Concerning the Roach Motel Approach

GOP extremism's clever concept of setting somebody else's house on fire to make sure that some other somebody else does not play with matches anywhere near Rancho Crawford or Château Kennebunkport has now turned out to be even more ingenious than one had originally thought it:

Al Qaeda's command base in Pakistan is increasingly being funded by cash coming out of Iraq, where the terrorist network's operatives are raising substantial sums from donations to the anti-American insurgency as well as kidnappings of wealthy Iraqis and other criminal activity.

What the Harvard Victory School will make of its flagship MBA's latest mischievement is beyond guessing. Although there may be a certain element of "blowback" in the situation described, at the same time, for anybody at all to manage to take money OUT of the bushogenic quagmire seems a miracle of economics, a feat comparable to baking stones into raisin bread. Particularly when the money seems to have no particular connection with either petroleum or the Kiddie Krusade payrolls! Early critics of RoachMotelism foresaw that the creation of Peaceful Freedumbia might engender a new source of moral support for M. Bin Ládin and Dr. Zawáhirí and a source of recruits for The Base, but I don't recall anybody predicting that it might do all that for the bad guys and show a financial profit too.

This story sounds a little too quaint and curious to be true -- a bit too much like witchcraft, even -- and perhaps on the whole it isn't true, in the sense that these "sums" are probably not really so "substantial," not amounts that our economic OnePercenters and their HVS trainers would apply that adjective to spontaneously, were they discussing WalMart, or the hidden price of illegal immigration, or possibly even their own 1040's. When Major Leaker talked to The Los Angeles Times on the telephone, he seems not to have mentioned any definite figures, but let us examine his account of how this small-scale Rumsfeldian lootin' supposedly works so that we may gauge the profit potential for ourselves:

"Success in Iraq and Afghanistan is the reason people are contributing again, with money and private contributions coming back in from the Gulf," said [Maj. Leaker]. He added that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia also has become an effective criminal enterprise. "The insurgents have great businesses they run: stealing cars, kidnapping people, protection money," . . . the activity is so extensive that the "ransom-for-profit business in Iraq reminds me of Colombia and Mexico in the 1980s and '90s."

(Are Columbia and Mexico vastly improved in 2007, then? Perhaps I slept through that news report.)

You'll notice that the LAT gentleman, Mr. Greg Miller, seems to have oversimplified things at the top of his narration. That certain OnePercenters in Sa‘údiyya should be heartened by the progress made in Peaceful Freedumbia and give more generously to The Base on that account is plausible enough, but it has nothing to do with the bread-from-stones miracle. I do not recall whether the critics of RoachMotelism specifically predicted this development also, yet they may have. Probably, however, they did not, since thinking economics first is more characteristic of Marxists and AEIdeologues and HVS MBA's than of mainstream anti-Bushevik thinkers, who are much more likely to mean moral support rather than financial support when they use the noun without further specification. Did the critics of RoachMotelism, or their predecessors, ever worry about exactly how Ho Chi Minh was to find the money needed to ensure that "the people united can never be defeated"? Maybe so, but that is not what we remember Indochina peaceniks for.

If Mr. Miller is a little confused, he is not alone. Major Leaker himself rather muddles together "Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia" and "the insurgents" and "the ransom-for-profit business in Iraq." If we assume that sub-Rumsfeldian lootin' is in fact a promising line for the neo-Iraqi entrepreneur to pursue at the moment, it would be odd if only one band of doctrinaires heard the knock of opportunity. In all probability, some loot for M. Bin Ládin and Dr. Zawáhirí, others loot in the path of terrorism / insurgency / guerilla / muqáwama conceived in terms unacceptable to The Base, and at least a few shabby non-idealists loot strictly for themselves, disgrace to the human race, or likely candidates for Republican Party membership, though such behavior makes them.

As always, Major Leaker's own position must be scrutinized, to such extent as scrutiny is possible. Clearly he cannot be in total sympathy with Boy and Party. If he were, he would keep his mouth shut about a matter which can only be an embarrassment to them. Notice that he speaks of "success in Iraq and Afghanistan" (i.e., success from the viewpoint of The Base or of globoterrorism more generally). Master Tony Snow would not describe the present correlation of forces quite like that. The Crawfordites still consider that they have a monopoly on Success and Victory, although perhaps, given a journalistic knee applied to the groin, they will allow that they have a certain number of "problems of success" as well. Per contra, Boy-'n'-Party loyalists are to consider that M. Bin Ládin and the rest are the exclusive proprietors of Failure and Defeat, even though there may be some postponements of defeat corresponding to the Kiddie Krusaders' problems of success.

Major Leaker dispenses with Party Chinese and says ""Success in Iraq and Afghanistan is the reason people are contributing again, with money and private contributions coming back in from the Gulf" in American English, which is a kindness to the reader at least. It does not, however, locate him on the bureaucratic map or reveal what cause he is leaking in aid of this time. Neither does his mishmash of AQI and "insurgents" and what even a bipartisan commission would agree are plain vanilla criminals. A pious Bushevik would presumably have remembered that she is definitely at "war" with al-Qá‘ida, probably at "war" with all insurgency whatsoever inside Peaceful Freedumbia, but content to resign mere criminals to the wimpy Law Enforcement Paradigm.

I'm not quite sure about the middle ground there, admittedly. Perhaps they don't automatically cancel one's Party card for supposin' that it is up to poor M. al-Málikí to be at "war" with most neo-Iraqi guerilla / insurgency / muqáwama / terrorism. Or perhaps they do cancel it. I really dunno. In any case, Major Leaker thinks it more effective or more accurate or both to lump all the black hats together and revile them as criminals rather than as hostile "warriors," which seems sensible to me but is not strictly compatible with orthodox Bushevismus. It looks as if the good major must be some kind of Law Enforcement Paradigm wimp, in short. He is also in agreement with colloquial English, according to which it would be odd to label "great businesses they run: stealing cars, kidnapping people, protection money" anything other than "crime," and the perps thereof "criminals." Perhaps a normal (that is to say, a non-Party) Anglophone might call such businesses "organized crime," but the chances that he'd ever call them "hostile warfare" are pretty well zero.

Those charitable Sa‘údí OnePercenters can, I assume, be lumped in as criminals also, for even the Great Cardboard Kingdom surely can't be incompetent enough not to have issued an ukase or twenty against any of its subjects sending money to M. Bin Ládin and Dr. Zawáhirí. There may, however, be organs of muqáwama inside Peaceful Freedumbia that subjects of Riyád are not forbidden to assist financially. Or if not that, then neo-Iraqi organs of muqáwama that Sa‘údí OnePercenters may assist without running any risk of being prosecuted for actions that are technically illegal. I'd say "the matter bears looking into," except that looking into it may be quite impossible in the Great Cardboard Kingdom, where the "wink, wink, nod, nod" principle appears to supersede mere Western-style legalism. (No wonder the Crawfordites find the place simpático!)

Returning to Major Leaker, what clues to his identity does Mr. Miller provide?

A major CIA effort launched last year to hunt down Osama bin Laden has produced no significant leads on his whereabouts, but has helped track an alarming increase in the movement of Al Qaeda operatives and money into Pakistan's tribal territories, according to senior U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the operation.

That's the first paragraph, and it sure sounds as if Langley Fedguv University is Major Leaker's alma mater to me, but let's run through the rest quickly,

. . . U.S. officials . . . intelligence officials . . . a senior U.S. counter-terrorism official . . . One former high-ranking [central intelligence] agency official . . . U.S. intelligence and military officials . . . a former senior CIA official who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on condition of anonymity when discussing U.S. intelligence operations . . . Current and former U.S. intelligence officials involved in the surge . . . a senior U.S. intelligence official responsible for overseeing counter-terrorism operations . . . Several former CIA officials . . . one former CIA official . . . another former CIA official . . . .

(I've omitted obvious allusions to the same undisclosed person or persons.)

If the Boy-'n'-Party cowpokers go apoplectic down at the ranch assumin' that every damn spook in the country must have attended this particular Leaker family reunion, they perhaps have reason. It slightly spoils the effect that Mr. Miller does have one identifiable source, but only slightly:

In a written response to questions from The Times, the CIA said it "does not as a rule discuss publicly the details of clandestine operations," but acknowledged it had stepped up operations against Bin Laden and defended their effectiveness. "The surge [of spooks] has been modest in size, here and overseas, but has added new skills and fresh thinking to the fight against a resilient and adaptive foe," CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said in the statement. "It has paid off, generating more information about Al Qaeda and helping take terrorists off the street." (...) . . . [T]he CIA began sending dozens of additional case officers to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The impetus for the surge is unclear. Several former CIA officials said it was launched at the direction of former CIA Director Porter J. Goss, and that the White House had been pushing the agency to step up the effort to find Bin Laden. But the CIA disputed those accounts, saying in its written statement that "this initiative was and is driven solely by operational considerations." The effort, according to CIA spokesman Gimigliano, grew out of an assessment in mid-2005 in which "the agency itself identified changes in the operational landscape against Al Qaeda."

Well, well, "solely by operational considerations," was it, then, and not at all because "the White House had been pushing"? Golly!

