, Mr. Bones, former USA Secretary of War M. K. Albright has excluded Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan and Pakistan from her private mental Middle East, although admitting them to be part of some large unchristened zone inside which human events are currently treacherous.

That hunk of mystery meat and terror terrain would probably correspond pretty well to the vulgar or dhimmí notion of the M.E. (minus the Palestine Puzzle).

Meanwhile, back in the holy Homeland™, this far-fetched long-time fellow-traveler with the militant extremist Republican Party may be about ready to become a card-carryin’ neocomradess:

Democracy’s advantage is that it contains the means for its own correction through public accountability and discussion. It also offers a non-violent alternative for the forces of change, whether those forces are progressive OR CONSERVATIVE

That sounds enough like ordinary meanin’less boilerplate that it may actually be ordinary meanin’less boilerplate, but on the other hand, what has ‘progressive’ ever done for Her Excellency?

And Father Zeus knows best about SECWAR M. K. Albright!

Happy days.

Bizonia Not Yet Ruled Out!

I think two-states is impossible. It's seeming like everyone in Israel agrees. Only Palestinians, and only Palestinians on the US payroll seem to doubt this. But why not begin preparing for the possibility that somehow or other this dream of two states will not happen?

Two states remains a perfectly viable solution of the Palestine Puzzle, as long as one understands "two states" in a hard-nosed and mushfree Wohlstetteter-Rabbîn-‘Inbar [*] kind of way:

[Prof. ‘Inbar] recalled that he had published a book about Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister who concluded the Oslo Agreement with Yasser Arafat’s PLO back in 1993, and said, “Even Rabin’s formula was always ‘land for security’… What Rabin wanted was a tyrant in power in Palestine. But he couldn’t get an effective one.”

Just so. BINGO! Give that gentleman a cigar, Mr. Bones!

Find and install an effective tyrant, and -- hey, presto! there you are. You can have your two states and you can even have one of them be prescriptively Zionistical and democratic (pretty much) simultaneously -- PROVIDED that the other one is a competent dictatorship that can endure.

Empathy fans may not much care for the proviso, but there is no need to agree with them if they cannot get past reciting "Tyranny cannot possibly be competent or endure" as a supposedly self-evident proposition. At the mantra-recitation level, "Sure it can, look at Mubárak!" is response enough. AE calls the Cairo régime "a dictatorship," which is clearly correct, and who can doubt that stamina has been exhibited by it? What a pity for certain interested parties that the good general should not be a native and local of Palestine! (Perhaps there is a cousin or nephew?)

It is plain from the account of the interview that Prof. ‘Inbar thinks that he and M. de Nétanyahou and le parti Lîkoud in general are sitting in the catbird seat at the moment. Not so clear is how he supposes that they will stay there for the next couple of centuries. Still, even an amateur can guess. The easiest and most eligible guess, based on the words here attributed to him, is that Prof. ‘Inbar supposes that sooner or later the strongman candidate that the late Gen. Rabbîn so regrettably failed to discover will turn up and be installed.

Something has to turn up, anyway, if that zillion-times reiterated dichotomy of "Either not a proper Jewish State® or not a proper democracy" is to be evaded. Messrs. les lîkoudiens show every sign of thinking that it can be evaded: could there be something that they know and we kibitzers have overlooked?

Happy days.

___
[*] Is this the same way as that of our holy Homeland’s own Ambassador J. J. Kirkpatrick?

Not quite, because unless I misremember, the GOP neocomradess recommended her ‘authoritarians’ on a temporary basis. Of course as a diplomatic term of art in a suitable context, ‘temporary’ could mean, say, 417 years and eight months, but JJK does seem to have expected her clients, most Latin American, to succumb to liberalism and democracy reasonably quickly.

"Believing they could be led into democracy by example," say the wikipædiatricians , though without specifying any time frame.

(( In the hypothetical two-state Palestine, there would presumably be no pernicious ‘example’ anywhere in the vicinity near enough to become a seriously destabilizing -- that is to say, deauthoritarianizing or tyrannicidal -- factor. But God knows best. ))

O God! O Cæsarea!

Your HTML cannot be accepted: Must be at most 4,096 characters

O Mars! O Machpelah! What is seven hunded thirty-one (731) between e-friends? And why could they not post their e-property in advance?

Well, Mr. Bones, that Cæsarea won't have it does not mean that the Muses and thee must go without. This way I can stick in a couple of irrelevant goodies for print-challenged MacLuhanoids.