Mr. Gimigliano thinks that he can now slight the Boy-'n'-Party crew, and even attach his name to discouraging words about 'em, with perfect impunity. Undoubtedly there will come a time when Crawford is not -- Father Zeus hasten that day's blessèd advent! -- but Mr. G.'s watch may be running slightly fast.

It's no secret, of course, that the bureaucratic spooks do not much care for the Big Management Party cowboys and never did. Or that this ill-will was mutual even before the aggression of March 2003. Even before the Pentagon/WTC attacks, for that matter.

This reciprocal antagonism is very natural. In the eyes of a Harvard Victory School MBA, the most exalted of spooks, James Bond himself, even, can never be anythin' more than a hired hand, one more easily replaceable employee, only a fungibility, never a necessity. The practice of genuine Big Management is far over the head of pygmies like that, obviously, and evermore shall be so.

This is not how the Bani Langley see themselves, although they do make certain verbal concessions in that general direction at times. Uncle Sam's "intelligence community" exhibits a definite tendency to lapse into the fathomless Murdochian insincerity of "We report, you decide" along with its standard mental reservation, "But of course you guys are only so many flaming jerks if you don't decide it the way we reported it." In their hearts they firmly hold out at Langley that Knowledge ought to be Power, and they let their true opinion show perhaps a bit more than is in their own best interest, or rather, than would be most effective in getting the militant GOP stumblebums to do something sensible for a change.

Decent political grown-ups should not allow their warranted disgust with Republican Party extremism and Big Management to cause them to side with the Bani Langley lock, stock and barrel in this quarrel. We are to reflect that someday we shall regain control of the Executive Branch and that it will then be more comfortable and convenient if we do not have to explain that we never actually promised that the Knowledge of the spooks is to be the sole criterion by which we donkeys exercise our Uncle Sam's hyperpower. We don't really mean that, so we shouldn't promise it; we should not even allow ourselves to look as if we had promised Americans anything like that. There must be no cheap and Crawford-worthy narcissistic contempt for knowledge and intelligence, obviously, no more petulant and bratty willfulness, no more reckless hormone-basin'.

Beyond promising America that minimum, however, let us keep all our options open, O donkeys! Any standard dictionary can inform the uninformed that a Democrat is not somebody whose favorite political slogan is "All power to the experts!"

Who Needs a Nation? (as long as she's got oil instead)

Drafting an effective Petroleum Law is, perhaps, the key to ensuring Iraq’s survival as it will be oil revenue that keeps the state together rather than any attempt to build a coherent national project in the short term.

Oh, dear!

It is getting awfully late in the day for the obsolescent and ineffectual brand of paleface planmongering that Chatham House (Prof. Gareth Stansfield) has just added to the heap of. Don Juan Cole, being such a planmonger himself, may find it muy simpático that so grave and august -- so Toynbee-esque -- an institution has begun thinking dangerous thoughts:

Iraq has fractured into regional power bases. Political, security and economic power has devolved to local sectarian, ethnic or tribal political groupings. The Iraqi government is only one of several ‘state-like’ actors. The regionalization of Iraqi political life needs to be recognized as a defining feature of Iraq’s political structure.

Thus Dr. Stansfield begins his nonexecutive summary, quoted in a press release and requoted by JC, with what would be an impressive observation if only it had it been observed forty or fifty months earlier. Three-quarters or four-fifths of this scribble entitled "Accepting Realities in Iraq" turns out to be of interest only to inveterate unreality-basers. If there was any chance that the residual quarter or fifth would include Republican and Blairite extremists, it might be of some use even so. Unfortunately Dr. Stansfield is a strictly orthodox paleface planmonger and therefore begins by tacitly assuming that the good folks who gave us the aggression have all gone extinct by now, or maybe gone to the World Bank. Whatever matters in the former Iraq, he considers, it sure ain't the Occupyin' Power.

To be fair, let us look at his own way of expressing that crucial misjudgment, i.e., the first sentence of his Conclusion (p. 9):

It would be a mistake to believe that the political forces in Iraq are weak and can be reorganized, perhaps by the US, perhaps by the international community.

No cloud without a silver lining: it is at least a little something to have got past the idea that China and Peru and Turtle Bay are going to rush in and fix up what Crawford and Rio Limbaugh have so sadly botched. On the other hand, international realists could have told Dr. Stansfield that as much forty or fifty years ago. Everything involving "the international community" that has happened in neoliberated Mesopotamia has been perfectly consistent with generalizations there was heaps and heaps of evidence for already. It may be nice to get up early once and a while and verify that the sun does still actally rise in the east rather than, say, the westsouthwest, yet one need not rush home to the keyboard to describe one's findings as a brave new acceptance of astronomical realities. Dr. Stansfield looks good on this point only graded on the curve, compared with other vendors of dead-on-arrival plans for solving neo-Iraq.

Dr. Stansfeld does stand out from the left-conventional wisdom, a little, by professing to find the natives' parties strong -- their parties, mark you, not their sects or their "communities" or their "identities." I don't recall hearing anybody say that before. Unfortunately one of the reasons why nobody, not even a dimwit Bushie, says a thing can be that the thing is not in fact the case. I incline to think that what we have here is a certain confusion on the analyst's part. To pronouce that the forces behind the natives' parties are strong would be unexceptionable, though also utterly unoriginal, but that is not the same thing at all as the parties being strong in themselves with a properly parteilich strength. To holler slogans along the lines of "Live and die with dear old Da‘wa!" or "All for ‘Alláwianity!" might get the eccentric enthusiast admitted to a lunatic asylum.

At Chatham House they perhaps consider carrying on like that vulgar and clownish when Labourites and Tories do it closer at hand, and be thus disinclined to take my argument seriously that the absence of such mindless yells for one's preferred political team from the Peaceful Freedumbian scene indicates that there can be no strong parties there. Well, the point hardly matters, since Dr. Stansfield's actual survey of the usual suspects (pp. 6-8) ís framed in terms of federalism, by which term he does not mean worrying exactly how to divide the present militant GOP colony up fairly into SCIRI cantons and Da‘wa cantons and Chelabian secularist cantons and Virtuetite Sadrist cantons and Talebanian Kurdist cantons and Muqtádan Sadrist cantons and ... so on. He means by "federalism" the same thing that Ms. Convential Wisdom means by it. We need not pursue the question of whether that meaning in itself takes for granted that all the natives' political parties are insignificant quâ party.

It occurs to me in passing that Dr. Stansfield may have slightly misstated himself here: perhaps one should decode "It would be a mistake to believe that the political forces in Iraq are weak" into the received banality about how it is now up to the natives themselves to solve neo-Iraq. Alternatively, one might speak again of grading on the curve: though the indigenous political forces be no great shakes considered absolutely, yet when it comes to picking up the rubble in the wake of Hurricane Dubya, they are far more likely to be effectual than Kennebunkport-Crawford Republicans or Blairite New Labour -- or, as previously noted, "the international community" either.

In sum, Dr. Stansfield may be wrong on this issue, or he may be right along with nearly everybody else, but it is highly unlikely that he is both accurate and fresh. I should put somewhat more trust in those stereotyped reports that invasion-language journalists send us from the hotel lobbies of New Baghdad to the effect that the vast majority of colonials consider GZ collaborationist politics a farce or an obscenity: those hack pols keep talking, or taking vacations, but they do nothing to help keep real people from getting killed or kidnapped, or even to get real people a satisfactory supply of water and electricity. Et cetera, et cetera. That is, of course, an imported-from-America template or "narrative," one encountered all the time about donkeys and elephants here im Heimatlande. I daresay the subjects of Ms. Windsor are tolerably familiar with it also. Nevertheless, if such an I-hate-politics rigmarole flourishes in Greater Anglophonia where strong political forces exist and flourish, it seems antecedently probable that it would be a marketable product in neo-Iraq, where such forces do not thrive much better than the electricity supply or the security supply. But God knows best.

Onward! High time we discuss Dr. Stansfield's views on petroleum as Ersatz nationalism:

Drafting an effective Petroleum Law is, perhaps, the key to ensuring Iraq’s survival as it will be oil revenue that keeps the state together rather than any attempt to build a coherent national project in the short term. However, the Petroleum Law is tied closely to the future of federalism. In the absence of an agreement over the nature of federalism, the negotiations over the Petroleum Law have been characterized by mistrust, brinkmanship and, ultimately, failure. For the Sunni Arab negotiators, the situation is very simple: the oil resources of Iraq are for the benefit of all Iraqis and, as such, should be administered by the Ministry of Oil in Baghdad, with the revenue also distributed centrally. In this model, there is no room for the involvement of regional governments such as the KRG, or a Basra-centred entity. This tension has led the Ministry of Oil, on several occasions, to announce the passing of a centralized Petroleum Law, only for the announcement to be dismissed by the Ministry of Oil and Natural Resources in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Region. The Kurdish position follows quite closely the stipulations outlined in the Constitution of Iraq. Central government is to maintain responsibility for administering the resources already established (including the Kirkuk and Basra fields), and also for distributing revenue across the state. However, according to the Kurdish interpretation of the constitution, regional governments are responsible for the management and administering of ‘new’ fields within their territory, and for then undertaking the distribution of revenue within the region and, by agreement, to the Iraqi government. However, the details of how this will work have not been agreed and Sunni negotiators remain adamant that the Petroleum Law is one area of the Constitution that has to be renegotiated in order to ensure their cooperation in the National Assembly. Emphasizing their strength, the Kurds have proceeded to negotiate exploration contracts with international oil companies. Several have already been signed, with small, risk-taking companies, much to the consternation of Baghdad. Disagreements over the Petroleum Law have broken out regularly in 2007. In January, Iraqi Oil Minister Hussein Shahrahstani announced that a law had been passed requiring all Iraqi oil operations to be administered by the Ministry in Baghdad, irrespective of what region they happened to be located in. The response from the office of KRG Prime Minister Nechervan Barzani was predictably swift. It rejected Shahrahstani’s announcement and stated that the Constitution gave the Kurds the right to administer their own fields. Barzani also raised the subject of utmost sensitivity to all Iraqis – the future of Kirkuk. While this conflict appeared to have been resolved, further disagreements broke out in early May, with Kurdish and Sunni officials objecting to the law for different reasons (the former objecting to the detail of the important annexes, and the latter objecting outright to the existence of the law) and threatening to derail the entire process.

I think maybe I'll demand my money back from Chatham House. That's an admirable review of the bidding, but where is the advice about play of the hand? How is St. Petrolaeus to go about "ensuring Iraq’s survival," exactly? Instead of learning about that, the Chatham House customer is treated to a gloom-and-doom dissertation on Kirkuk (p. 7-8) that culminates in

Kirkuk, federalism and oil, combined with the security concerns, the targeting of Iran and the implementation of US policy in Iraq and the wider region, all come together in 2007, creating the likelihood that the situation in Iraq will get much worse before it can get better. Many different agendas, processes and forces will converge in the near future, making it more likely that Iraq will lurch from crisis to crisis in 2007 than enjoy improved security and follow a constructive political process involving dialogue among its communities. Feeding into these developments will be the regional powers of the Middle East, and particularly Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

After that comes a (seriously incomplete) discussion of how regional powers might conceivably decide to muck about in Mesopotamia. Dr. Stansfield seems to consider that his own pet scenarios about the day after tomorrow also count as "realities" that require to be "accepted." He does not advise us whether we must accept everybody else's pet scenarios also.

Finally, the Conclusion, p. 10-11, which may as well be swiped in toto:

It would be a mistake to believe that the political forces in Iraq are weak and can be reorganized, perhaps by the US, perhaps by the international community. While no single party exercises authority over the state as did the deposed Ba‘th, it is an underestimation to describe the current power-holders in Iraq as merely ethnic-sectarian entrepreneurs keen to exploit the situation for their own communal, even personal, benefit. The parties are now, without exception, sophisticated organizations with segmented political and military structures, highly developed ties with neighbouring states and ever-deepening roots in Iraqi society. The government of Nouri al-Maliki has struggled to bring control to the streets of the cities of Iraq. Many of these, including Kirkuk, Mosul, Baqubah, Samara, Ramadi and Basra, have become lawless theatres of inter- and intra-sectarian and inter-ethnic violent conflict. They have fallen out of the orbit of the Iraqi government’s control and instead succumbed to the power gained from the barrels of the guns of whichever group manages to dominate a particular area. Only the Kurdistan Region remains unaffected by the civil wars gripping the rest of the country, but it remains threatened by violence as disagreements in the ‘disputed territories’ of Sinjar, Mosul, Kirkuk, and Mandali all bring Kurds into conflict with their neighbours. Contrary to the initial hopes of policy planners in Washington DC and London, it seems likely that the reality of the regionalization of Iraqi political life – which is in effect a manifestation of identity-based politics – will have to be accepted as a defining feature of Iraq’s political structure. It will need to be worked with rather than opposed. In pursuing such a strategy, military force in the form of surges cannot deliver the critical political accommodation. Only by engaging with leaders and organizations that possess some degree of credibility and legitimacy among local populations can there be any chance that a political solution built upon negotiations between communities can provide a basis for a strategy resulting in the stabilization of Iraq. This recognition and ‘bringing in’ of such leaders can be undertaken by foreign interlocutors but would have a much greater chance of succeeding if prominent Iraqi leaders were seen to be involved. Many of them already are, but in a ‘behind-the-scenes’ way. The process of engagement now needs to be public and transparent.

(More review of the bidding, no play of the hand, no trace of St. Petrolaeus. There is only one paragraph left, so it had better be spiffy!)

The three aspects of this approach are simple enough: find Sunni Arab representatives to participate in government; recognize Muqtada al-Sadr as a legitimate political partner; be more responsive to Kurdish concerns. These approaches should colour any actions taken either by the US or by the Iraqi government as policies are formulated and specific actions planned. Meetings such as at Sharm al-Sheikh in early May 2007 proved that the solution to Iraq is to be found inside Iraq itself. While it is obvious that neighbouring powers have interests in and take actions inside Iraq, their support for any particular approach can only assist the stabilizing of Iraq if Iraqis themselves come to some form of accommodation with each other. In effect, Iraqi solutions will need to be found to Iraqi problems. These solutions will then need to be supported by regional powers and the US. Devising US or regional solutions according to the players’ own interests, and imposing them upon Iraq, has been tried and has only served to destabilize the situation further.

==

Oh, well! We never do hear how the blessèd St. Petrolaeus is slated or fated to smooth the sailing towards ""a coherent national project," and it looks as if Dr. Stansfield does not know anything more about that shadowy scenario himself, for all that it's his own, or Chatham House's, brainwave.

A couple of recensions back, Professor Cole was peacegaming that the Arab Sunnis ought to be given double the oil revenues of mere Kurds and Twelvers, a scheme which, although politically absurd, at least had the merit of being clear and distinct. Unfortunately it also took for granted that only the Arab Sunnis require to be pandered to, whereas Dr. Stansfield adds two more panderees, the Sadr Tendency and the Free Kurds.

One is tempted to call it effrontery when this paleface planmonger announces that this three-headed monster of his is "simple enough," but perhaps self-restraint is in order, for one may charitably fantasize that Dr. Stansfield only considers that his modest recommendation is simple to state, and prescinds from offering any hasty judgment about implementational difficulties that might possibly arise.

Had he trimmed the Chatham House product down to a One Point Plan and said no more than "Go 'find Sunni Arab representatives to participate in government'!," the reader might take Gareth Stansfield for a Jonathan Swift wannabe and the clever spoofing as equivalent to "Let's start by simply assuming that the North Atlantic has beeen converted into soda water . . . ." But since he tacks on the other two items, he is all but certainly quite serious.

Oh, dear!

In Sultan Jerry's Golden Days

First let us have the teller's boss, and the teller's tale only afterwards.

The employers of M. Nír Rosén are very broad-minded, as corporations go. Not only do they allow him to sell some of his best journalism stuff on the side, they even praise it and direct attention to it when he does so.

That may be what is going on here, but it is also possible that that the management and staff of Slogger City found the following specimen a bit too editorial for their business plan to endure. Like Rupert Murdoch, they would no doubt ideally wish everybody to buy their wares. But considering the nature of the wares they vend -- inside information on the condition of the former Iraq under the yoke of Crawford, especially information about 'security' for foreign ventures of capital -- one appreciates why their actions might be somewhat constrained. Assume the op-ed pages of all Citizen Murdoch's trophies expounded the political views of Mr. George Soros and that the press baron actually allowed them to do so for some unaccountable press-baronial reason of his own. Even in that fantastic case, Dr. Murdoch could reflect that newspapers and picture media will always be in demand, even should the whole Anglophone world fall to the doves and the donkeys. Whereas if (irresponsible) withdrawal of militant GOP forces from neo-Iraq ever really happens, who will be left to pay to have the joint slogged for them? Mr. Soros? The United Nations? The postneoliberated natives, even? These are improbable candidates. Either they would not need the slog product, or they could not afford it, or they would not trust the present crew to do the slogging for them.

Money being money, it is conceivable that the Slogger City management and staff might all thoroughly agree as mere animal individuals with the views expressed by M. Rosen (not to mention the tedious natives again). They may clearly perceive that the Big Management Party's conquest and occupation of neo-Iraq has been an incompent racket, they may judge privately that such a racket would have been wrong even if competently conducted -- but what have these things to do with trying to make a buck or two out of the quagmire while it lasts? Under the circumstances, it would positively be biting the Invisible Hand to allow a general impression to develop that everybody at Slogger City agrees with M. Nir Rosen. Far better he should send it off to the Washington Post! Perhaps there was a slight sigh of relief in the boardroom when they saw M. Rosen safely identified without reference to themselves:

Nir Rosen is a fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq.

As an unprofit organization, I daresay this 'New American Foundation' does not need to worry about such things the way any responsible corporate sloggerdom must, and for all I remember to the contrary, the NAF may be hopelessly tarred by association with doves and donkeys already.