... the title of this op-ed, "Obama in Netanyahu’s Web" ... will necessarily enflame anti-Semitism on the web.

Well, of course no person of prudence dare dispute about such a claim until she gets well up to speed on GPCR peptide ligands. ("Who?")

Turning from future necessities to facts of observation immediately at hand, however, it looks as if the portion of the web immediately adjacent to the New York Times Company has minor inflammation problems already.

This keyboard was reading through the comments on Mr. Cohen’s op-ed in its accustomed way, top to bottom by "Reader Recommendations," and was surprised to find that this scribble, the first of a Hyperzionistical tenor to be encountered, came in no higher than twelfth. (As of 05/28/2009 12:41PM.)

The first eleven were all rooting for Team Cohen, some of them rather witlessly. The state of mind that finds it worthwhile to lift a finger to click approval of an analysis like "I agree with your editorial completely" -- item #3 by popularity, #7 by chronology, here reproduced in full -- eludes me. Enough to make you wonder about "Rochester Hills, Michigan" a little, that is!

Myself, I wonder more about Manhattan Island, New York.

After a certain amount of wondering, I have tentatively concluded that we have here no adequate evidence that the New York Times is not still the local Jewish fishwrap in those parts, only that the finger-click approval artists must be a different crowd almost entirely from hard-copy locals and natives [*].

UPDATE: as of 05/28/2009 02:47PM the NYTC management and staff announce "Comments are no longer being accepted." But an attempt to review the data points by "Editor's Selections" still yields "There are no comments in this view." Furthermore, when the race was called because of I-know-not-what, the "JG, Caesarea" effort, #5 chronologically, had risen to tenth place from twelfth.

Could the track management have been afraid the still pretty dark horse was going to sweep on to victory? It seems improbable.

Happy days.

(( Not to dodge the article’s substance altogether lest one look like a craven appeaser: is it really at all likely that Mr. Cohen was thinking of the electronic ‘web’ when he allegedly ventured into political entymology? Indeed, didn’t the arachnoid web come from some NYTC headline editor rather than from the author? Boo-boos of that type happen all the time nowadays. It must be really tough for the gentry to engage competent and reliable servants nowadays!

(( As an Eng. Dept. or Comp. Lit. conceit to toy with, ‘web’ is admirable and right up the present keyboard’s alley. Yet if I were to set up as toyer-with, Mr. Roger Cohen would get no more credit for my verbal plaything than he deserves -- none at all. ))


___
[*] The NYTC flagship publication has recently started to divide like a peptide-crazed amœba

into a "Global Edition" and a "U. S. Edition." For a while it looked as if Mr. Cohen had been banished -- promoted? -- to the former exclusively. Neocomrade Herr Prof. Dr. M. Peretz of H*rv*rd even mistakenly inferred that he had got the boot altogether.

(( I’d supply the reference, except that the software over at The New Republican seems unable to find anything at all in the archives just now: "Thank you for coming to The New Republic! We are still trying to work out the kinks of our new website and ask for your patience while we move all of our content to the new location." Oh, well. ))

In fact, Mr. Roger is still around, and still around in the neighborhood as well as in the Gesamtganzweltall. The only distinction this keyboard can perceive is that he runs third in the Op-Ed Sweepstakes at the breakfast table of Joe Tweedledumbovitz and Archie Bunker, whereas Mynheer van Tweedledee and Mr. Tony Judt are implicitly solicited to read Roger Cohen first and foremost.

Whether or not that fine shade of difference means anything of any importance must await further research, but meanwhile it would be helpful to amateur social-scientisers like the present keyboard if the NYTC were to indicate which version of the corporate product each finger-clicker is clicking about. For all one knows with complete certainty, poor #7/#3 may be a resident of Beirut or the Bronx irrelevantly marooned in Rochester Hills MI when his one-hoss shay broke down.

"a fact of life because of, well, the Americans"

Has Señorito S. de Rosnér learned its political metaphysics lesson -- that 'linkage' is not to be reified -- or not?

About half and half, it look like: the pupil concedes that "It’s a fact of life because of, well, the Americans who believe in it."

Thus the substantive point is yielded. But consider the wistful tone of the concession: Oh, that our philosophy pupil lived on some other planet or in some other universe where facts and life are separated with greater ‘seemliness’! [1] [2] A Planet Beulah where facts are FACTS, goddammit!, and utterly cannot be "socially constructed" by low-life North American liberals and democrats and Democrats. Some blessèd Neualtland where non-linkage is an immutable fact as plain as potatoes and Original Sin [3] and not even in the lowest depths of tribal pond scum and ideological trailer trash can anybody so depraved as to attempt to perpetrate a linkage be discovered.

Alternatively, the señorito nuevo might conceivably settle for parity in linkage here on Terra, a correlation of farces such that the Tel Avîv régime pols have as much right and power to join together and put asunder as the pols of Rancho Crawford and Cook County. This, however, is only an off-the-cuff remark by the present keyboard that begins to look dubious only fifteen seconds after I have scribbled it down, for would not native and (non-Zionist) local pols be instantly wanting to play too if any such rules of the game were adopted? A world in which Islamic Resistance Movements and God Parties can link and dissever with impunity scarcely bears thinking about -- not even to mention the evil Qommies . . . .

On the practical rather than speculative level, though, I suspect the señorito and his ideobuddies will manage to cope. The long-term crisis management proposed by their M. de Ya‘alôn looks about as sure-fire and fool-proof as merely human contrivances can reasonably hope to be.

Its only obvious weakness is the fact that a dhimmí like the present keyboard has got wind of it at all. There is bound to be trouble with those linkage-crazed Obamacrat fiends if a policy of "maintain and strengthen (our) interests while managing the conflict, and working towards stabilization in the distant future" is frankly avowed. The fiends have a relatively short time horizon, not located much farther off than January 2017 at the utmost. Still, to let them know in May 2009 that one proposes to stall them for over seven years can scarcely fail to be counterproductive.

If the Hyperzionistical crew would stop printin’ their clever schemes in the newspapers and just DO them in stealth and silence, however, the prospects for success strike me as excellent. [3]

"Softly, softly, catchee monkey!"

If one takes the Ya‘alôn Plan™ as one’s overarchin’ strategy for Jewish Statism, then the metaphysics of ‘linkage’ will be seen in a quite different perspective than the present señorito’s. If a Ya‘alônite, one certainly does not want linkage and nonlinkage to be brute facts -- it would be absurd to want that. What one wants is for them to be talkin’ points. Furthermore, one ought to prep oneself to talk them either way. To talk them anywhich way that conduces to still more prevarication and delay. To run out the clock on Team Obama with linkage chatter, as it were.

A Señorito S. de Rosnér may well find all this philosophically disquietin’, insofar as it lies at the opposite pole from Rosnerian reification. ‘Linkage’ is to mean no more than Tel Avîv's commissar for foreign affairs chooses that it should mean, and there can be no guarantee that she will not change her mind what that meanin’ is between now and sundown on Thursday. "Everything solid melts into air," as Whazzizname used to say. [5] Though, as I began by noting, the neocomrade does admit that linkages and nonlinkages are not really quite as solid as platinum and potatoes, he is not happy about havin’ to make the admission, and therefore seems unlikely to take to ya‘alônicatin’ with blithe abandon.

I suppose the Hyperzionistical crowd in general will be divided in their feelin’s about linkage-as-prevarication versus linkage-as-fact. M. de Ya‘alôn himself speaks of "strategy," and at the strategic level his superiority over reifiers and wannabe reifiers is indisputable. At any rate, I cannot think of any plausible way of disputing it. Consider: if linkages and nonlinkages be socially constructed, if they are entities that can be invented rather than merely sit there and sog ‘objectively’ as they await discovery, the strategist has a powerful weapon at her disposal that would not be available on the alternative hypothesis.

This strikes me as so obvious a good thing that it overwhelms its own reverse, a negative flip side which does exist but amounts to no more than that what has been constructed by man can by man be dismantled. The nonlinkage between Occupied Palestine and neo-Muslim Iran that Neocomrade S. Rosner and many others desiderate cannot be relied upon as permanent. There may exist no particular reason the nonlinkage should melt into air this week or this month or this year, yet it is in principle a meltable-into-air sort of thing. (For us philosophical and critical Ya‘alônites, that is.)

Here in Greater Anglosaxonia, this peculiar class of evanescent entities may be slightly less alarming than it is to alien outsiders. We have been told, after all, that "Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests." Specifically in the Heimatland Gottes, there is Washington's Farewell Address: "[N]othing is more essential, than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular Nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated ...."

Plainly M. le général de Ya‘alôn thinks so too, although, like Lord Palmerstone, he speaks of "interests" rather than of "feelings" -- language which perhaps makes Y. and P. (very) slightly more reificatory than General Washington was. [6] [7]

Happy days.