The bosses' praise and attention-directing is of considerable interest in its own right:

IraqSlogger's Nir Rosen pens a scathing rebuttal to Paul Bremer's earlier op-ed in the Post, and one of those rare pieces in Iraq journalism that does not take sectarianism at face value.

Perhaps we cheapskates should receive that as an accidental tidbit of info usually made available only to paid-up subscribers. Do the management and staff of Slogger City make sure that every time a prospective customer shows up at their door, he hears something like "You must understand, Dr. Warbucks, that what the papers keep saying about sectarianism in Iraq is not at all to be taken at face value."? It seems likely enough that they might. Warbucks Enterprises Inc. would presumably not require their consultancy if there was avowedly nothing to it that could not be found in, for instance, the Washington Post. At very least, the sloggers must offer something different, and furthermore must assure their customers that the Slogger City product is not only different from, but better than, the MSM product. (Whether it really is so remains another question, of course. Caveat emptor.)

For that matter, Dr. Warbucks already has the Slogger City account of the MSM account of neo-Iraq for nothing, just like us cheapskates. One of the implications of that is immediately relevant to our own quest: the management and staff would be asking for sales resistance on Warbucks' part if they did not themselves believe it to be really the case that the so-called sectarianism of the militant GOP's neo-Iraqi subjects is not simply what it appears to be at first glance. They cannot be inviting their marks to make objections such as "But didn't you folks just say on your website that . . . ?" Well, actually they could be doing that, but one supposes they possess enough Adam Smith savvy to know better.

So then, now that we have established not only that corporate and official sloggerdom recommends M. Nír Rosén and his sentiments on 'sectarianism' but that it almost certainly does so sincerely, what exactly are those sentiments? The word itself does not appear. The following passages seem pertinent, and are to be read in light of the fact that the whole scribble is framed as an anti-Bremer tirade. All opinions attributed to Sultan Jerry are ex officio erroneous and damnable:

Time and again, he refers to "the formerly ruling Sunnis," "rank-and-file Sunnis," "the old Sunni regime," "responsible Sunnis." This obsession with sects informed the U.S. approach to Iraq from day one of the occupation, but it was not how Iraqis saw themselves -- at least, not until very recently. Iraqis were not primarily Sunnis or Shiites; they were Iraqis first, and their sectarian identities did not become politicized until the Americans occupied their country, treating Sunnis as the bad guys and Shiites as the good guys. There were no blocs of "Sunni Iraqis" or "Shiite Iraqis" before the war, just like there was no "Sunni Triangle" or "Shiite South" until the Americans imposed ethnic and sectarian identities onto Iraq's regions.

Perhaps it is only an inadvertance that M. Rosen's opening salvo of polemical buckshot gives the impression that the accused was not so much obsessed with sects, as obsessed with (Arab) Sunnis in particular. Perhaps it is more than an inadvertance.

The qualifier "at least, not until very recently" leaves one in some doubt as to what M. Rosen would say in a stand-alone account of his own position. Perhaps there is no politically significant sectarianism in "Iraq" even on Wednesday 16 May 2007? Perhaps there is lots of it, but all developed under the Republican Party invaders and occupiers? (Perhaps sectarianism snuck in under Neocomrade Paul Bremer's very own overcoat, as it were?) We'll need to read a bit more to be sure about the current state of affairs, but M. Rosen seems perfectly certain that sectarianism was effectively unknown under the Ba‘th. Onwards!

Many Iraqis saw the Americans as new colonists, intent on dividing and conquering Iraq. That was precisely Bremer's approach. When he succumbed slightly to Iraqi demands for democracy and created [an] Interim Governing Council, its members were selected by sectarian and ethnic quotas. Even the Communist Party member of the council was chosen not because he was secular but because he was a Shiite.

(Thank goodness the poor indig wasn't chosen for being a Commie! What would the AEIdeologues have said if he had been?)

Again, M. Rosen's own analysis is not easy to discern. He doesn't quite say that our neo-Iraqi subjects were right to think what they thought, or that Sultan Jerry actually managed to impose conquest-by-division upon them, as opposed to making only an "approach" to doing so.

But let's not linger, for here comes The Biggie:

In Bremer's mind, the way to occupy Iraq was not to view it as a nation but as a group of minorities. So he pitted the minority that was not benefiting from the system against the minority that was, and then expected them both to be grateful to him. Bremer ruled Iraq as if it were already undergoing a civil war, helping the Shiites by punishing the Sunnis. He did not see his job as managing the country; he saw it as managing a civil war. SO I ACCUSE HIM OF CAUSING ONE.

Emphasis added, obviously. That thunderbolt answers most of the questions M. Rosen was leaving open. Certainly it can not be accounted successful Big Management according to the traditional divide et impera school to produce a civil war instead of, say, a tamed and sullen populace such as Lord Cromer managed to achieve in Egypt, or even the less adroit French in Syria and Morocco, but that is what M. Rosen tells us that Sultan Jerry did in the former Iraq. Jerry did it on purpose, furthermore, at least as regards the dividing and conquering part, though presumably not the civil war part.

I fear this tale does not altogether recommend itself to me. President Lincoln was joking when he called Harriet Beecher Stowe "The little lady who caused this big war," but M. Rosén does not seem to be joking at all, he believes in his J'accuse! as passionately as M. Zola in the original product. To make this one, personally negligible, middle-rank Boy-'n'-Party neocomrade responsible for the whole vast bushogenic quagmire betrays a certain lack of proportion. Still, M. Rosen does not claim that the accused was solely responsible, or even claim that the D&C policy was little Jerry's own idea. We thus remain up in the air to some extent.

Passing over whether "At least a third of the famous deck of cards of Iraqi leaders most wanted by the Americans were Shiites" establishes that the ancien régime was really a paradise of unsectarianism, let us leap to M. Rosen's peroration:

Some have indeed pilloried Bremer for his individual errors, such as disbanding the army. But these blunders are not the reasons why most Iraqis hate the American occupation and support violent resistance to it. The main grievance most Iraqis have with America is simply the occupation itself -- an occupation that lingers on years after Bremer waved goodbye.

The bottom line is so true as to be a truism, but I cannot say that M. Rosen does anything but make his own position murkier than ever with the paragraph as a whole. If we are to understand that the Crawfordite extremists should have marched their triumphant military hired hands back home in the summer of 2003, that would be close to a truism also, I'd say, -- but unfortunately it is indeed I who say it, not M. Rosen. If he had said it, I'd complain that he really ought to add a little bit more to explain why the Big Management Party stumblebums in fact did nothing of the sort.

==

With Rupert Baron Murdoch we began, and with him we may end. Considered as a report of what most neo-Iraqi subjects think at the moment about their lords and masters down at Rancho Crawford, I hereby officially decide that this performance will serve well enough. Considered as an account of the Big Picture, however, or even only as a speech for the prosecution in the case of Decency v. Paul Bremer, it is pretty sad stuff.

I decide so despite agreeing with M. Rosen's basic dovishness and having profited from the Green Bird book. When he tells us what (Arabophone) indigs under the Occupyin' Power say and think, he can be very good -- although not perhaps altogether excellent, for competent authority has advised me that M. Rosen probably cannot read standard Arabic with any readiness, despite his Iraqi colloquial. Assuming that this supposed limitation actually exists, it sets an appropriate limit on how far to take M. Nir Rosen altogether seriously.

When it comes to his Zola impersonation -- undoubtedly the most striking part of this scribble -- that canon would mean that one may safely believe that quite a number of former-Iraqis think some such thoughts as these that M. Rosen has signed his own name to at the Washington Post, but that one should look elsewhere before deciding whether they and he are well advised so to think, let alone whether what they and he think is the way the occupied "Iraq" really is.

As to sectarianism, it seems permissible to speculate that certain neo-subjects might find the real and present yoke of Crawford so disagreeable that they honestly, or at least sincerely, misremember what they equally sincerely used to think about Saddám and all that. I've undoubtedly made that mistake myself and suspect that it happens commonly enough.

But God knows best.

SIIC semper tyrannis!

It is time for some Confucian rectification of names, Mr. Bones.

That invasion-language acronym being absurd, what shall we call this parcel of rogues? Perhaps Hakimites might do provisionally? Or else just keep on reiterating that SCIRI is scarey? The latter is probably what the Green Zone lounge lizards of the MSM will do. The Hakímiyya made the announcement that they were dropping "revolution" from their prospectus a number of months back, as a matter of fact, but if that development eluded the perspicacity of a M. ‘Amr Muhsin, who presumably thinks in Arabic, 'tis no wonder that Uncle Sam's hotel-lobby journalists never heard of it at all.

At the time, I recall wondering exactly what would be left in the vernacular after the Rev. decided to miss out his revo. It looks like Al-Majlis al-‘Ulá al-’Islámí al-‘Iráqí is it. Not very happy, I fear, in that form either: Mím ‘Ayn ’Alif ‘Ayn might do to portentously introduce a súra with, but that jumble can scarcely be a clever acronym like al-Hamás. M. Muhsin's reportage drags in James Madison quickly enough, but perhaps the Supreme Counselor himself should talk to somebody on Madison Avenue about the little details of packaging his product.