___
[1] Could the philosophy pupil be an M.I.T. chauvinist or victim of so-called "physics envy"? A neo-Cartesian, in the sense that animals would be much more satisfactory to Neocomrade S. Rosner if they really were made of clockwork instead of meat?


[2] As ever, ‘seemly’ and its verbal cousins are used with the gracious nonpermission of Her Imperial Highness, Jennifer Princess Neoterica of Outer Pajamastán.


[3] "The ancient masters of religion ... began with the fact of sin--a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or no man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt."

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1909, second paragraph of Chapter Two. (P. 24 of the Googleswipe.)

[4] Mais que sçay-je?


[5] Alle festen eingerosteten Verhältnisse mit ihrem Gefolge von altehrwürdigen Vorstellungen und Anschauungen werden aufgelöst, alle neugebildeten veralten, ehe sie verknöchern können. Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft, alles Heilige wird entweiht, und die Menschen sind endlich gezwungen, ihre Lebensstellung, ihre gegenseitigen Beziehungen mit nüchternen Augen anzusehen. [ p. 465 ]


[6] Considering its date, that Presidential reference to the cultivation of feelings is quite remarkable--almost as improbable as an Encomium to Empathy from the same source would be.

Yet I dare say there is no sound reason to suppose His Excellency had fallen for Jean-Jacques all across the board. Perhaps in Century XVIII feelings were considered somewhat less perishable than they are in 2009? (This is the sort of puzzle that one dearly wishes historians of thought treated better than they seem able to do.)


[7] An objector may object that a ‘linkage’ of issues is not the same thing as an alliance of States. Very true, but I take it that what applies to the latter applies to the former as well a fortiori. An ‘alliance’ or ‘attachment’ looks and sounds much more solidly thinglike than a mere ‘linkage’, does it not? And yet Washington and Palmerstone could contemplated the melting away of alliances and attachments into air with equanimity!

Miller's Tail

Now here -- down to, but not including the neocomrade’s bottom line -- is a cool, clear steel-claptrap mind at work, Mr. Bones!

Here you will find no sentimental folderol leadin’ to wishful thinkin’ that maybe Uncle Sam (and idiot nephew Barák Husáyn) will suddenly reconsider and start singing "Bomb, bomb, bomb / Bomb, bomb Iran!" along with J. Sidney McCain so that the Tel Avîv statelet need not aggr preëmptively retaliate in isolation.

Better still, and better than their M. de Nétanyahou [1] has been able to manage, is the absence of what we may call the Higher Sentimentalism. Neocomrade A. H. Miller does not waste the time of us insignificant dhimmís with crude mob-appeal stuff like "Western civilization will have failed if Iran is allowed to develop nuclear weapons."

You can’t imagine how much it pleases me, Mr. Bones, to find a Hyperzionist who can actually attempt to make his faction’s case without draggin’ in poor old

Western Sieve! I seem to be a tad immoderate on that particular point, sir: why should I become angry at passionate appeals to what I consider a mere figment of self-servicing agitprop in the first place? The intellectual history of Greater Europe exists and is worthy of study: "Western Civilisation" as it emanates from the mouth of hormone-urged Hyperzionisers, "Western Civilisation" as the name of a cause that anybody sane could ever seriously expected to fight or die for, or even merely to drop a few bombs for occasionally -- well, what could be rubbishier rubbish than that, sir? I guess the reason I get worked up about it is not an impartial distaste for rubbish as such, but rather fear that such stuff might actually appeal to the mob. Oh, well!

In any case, it is a pleasure to have no occasion for annoyance on this score with Neocomrade A. H. Miller, at least.

The severe Millerite steelclaptrapness of mind does falter a little at the end, though. It would have been better to omit "Perhaps President Obama too will one day see the benefits of Israel eliminating the Iranian nuclear threat" and the paragraph that leads up to it.

Though I do not suppose the neocomrade himself pins any wishful thoughts on that passage, yet some of his weaker siblin’s might. That is to say, they may unreflectively turn "Someday Sam will perhaps admit that we were right to retaliate preëmptively" into "Eventually Sam must see that we were right, which means that it will all be OK with the Yanks in the long run, which means why not we go ahead this afternoon?" What began as a mere contingency of future fact for Neocomrade A. H. Miller himself would thus become a positive recommendation for the siblin’s -- and also become a wishful thought that they might conceivably not get their wish about.

Perfect Kirkegaardian purity of heart and steelclaptrapness of mind would therefore proclaim altogether unmistakably that "Israel eliminating the Iranian nuclear threat" is a good thing and will be a good thing forever, no matter who does or does not perceive the goodness of it before, during, or after the perpetration. [2]

But God knows best.

Happy days.


____
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200903u/netanyahu


[2] Is the neocomrade obliged to consider now what position the Tel Avîv pols would find themselves if they go ahead and bomb Natanz &c. this afternoon but subsequently find that Sam never does come to agree that they made the right choice?

This is a rather tricky question, it seems to me, and one that calls for protracted cogitation.

Off-hand my inclination is to say it depends on exactly what sort of goodness A. H. Miller attributes to his pet project -- is it an instrinsic goodness or only a goodness of collateral consequences?

Also it depends on how strictly or loosely he deploys the English verb "to eliminate" in formulatin’ it. If one single preëmptive retaliation ensures that there can never be another nuke-you-larry threat to Jewish Statism again, then obviously Sam and Sam’s Barák can be ignored with impunity. But is that scenario likely to be the real-world case? Myself, I kinda don’t think. Mais que sçay-je?

Finally, one must bear in mind that Sam’s reaction after the perpetration would not be an entirely independent variable. Doubtless the unmentionable W*lt and M**rsh**m*r have spoken of this aspect of such affairs in terms that are far too strong, but surely there would at least a small margin of adjustability, so to call it, after the fact. Within limits that we need not specify precisely at the moment, reaction at Washington would be an object of manipulation for Tel Avîv pols and weekly standardisers and common terrorisers et hoc genus omne.

Attaining unto 100% steelclaptrapness of mind and zero percent of sentimentality and wishful thinkimg becomes a very stiff challenge at this point, Mr. Bones. There are simply no adequate precedents to go by. The Osirak preëmptive retaliation is no doubt pertinent to some extent, but the difference in scale probably makes that extent tiny.

Kirkegaardian perfection would be possible, I think tentatively, only if one could predict the worst possible outcome with a reasonable degree of reliability and then decide that the A. H. Miller caper would be worthwhile even at that price. Unfortunately, such a calculation cannot be made. Or more exactly, I have not the faintest clue how to make it, despite reading hundreds of articles for and against Iran-bombin’. It looks as if nobody knows for sure.

Form trumps matter, the Master has taught us, Mr. Bones, and formally speaking, the upshot seems to be that steelclaptrapness of mind is stymied when it faces a sufficiently high level of uncertainty. But God knows best.

"re-evaluate their culture of hate"

Does not that nifty Hyperzionistical "culture of hate" remind thee of Neocomrade H. L. Carr,

Mr. Bones, "Emperor of the Empire of Hate"?

Ammá ba‘da, "but seriously,"

A call from Obama for Muslims to re-evaluate their culture of hate against Jews, Israel and America would not be welcomed by its listeners. However it would be not only an act of intellectual honesty but a step toward the honest dialogue that is desperately needed.

I suppose that is the flip side of the recordin’ made by some GOP genius of the 1950's who thought the Palestine Puzzle™ would go away if only natives and Zionists would "just agree to live together like good Christians."

That will have been cornfed Ohio and Iowa Christians, naturally; nothing to do with exotic Maronites or Greek schismatics or Monophysites who unintelligibly demand to be relabeled ‘miaphysites’.

The philosopher will seize this opportunity to think of Professor Kant of Koenigsberg. She will guess, as I conjecture, that Kant would regard perpetual re-evaluation of one's own culture as the sort of thing that is, or ought to be, categorically imperative. Possibly the very sort of thing that separates ‘us’ from Primitive Endarkenment. And from all the neo-endarkeners.

I take it that the fact that ‘we’ do not much enjoy doing self-re-examinations is a plus inside the system. If the Kantian enjoyed self-re-examination, her motives would probably be impure eo ipso. At any rate, it would be difficult for self-re-examination to pin down what its own motives actually are. When it is quite clear that self-re-examiners did go not into that line of business to make bucks or to have fun or to rule the world, it follows (doesn't it?) that they must be doing it only because they think it the right thing to do.

Inside what remains of Western Sieve, that sort of old-fashioned Prod gush is still not uncommon, though no doubt there exist post-whateverists eager to show that poor Professor Kant had a mind full of invincible ignorances and self-servicing provincial druthers. Those of us who cherish the traditional gush would, of course, respond that at least our hero got as far as disapproving of whims and ignorances and parochialism and selfocentric advantage-grabbin' even if never managed to detoxify himself completely. Diagnosis is not the same thing as cure, but nevertheless there is something to be said (is there not?) for having an inaccurate acount of the disease rather than an inaccurate one, or no account at all?