In English I should prefer to keep the grammatical structure of SCIRI, "The Supreme Council for Iraqi Islamism," but then, "Islamism" is jargon that begs to be mispronounced at Rio Limbaugh, and "Supreme Council for Islamic Politics in Iraq" would probably be open to ideology-based objections from the Hakímites themselves. Probably they rather like what they came up with because it fudges the question of whether their Iraquitas takes precedence over their Islamicitas or vice versa. However from a Madison Avenue point of view that little ploy will not get them very far either, for of course the TwentyPercenters and the Sunnintern and indeed, most street Arabs worldwide, do not much care for the Hakímites' Islamicity in the first place.

But I perceive that I have transgressed the border between words and things here and that therefore we must hear from M. Muhsin about the thing side of it all:

Pan-Arab al-Hayat reported on a press conference that was held in Baghdad by the leadership of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC - formerly SCIRI) to announce and comment on the latest changes to the party’s platform. A statement read by SIIC’s leader, 'Abd al-'Azeez al-Hakeem, confirmed earlier reports claiming that the powerful Shi'a party has decided to change its name and, more importantly, proclaim Ayatollah Sistani as the party’s main spiritual authority. SIIC occupies 30 seats in the Iraqi parliament and is, along with the Sadr Current, the largest player in the ruling Shi'a coalition. Al-Hakeem reiterated the argument claiming that the removal of the term “revolution” from the party’s name is due to the ousting of Saddam Husain “which made ‘revolution’ an outdated term,” al-Hakeem said.

Could M. ‘Amr Muhsin be out to guy the Rev. al-Hakím? – "Look, it has only taken His Worship four years to notice that Saddám is gone!" etc. etc.? An interesting question, but not an important one. It does matter, though, whether M. Muhsin seriously considers that between them the Sadriyya and the Hakímiyya dominate the quasigovernment of poor M. al-Málikí, who has not the honor to belong to either the one faction or the other. Furthermore, it matters that M. Muhsin seems to know about such questions only from reading the London papers. It would be nice to have BritSlogger too, no doubt, but that would be a different line of enterprise all the same. (Why on earth was M. ‘Amr Muhsin not present at the Rev. al-Hakím's press conference in person? Didn't they invite him? Did they perhaps not even inform him that it was happening? What's going on here? Would you buy a used slog from this guy? One must always bear in mind that the whole Slogger City web fandango is basically a come-on designed to lure potential mercenaries and/or investors to purchase inside information about the state of the colony from their corporation. M. ‘Amr Muhsin looks to be letting his team down just a little ….)

We are here to discuss native politics, though, not private-sectorian schemes of enrichment. To begin with what is perfectly clear, the Rev. al-Hakím is no revolutionary vis-à-vis the existing quasigovernment of poor M. al-Málikí. Beyond that, however, things become murky quick. Do the Hakímiyya support the GZ status quo in the same sense that the Sadriyya support it? Presumably not. After the mass resignation of their quasiministers, the Sadriyya must be accounted somewhat less supportive, or so it would be natural to suppose. But then again, maybe not. At the time the Sadrists took a rather implausibly lofty tone about that move, making out that they were doing poor M. al-Málikí and "national" "reconciliation" a favor by stepping out of the way and thus setting a good example for the others. That sounded a bit too good to be true, but it could be true all the same, and the Sadriyya may conceivably have made a secret deal with the President of the Council of Quasiministers that makes them really even farther inside than the Hakimites are.

On the basis of the London press, M. ‘Amr Muhsin speaks of "more importantly, [to] proclaim Ayatollah Sistani as the party’s main spiritual authority." As regards that point, I'd guess that rank-and-file Sadrites and Hakimites are on a par, it being news to both of them that His Eminence of Najaf has not been their guru-in-chief all along. Certain factional insiders and operatives may have made mental or ideological reservations on behalf of Cardinal Khamenei at Tehran or Cardinal al-Há’irí at Qom, but they do not seem to have gone public with that sort of potentially divisive argumentation. To bring in some additional players, the traditional position of poor M. al-Málikí's faction, the mainstream Da‘wa, has been not to want any political guruship at all. And then there is the Islamic Virtue Party, which, as a cynic would expect from such a name, seems to be entirely out for power and plunder, despite the nominal guruship of Cardinal al-Ya‘qúbí. Finally it can be speculated with a high degree of confidence that such neo-Iraqi Twelvers as belong for political purposes to the rootless cosmopolitan or "secularist" community are muqallidún of the Rev. al-Sístání, but do not propose to take political advice from him or anybody else who wears a turban.

That is five factions, to each of which one might apply the further ecclesiastical-political ruminations of M. ‘Amr Muhsin:

SIIC’s move away from Khamena'i’s umbrella may have surprised observers (formerly, SCIRI’s constitution noted that the party follows the leadership of the institution of Wilayat al-Faqeeh, currently headed by Ayatollah 'Ali al-Khamena'i) especially that many of the core activists of SIIC consider themselves loyal followers to Ayatollah Khamena'i, but there are several facets to the issue. On the one hand, only a fraction of Iraqi Shi'a follows Khamena'i and adopts his theory of Wilayat al-Faqeeh. No accurate statistics exist to confirm this opinion, but many observers consider Ayatollah Sistani to be the most widely followed religious authority in Iraq. At the same time, SCIRI was founded in Iran, and hosted by the institution of the Iranian Revolution. SCIRI’s early membership mainly consisted of Iraqis who fled to Iran, in the hundreds of thousands; many of whom sympathized with and supported the revolution and, as a result, followed the institution of Wilayat al-Faqeeh. After the fall of Saddam’s regime and the return of many Iraqi exiles from Iran, a clear gulf was noticeable in the party’s ranks between those who returned from Iran propagating a Khomeinist version of activism, and SCIRI’s local supporters who felt alienated by the unfamiliar loyalties of their peers. The same applies to the larger Shi'a public, Sadrist and Fadhila supporters also tend to follow Sistani; and Sunnis often critiqued the “Iranian” iconography of SCIRI and frequently accused the party of being a tool for the Iranian clerical establishment. In that sense, SIIC’s decision to distance itself from Khamena'i may be a well-calculated stratagem to promote the party among the Shi'a populace.

Again, M. ‘Amr Muhsin is sound enough on what scarcely anybody denies, that the vast majority of the GOP's Shí‘í subjects in neo-Iraq follow al-Sístání on the strictly ecclesiastical front. Beyond that, he gets himself into trouble at once: Cardinal Khamenei's current wiláyat al-faqíh is not the same as Cardinal Khomeini's first draft of it, and then the former SCIRI's official ideology is distinguishable from both of the above. Even if all three of these were exactly the same, as they are not, wiláyat al-faqíh would remain the name of what M. Muhsin himself refers to as "an institution," which means that doctrinaires who agreed on everything else in detail could still diverge about the name of their walí.

This pudding becomes really interesting when one reflects that His Eminence of Najaf does not believe in the WaF institution at all, which seems prima facie rather like the RC's somehow finding themselves stuck with an anti-papistical Bishop of Rome. The analogy cannot be pressed, of course, because unless one gets it straight that the whole WaF business is a recent innovation, though perhaps a development adumbrated to some extent before the Rev. Khomeini came along, one does not know enough about the matter to begin to be dangerous. M. ‘Amr Muhsin does not point this out, an omission which must signify either that he is not aware of it himself or else that he does not consider it particularly significant. Either way, he and his corporation are most likely not the best place to look to for a book called Inside Neo-Iraq. Or even Neo-Iraq for Dummies.

Cole Oil

When you can't be sensible yourself, at least it is nice to know somebody is better at it.

[T]here is another corner of the petroleum bill that is often misreported. It has to do with the weakness of the central government and the power of the provincial confederacies or "Regions." An informed observer of Iraq affairs with expertise in finance and law allowed me to reprint the following email message though he wants to remain anonymous: The reporting in the press-media about the proposed Petroleum Law omits a material fact. The proposed Law does not have a word that relates to the "fair distribution of revenues." That phrase relates to the dispersion of gasoline stations, not to the distribution of revenues. The gasoline stations will be covered by another petroleum law not yet considered by the Council of Ministers. What is really going on relates to the Iraqi Constitution. The context is Article (113): "The federal system in the republic of Iraq is made up of the capital, regions, decentralized provinces, and local administrations." The Iraqi Constitution has a unique feature distinguishing it from the US federal structure. The provinces are the basic units of governance. But the Constitution treats regions as more important in the federal structure. There are extensive provisions with respect to the permitted regional governing institutions. There are only two relating to provinces.

Where on earth did those filling stations come from? Some classified discussion at Gulf2000 or thereabouts?

Anyway, of course the controversy about the petroleum bill is mainly about Khalílzád Pasha's "constitutiom," unless you pontificate from Ann Arbor are take no interest in mere structures and technical legalisms. ("The Iraqi constitution allows 50 deputies to call a vote of no confidence; but the Iraqi government is so dysfunctional it is not clear anyone would bother to do so," declares Himself, in another communiqué of today's date.)

Dr. Anon is wiser than that, but she cannot be a real structure person either, I do not think. A constitutional lawyer or political scientist would discuss the bizarrenesses of Zal's thing more generally. Dr. Anon discusses it only insofar as it is connected with the oil. She cannot be a historian either, to find it surprising that neo-Iraqi "federalism" works strictly top-down, and has nothing worth mentioning to do with Philadelphia in 1787, or consider that reversal the only deviation that distinguishes it from Mr. Madison's handiwork.

That the Khalílzád Konstitution said more about regions than about governatess probably only indicates that the native collaborationists who help toss it together had only a vague idea of what a proper constitution should be like, and their extremist GOP colleagues not much more. Under such invasion-based circumstances, it is not remarkable that space in the text should be allotted in proportion to what is important because it is controversial rather than important because it is fundamental.

The proposed Petroleum Law has provisions which deal with the ownership rights - including rights to award oil field development contracts - granted by the Constitution to "Regional Authorities." Article 110 of the Constitution expressly gives the power, in the case of the oil industry, to the federal government and "the producing regions and provinces," but the provinces are not included as such; they are disempowered. The way the Constitution is written permits, even requires, the substitution of the regional governments for the provincial governments.

Were it not for the general Green Zone dysfunctionality, there could be some jolly litihgation over Dr. Anon's loose construction of Section IV, Article CX. Let us have a look at the horse's mouth :

Article 110: The following competencies shall be shared between the federal authorities and regional authorities: First: To administer customs in coordination with the governments of the regions and governorates that are not organized in a region. This will be organized by law. Second: To regulate the main sources of electric energy and its distribution. Third: To formulate the environmental policy to ensure the protection of the environment from pollution and to preserve its cleanness in cooperation with the regions and governorates that are not organized in a region. Fourth: To formulate the development and general planning policies. Fifth: To formulate the public health policy in cooperation with the regions and governorates that are not organized in a region. Sixth: To formulate the public educational and instructional policy in consultation with the regions and governorates that are not organized in a region. Seventh: To formulate and organize the main internal water sources policy in a way that guarantees fair distribution. This will be organized by law.

Can you find any fluid mentioned there besides water? Could Antonin Scalia find any? Is one to understand that because petroleum is, presumably, the "main sources of electric energy" in neo-Iraq, therefore federal authorities and regional authorities must possess a shared competency over it as per Section IV, Article CX, Clause 2? Here we have a neocolony that obtains over ninety percent of its revenues from fossil fuel extraction, and this is how the whole matter is "constitutionally" disposed of? Well, no, in fact the matter has already been disposed of by the time one arrives at Article CX:

Article 108: Oil and gas are the ownership of all the people of Iraq in all the regions and governorates. Article 109: First: The federal government with the producing governorates and regional governments shall undertake the management of oil and gas extracted from current fields provided that it distributes oil and gas revenues in a fair manner in proportion to the population distribution in all parts of the country with a set allotment for a set time for the damaged regions that were unjustly deprived by the former regime and the regions that were damaged later on, and in a way that assures balanced development in different areas of the country, and this will be regulated by law. Second: The federal government with the producing regional and governorate governments shall together formulate the necessary strategic policies to develop the oil and gas wealth in a way that achieves the highest benefit to the Iraqi people using the most advanced techniques of the market principles and encourages investment. (Antiquities and antiquity sites, traditional constructions, manuscripts and coins are considered part of the national wealth which are the responsibility of the federal authorities. They will be administered in cooperation with the regions and governorates, and this will be regulated by law.)

That's more like it! More like the chatty brand of "constitutionalism" that characterized the efforts of Feldman Effendi in neo-Afghanistan as well as Khalílzád Pasha at New Baghdad. "O Zayd, surely oil and gas are not ALL our national wealth?" "By Zeus, thou art right, O Hasan! Let's toss in cuneiform tablets and so forth as well at the end." And so they did.

Meanwhile Dr. Anon may have been puzzled by "governorate(s)" for "governate(s)" for muháfaza(t) to refer to what she hemself prefers to call a province. The chatters mention that sort of thing thirty-seven (37) times. To be sure, "region" and "regions" and "regional" ’iqlím, ’aqálím, ’iqlímí appear seventy-four (74) times, so her basic perception is not badly mistaken. Nevertheless, "the provinces are not included as such; they are disempowered" is a flat-out boo-boo, and ""The way the Constitution is written permits, even requires, the substitution of the regional governments for the provincial governments" is at best a non sequitur.

Onwards!

The "Regional Authorities" have the power and jurisdiction over the production segment of the oil industry. Basra should "own" the Rumayla Oil Field, but apparently does not. In the cases of many other things, the provinces will also be disenfranchised. The power and jurisdiction is established by the reservation article, just as all powers not expressly granted to the US federal government are reserved to the states. But the power is reserved not to the provinces, but to the regions: "Article (111): All that is not written in the exclusive powers of the federal authorities is in the authority of the regions. In other powers shared between the federal government and the regions, the priority will be given to the region's law in case of dispute." I don't know where this came from or whether the US Government had any part in devising it. Much is explained by taking this unique feature into account. It is not clear to me that it has been thought through by the US Government or the Iraqis. Note also the use of the word "granted." The US had states. They got together and formed a federal government and gave it powers. That is not what has happened in Iraq.

Well, at least this time the number is right. I presume Section IV, Article CXI is itself Dr. Anon's "reservation clause," even though the casual chatters are translated as having offered us "given" instead of "granted," a word which admittedly resounds with a more Madisonian dignity.

As to any future pseudoconstitutional exegesis, however, the key word has to be "priority." Let's see, ... takúnu l-’awwaliyya ... li-qánún al-’aqálím wa-l-muháfazát ..., "... the law of the regions and [of] the governates shall have firstness ...." Not "supremacy," mark you, the "unitary regime" (al-hukúmat al-ittihádiyya) shall possess only "firstness" whenever it shares authority with regions and governates. Secondness is not excluded altogether. It is very typical of the Khalílzád-Feldman school of legal chatter that one has no clue under what circumstances secondness is admissible, let alone what would happen if secondness happened to be in order, but the region said X and one of its governates said not-X.

A brief digression in favor of James Madison and the Gang of '87 is appropriate. They would never have signed their names to off-hand invasion-based tripe and baloney like this that does not even attempt to indicate how the machinery of government is supposed to work. In a different direction, they would never have admitted details like ""antiquities and antiquity sites, traditional constructions, manuscripts and coins are considered part of the national wealth." Agriculture was as important to them as mineral extraction is to the Green Zone collaborationists, but they did not say a word specifically about it. But onwards!

When Muqtada al-Sadr and others speak of a "unitary government" and a "united country," they really mean it. The federal government is going to pass many laws which, under a federal system, should be enacted by the provinces. The problem the Iraqis have is that the Constitutional default or reserved power system calls for the regions to enact the laws, but, outside of the Kurdistan Regional Government's territory, there are no regional governments in existence to enact the laws. This unique feature might or might not cause serious problems in the future. The Iraqis are probably developing in sophistication daily. Notwithstanding the elemental struggle going on in Basra, I have seen indications that there are at least a few sophisticated people who appear to have received outside advice in the trade unions and at least one gentleman in South Oil Company. They have a decision to make. They could form their own three-province regional government or they could go it alone. If they decide upon the latter, they will be carving new ground and will have trouble. But they also will have a lot of de facto power.

As we just saw, it is not only the Rev. al-Sadr who speaks about "unitary government," but the Khalílzád Konstitution itself. Dr. Anon seems to be playing at Humpty-Dumpty a little here, informing us free of charge that what has been imposed on the conquered natives by the militant Republicans is not genuine federalism, but some sort of shoddy imitation product. No point in arguing about words, though -- the main question is whether she describes the product accurately. Since she erred about Section IV, Article CX, Clauses 1 and 2, I fear her deductions are mistaken as well. Maybe only three governates have a regional affiliation at the moment, but the other fifteen undoubtedly exist aas governates and are plainly said in the "constitution" to possess firstness of law vis-à-vis New Baghdad as regards oil and gas and mediaeval MSS. They will accordingly be better off not to regionalize themselves, I should think. Why invent a third part into future quarrels they may have with the unitarian régime? If they can't be sure a neo-region would always agree with themselves, why invent it? Even if the rulers of the governates could be sure, how would they be better off, de-facto-powerwise? or de-jure-powerwise either? There may, for all I know, be reasons why they would be better off lurking in other clasues of the Khalílzád Konstituton, but I entirely fail to discern any in the bits of it that Dr. Anon alludes to. Onwards!

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim also is breaking new ground. Does he really intend that there will be a replica of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), with a constitution, a legislature, a council of ministers, a court system and other institutions nearly all of which will be new and unprecedented? If he does not, or if the proposal is defeated in the Council of Representatives - which is a real possibility, see next paragraph - what is going to happen is that the powers of the federal government will be unlimited as a practical matter in relation to the provinces. When the Sunni leaderships look at their options, a regional government must seem to them conceptually and existentially to be a non-starter. What that means is that, with respect to voting or fighting, there are only two alternatives: live with the new system or fight. It would take a significant effort to lay out for them what Mr. al-Hakim might be, but is not necessarily, considering. That is why I have been stressing the point, because preparation should have begun yesterday. One trouble might be that the Embassy has no one who understands the problem in specific detail. They might simply be applying the embedded US model without focusing on the fact of this unique feature in the Iraqi Constitution. I am not clear that the PRTs are being appropriately staffed and have the right mission. Their first and main task after they assure that food and medical assistance is available, is or should be to get the provinces, that is the Regions, started drafting a lot of laws. At the moment, with the exception of the Investment Law, the only laws of Iraq are in decrees of the former regime or orders issued by the Coalition Provisional Authority.