From this seemingly obsolescent standpoint, the trouble with the above quotation is pretty much that identified by the amateur narrow-bore philosopher of Century XVIII who noted that "Most quarrels about religion are as if two gentlemen were to fight a duel over a lady whom neither of them care for." (I quote from memory.)

Like the natives and Zionists of the 1950's, the current crop either never evolved as far as Kantianism or have evolved past it so far that it is now around the bend behind them. Either way, it is out of sight. With the above quotee, it is not altogether out of mind, though: he still expects to score some agitprop points for his team by recommending the self-re-examination product strictly for export. [1] (On those terms, however, perhaps it is not the exact same product?)

The performance puts me in mind of the cigarette manufacturers making up in sales to lesser breeds without what they have lost at home thanks to Surgeons General of the Evil Fedguv. But that analogy will not ultimately answer, because it is not (as I estimate) the case that Kantianism was ever as widely accepted in these parts as recreational nicotine. But God knows best.

Happy days.


___
[1] Discussion of Islám and neo-Islám by the likes of me certainly deserves relegation to a footnote. Que sçay-je de celà? Still, one must do what one can . . . .

With natives, as opposed to Hyperzionists, there were never any very plausible empirical grounds to accuse them of Kantianism. Naturally the Philosopher is free to take the line that Muslims and neo-Muslims, like everybody else, ought to be guilty, that failure to Kantianise is impairs the intellectual honour of the human race. And so on, and so forth! it would be a pleasure to let that tap run until the tub of rhetoric overflows, yet no amount of elegant Prod gush is likely to make any impression on weekly standardisers and common terrorisers who find the above quotation edifyin’. It is mere waste of breath to try to persuade grown-ups that they may not be very good at telling right from wrong. (And I am not so sure about children either.)

Certainly it is a waste of breath with Muslim and neo-Muslim grown-ups. It is not perfectly accurate to distinguish them from Hyperzionists as having never been through the Western Sieve at all, instead of havin’ been winnowed out by it. At a very high educational (and socio-economic) level, the natives of the neo-Levant have heard of Kantianism. They never, so far as I know, rejected it in some great opus refutatorium such as might have been aimed at the Prussian professor himself, but reject it they did. The late M. Hourani wrote a work called Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798-1939; his title dates the rejection plausibly, even though practical ‘liberalism’ incorporates a good deal more than theoretical Kantianism.

When it comes to the reasons for the rejection, I assume they will have been chiefly historical rather than philosophical. Muslims have always had to live with ‘us’ darkening their door at least remotely, and after 1789 often with ‘us’ right on the front porch armed to the teeth and, for the moment, inexpugnable. They never much liked ‘us’ to begin with, so the chances that they would accept a New Liberal West™ that had definitively broken with crusading and Endarkenment were never high. ‘We’ still looked very same old same-old to them, and anybody with even the slightest residual sniffles of Koenigsberg flu should be able to see why they might think so -- as well as why they were in substantial part mistaken so to think.

It does not help that to this day ‘westoxification’ is a very upper-class disease amongst the natives. The way the assassins of the late General as-Sadát reviled him would be a good place to start looking into that side of il gran rifuto. To what extent religionism sensu stricto comes into it is not immediately obvious. My own guess is that, in the absence of theoretical Kantianism and practical ‘liberalism’, neo-Levantine natives lack any vocabulary with which to discuss justice and injustice that is not faith-tainted. *Grossly* faith-tainted, that is, not slightly tinged with Islám or neo-Islám as Kantianism remains coloured by specifically Christian Christojudæanity of the brand that has called itself ‘reformed’ or evangelisch.

Quâ Kantian, I see that this position is likely to annoy a great many interested parties: (1) The militant extremist neocomrades with their jihád careerists prefer to take the natives’ religionizing seriously ("Seventy-two virgins apiece forever! Yippeee!") and dismiss what I take to be a message about justice than about the quality of anybody’s Islám. Or anybody's shirk and kufr either

But (2) the message-senders are required by their medium of expression to get angry too, for what is to be said of this wretched dhimmí who wants to demote Islám (than which there is no whicher!) to the status of a side issue and even has the gall to coin a vicious slur like "neo-Muslim" on the model of "neoconservative"?

I may (or may not) be on roughly the same wavelength with the President of the United States, for what that is worth. Unfortunately at the critical and philosophical level Mr. Obama's sort of credentials are not worth much. Not worth anything at all, really.

Oh, well.