"When the Sunni leaderships look at their options, a regional government must seem to them conceptually and existentially to be a non-starter" -- golly! Has Dr. Anon been paying any attention to native politics at all? Hasn't she noticed that perhaps the sole pont upon which all the dozens of TwentyPercenter factions and subfactions and subfactionettes agree is that "regional government" was never anything but a non-starter, and further that it never will be anything else, if they can impose themselves? It took Arab Sunnidom about half a second to work out the implications of the Rev. al-Hakím and SCIRI for themselves. One might as well devote "a significant effort" to teaching Dr. Rush Limbaugh the dreadful ickiness of the Democrat Party. Golly!

Would it help bring peace and freedom to the Crawfordites' Peaceful Freedumbia if the eighteen (18) governates and the one (1) region started scribbling lots and lots of local laws? In Free Kurdistan, I daresay they are doing it already, but that legislative vigor is not unconnected with the fact that Free Kurdistan is only nominally part of "Iraq" at all. Dr. Anon must be talking about the fifteen (15) regionless governates, which just coincidentally happen to be Arab ethnographically. The idea would appear to be nonsense if viewed in our fixer-upper's own framework: did she not just inform us that "the provinces are not included as such; they are disempowered"? No, I take it back, her proposal is nonsense taken de jure, but one could take it de facto instead, in which case she recommends that fifteen governates go into rebellion against New Baghdad immediately. If the governates won the ensuing war, then of course their laws would be legal, and the Green Zone pols' laws would be nothing at all.

If Dr. Anon had thought things through carefully, she would have presented this brainstorm as a nifty scheme to partion neo-Iraq into sixteen pieces rathen the paltry two or three that would satisfy most schizophiles. Considered as half-baked, though, her notion is probably vaguely that if the sixteen agencies start issuing lots of wannabe laws, many of our neo-Iraqi subjects will start obeying them -- (why?) -- and then gradually al-Diyála and Dhí Qár in our own time will come to resemble Connecticut and South Carolina in the 1780's. After that, the road ahead is clear enough, they have only to emulate the Philadelphia miracle!

The Sadrists, plus the IAF and Mutlak's Dialogue have 87 votes. (Those two, in addition to their allotted 30, that the Sadrists cleverly won are going to come in handy at some point.) They would need 51 more. Allawi would add 25, leaving a deficiency of 26. Maliki's Da'awa has 30; the UIA independents have 23; Fadhila 15. If the Council of Representatives were to reject the proposed Petroleum Law, that would be that, short of another revolution. The agreement struck between Mr. al-Hakim and Adnan al-Dulaimi to postpone the effective date of the Regions Law until mid-2008 means that the matter might not come up again until after the Regions Law becomes effective, and Provincial elections are held after the enactment of an Elections Law. During that time, staffing and intra-government relationships will be firmly entrenching the new regime in Baghdad. The power of the federal government will be absolute. It should be noted that no reference is being made to the third source of law, the Sharia.

(Prof. Cole may despise structures, but he plays a similar game with numbers of quasideputies over at the link already cited.)

Here again Dr. Anon's policy advice -- to reject the petroleum bill -- can be separated from her inadequate reasons and her implausible scenarios. I'm for rejection myself, but on the orthodox Sadrist grounds that nothing should be done under the yoke of alien and extremist Republicans that cannot be undone with ease later on. Until then, everything is at best only temporary and provisional, and at worst, flatly illegitimate.

"Firmly entrenching the new regime" is an ambiguous expression from this standpoint. I believe M. al-Sadr has agreed to entrenchment in the sense that when Iraq becomes a nation once again, the neorégime of poor M. al-Málikí, or some coupless successor to it, will be the first legitimate government of "the Second Iraqi Republic," to speak on the model of French politics. At that point, the only people with any real right to concern themselves will definitively decide such questions as whether or not "the power of the federal government [shall] be absolute," and exactly what Islamic Divine Law shall have to do with day-to-day law and administration.

As to the writer's scenarios, I am not at all clear what would be what, "short of another revolution." Does she mean that nothing resembling the present extraction bill will ever stand a chance at New Baghdad in the future? Maybe in fact it would not, but I do not see from what she writes why it should not. She warned Prof. Cole at the outset, however, that she was addressing herself to only "another corner" of the controversy. Deciding judiciously whether such a scheme might be implemented at a later date, after Iraq has become a nation once again, probably requires that one examine the other three corners as well. In the present bill, the "Iraqi" Fedguv and the governates and the region(s) are not the only players involved, the whole cast is to include, lemme see,

First: To assist the Council of Ministers in creating Petroleum policies and related plans, arranged by the ministry in coordination with the producing provinces and regions, and to put important legislations for exploration and production based on ARTICLE 9 of this law the ministers council creates an entity to be named “the Federal Oil and Gas Council”. The Prime Minister or his/her representative shall be the president of this council, and the council should include: 1- Federal Government’s Ministers from the ministries of oil, treasury, planning, and cooperative development. 2- The director of the Iraqi central bank 3- A regional government minister representing each region. 4- A representative from each producing province not included in a region 5- Executive managers of from important related petroleum companies including the national Iraqi oil company and the oil marketing company 6- Three or less experts specialized in petroleum, finance, and economy to be hired for a period not exceeding 5 years based on a resolution from the council of ministers. The Council shall represent all the different basic components of the Iraqi people.

(That's from Article V, page 8 of the translation.)

Chivalry Is Not Dead

(It is only resting until after retirement, when it has nothing to lose.)

Here is the first invasionite I've seen who would prefer to be at war with warriors, and not militate against cockroaches in human form:

General Sir Michael Rose told the BBC's Newsnight programme: "It is the soldiers who have been telling me from the frontline that the war they have been fighting is a hopeless war, that they cannot possibly win it and the sooner we start talking politics and not military solutions, the sooner they will come home and their lives will be preserved." Asked if that meant admitting defeat, the general replied: "Of course we have to admit defeat. The British admitted defeat in north America and the catastrophes that were predicted at the time never happened. "The catastrophes that were predicted after Vietnam never happened. The same thing will occur after we leave Iraq." (...) When he was asked if he thought the Iraqi insurgents were right to try to force the US-led coalition out, he replied: "Yes I do. As Lord Chatham said, 'if I was an American - as I am an Englishman - as long as one Englishman remained on American native soil, I would never, never, never lay down my arms'. The Iraqi insurgents feel exactly the same way. I don't excuse them for some of the terrible things they do, but I do understand why they are resisting the Americans."

What will the sophisters, economists and calculators of Airstrip One and Crawford TX make of that , I wonder? Very likely nothing at all, for it is written and thought in an old-fashioned dialect of morality that is alien to them. Perhaps especially alien to such of them as profess with their lips to be friends of Eddie Burke.

This being the case, Mr. Rose should have explained specifically that the redcoats had/have quite as much right to put down the natives and the natives had/have to try to get rid of the redcoats. Perhaps he makes that point in his book , although there is no sign of it in the extract over at the BBC website.

We are not exactly dealing with Sir Lancelot, however, who would not have rated "force protection" as highly as the first paragraph above does, and indeed can scarcely be imagined as polling his retainers about either strategy or gentlemanliness. Oh, well, it's a start.



Descending from the lofty wind-swept heights, one would like to have some clearer idea of what Mr. Rose anticipates is now to happen in Peaceful Freedumbia than merely that the outcome will not be catastrophic. I expect that it really won't be, but also attach a pretty definite factual content to that expectation, notably that the general idea of something like poor M. al-Málikí's quasigovernment will survive and sich durchsetzen so that someday, ’in shá’ Alláh, it shall become a real government -- even as "Iraq" shall become a nation once again, though naturally a nation minus Free Kurdistan. Unfortunately most of the folks usually termed "insurgents" have rather different scenarios in mind and will applaud mine no more than either of us would applaud one featuring perpetual subjection to the extremist GOP, or "Zionists and crusaders" as perhaps they might prefer to say. We know from Mr. Rose the moralist that he thinks them warranted in resisting all the inroads of Crawford, but does Mr. Rose the geopolitician look forward positively to something of my sort, or of (some subfactionette of) the TwentyPercenters' sort, or something quite different? Mr. Rose must disagree with "the insurgents" about something or another, to say "I don't excuse them for some of the terrible things they do," but plainly one needs more details to understand his overall position.

Who knows, perhaps "Mr. Rose the geopolitician" does not even exist, and the proper reading of this text is that whatever may happen in Mesopotamia, Airstrip One, or perhaps "the international community," will not be adversely impacted? That's likely enough too, but it does not seem quite the proper point to centre one's Big Picture around.

Chivalry is admirable after its fashion, and it would be lovely to see a thousand times more of it than we do in an age of Big Management, yet it does not trump Politique d'abord.

Dr. Triangle's Iraq

Political insiderdom is a dubious racket in general, and Dr. Triangle in particular has been mostly only a clown since he defected from Bill and Hillary, nevertheless it is kind of nice to read what the clown scribbles about a politician that one has actually voted for:

The left, led by John Edwards, is not about to accept mushy language holding the Iraqi regime accountable for its lack of progress, especially if the provision leaves Bush in charge of assessing what progress is being made. Why, they will ask, did we elect a Democratic Congress if the war is just going to drag on? . . . With the anti-war platform entirely to himself, Edwards could well upend both Obama and Hillary and win the nomination himself. The anti-war movement is growing, not shrinking, as the casualty lists mount and the war seems endless. Edwards could warn that Obama and Hillary are the new Nixons, emulating the original in appearing to oppose the war while running for president only to continue it once elected. With Hillary, identifying diverse military missions that must continue in Iraq after she takes office — including logistical, intelligence, and training support, hunting down al Qaeda in Iraq, and blocking Iranian infiltration — Edwards’s argument would have great credibility.

Doctor Triangle must be reveling in his favorite geometrical figure, for no donkeys other than Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama and Mr. Edwards merit discussion at all chez Dickie. That is a bit unfortunate for the former Iraq, perhaps, when Sen. Biden is the only horse, however dark, that even begins to know enough about the joint to be dangerous. However it would be silly to expect Doctor Triangle to take an interest in neocolonial boondocks and quagmires for their own sake, he is interesting only for his guesses about America’s guesses about that or any other substantive matter. His underlying guess goes like this:

The anti-war movement is growing, not shrinking, as the casualty lists mount and the war seems endless. … The war will continue and get less and less popular with each insurgent bombing.

Those two sentences seem clear enough – Dr. Triangle expects tomorrow to be like today in Televisionland’s notions of Peaceful Freedumbia, only slightly more so. That is almost always a plausible scheme to wager by, not invariably correct, of course, but hardly ever off-the-wall dotty either. But Planet Morris is a bit more complicated than that; the sentences after the one last cited read

By 2008, nobody will mind that Obama voted to end the war. The consequences of having let it continue will be evident. But the possibility that there could have been horrific consequences had Obama’s view prevailed back in 2007 will remain in the realm of speculation and theory.

(I have been summatorializing Dr. Triangle a bit against the grain. He framed his scribble as an unsolicited letter of advice to Obama of Illinois, whom I am not interested in at the moment. Even Mr. Edwards is secondary, and thus “Iraq” is no more than a tertiary or fourth-order concern.)

Not reading every word that this neocomrade writes, I do not know from elsewhere what Dr. Triangle considers that “the consequences of having let it continue” will be like. In isolation, the last passage would suggest that he anticipates glorious successes for the Surge of ‘07. By the time we get to vote for Mr. Bush’s replacement, all danger of “horrific consequences” will be well behind us. I daresay that is the orthodox Boy-‘n’-Party line at the moment, and it would not be at all remarkable to find a Mr. Dick Morris regurgitatin’ it. But on the other hand, this same guy just told us “The war will continue and get less and less popular with each insurgent bombing.” What gives, apart from obviously the mind of the insider is not riveted on the former Iraq?

What one stumbles over here is not a logical contradiction, for one can imagine that on 1 November 2008 (A) the Green Zone collaborationist regime will be as good as unassailable despite the fact that (B) the insurgents / guerillas / terrorists / resisters still keep up their shootings and bombings, to (C) the disgust of Televisionland USA. Indeed, that is pretty much our own view as of 3 May 2007, except for item C. However such is not the view of Ms. Conventional Wisdom, and it is very unlikely to be the view of Dr. Triangle either.

There would be even less of a seeming contradiction if one took “The anti-war movement is growing, not shrinking, as the casualty lists mount and the war seems endless” to be the crux of Dr. Triangle’s position on occupation policy. Quite a number of folks at Rio Limbaugh and Wingnut City expect that we surrender monkeys will gibber more vociferously than ever when we behold how well the Surge of ‘07 shall have unfolded itself. That, however, is not what the man says, and “as the casualty lists mount” makes it imprudent to attribute such thoughts to him. He really does seem to be predictin’ the best of times and the worst of times simultaneously and in strictly military and police terms.

Perhaps one might venture to guess that Doctor Triangle rather cloudily supposes that the Petraean wonder drug will either have cured its patients by a year from now, or else everybody who matters for inside-the-Beltway purposes will have agreed to give the militant GOP’s neo-Iraqi subjects up for lost – and it does not much matter which. That would at least make sense as domestic political guesswork, which is the specialty of the house chez Dickie, after all. It seems about the worst possible guess about actual facts on the ground out in the boondocks and quagmires, but so what? Doctor Triangle does not pretend to know or care about that sort of thing.

For that matter, it is not impossible that Televisionland and the 2008 electorate will have shrugged off some murky intermediate state of affairs in Peaceful Freedumbia by election day on more or less Mr. Dick Morris’s terms. Whether or not “horrific consequences” will eventuate in the absence of responsible nonwithdrawal may well have turned into an immense bore by then too. “Che sara, sara and that’s OK too, as long as “we” stop hearing so much chatter about it all the time, thank you very much!”

Not to be starry-eyed about la Democratie en Amerique! It could well be that whichever candidate, elephant or donkey, contrives to say the least about the former Iraq–and perhaps about the Kiddie Krusade more broadly also–will prevail, and prevail eo ipso, quite irrespective of the nature of what little she is compelled to say. In that case, my “she” could prove to be more than the generic pronoun. The silver lining to that cloud is that if Sen. Clinton does pull it off, tricky Dick Morris may decide to slit his wrists in a warm bath.

But we shall see. God knows best.

Witaj Majowa Jutrzenko!

Władysław Witwicki, filozof, psycholog, teoretyk sztuki, najwięcej polskości dostrzegł w obrazach naszych malarzy przedstawiających konie. Narodowy temperament Polaków mają najlepiej wyrażać formy i ruchy konia arabskiego. W dziełach Wojciecha Kossaka, czytamy u Witwickiego, jest "ogień, ruch, żywość wschodnia w kolorycie. Takimi nas zna świat, tak nas stylizują i przedrzeźniają obcy, takimi byliśmy w historii, bywamy w życiu".

There is not much ruch there, perhaps, not even if you ask you browser to show you the whole picture, but after all it's a self-portrait by the artist, and artyzm ain't ruch. Nevertheless "Takimi nas zna świat," that is the way we outsiders think gallant but doomed Third-of-May-Constitutionalists ought to look, is it not?

Those were cleaner and simpler days, alas, when gallantry meant defending one's own Constitution and not trying to get rid of Khalilzad Pasha's.

Oh, well, ....

"The Rule of Law Must Yield"

The way the Wall Street Jingo packaged this morning's freebie

The Case for the Strong Executive Under some circumstances, the rule of law must yield to the need for energy. BY HARVEY C. MANSFIELD (Mr. Mansfield is William R. Kenan Professor of Government at Harvard.)

had us fooled for a moment. We wondered whether Mr. Mansfield of Harvard was going to assure us that aggressions and occupations are warrantable whenever the alternative would be outrageously expensive gasoline and fuel oil. Decorum is, however, preserved and the closest the learned neocomrade comes to that sort of crudity is his final sentence,

I believe too that the difficulties of the war in Iraq arise from having wished to leave too much to the Iraqis, thus from a sense of inhibition rather than imperial ambition.

That has no visible connection with the rest of the piece, although one could make up an invisible one easily enough, as for instance that George XLIII is being commended for the "energy" of his imagination. In any case, the key term is elucidated as follows:

The best source of energy turns out to be the same as the best source of reason--one man. One man, or, to use Machiavelli's expression, uno solo, will be the greatest source of energy if he regards it as necessary to maintaining his own rule. Such a person will have the greatest incentive to be watchful, and to be both cruel and merciful in correct contrast and proportion. We are talking about Machiavelli's prince, the man whom in apparently unguarded moments he called a tyrant.

Thus we wound up in beautiful downtown Leostraussville, as the by-line should have warned us at once. Leostraussville is rather a quaint and agreeable intellectual hamlet, in many respects, but it is located far off the ordinary Boy-'n'-Party path, and even well off Signore Machiavelli's: imagine what the latter might say about the Big Management Party's colonial procedings since 1 May 2003, or in general about The Dynasty Boy as an instantiation of Il Principe! Naturally Mr. Mansfield prefers to defend the abstraction of Executive Energy rather than the record of George XLIII, yet by his own account they cannot easily be separated, and if he had separated them too severely, the WSJ would not have found him fit to reprint. Not even America's Moonpaper guards the ideological purity of its opinion pages more closely than the jingos do. To be sure, Mr. Mansfield of Harvard is perhaps too up-market a product for that fishwrap to purvey.

By a happy accident, the neocomrade himself obliquely expounds the ideal relationship between the Faculty of Arts and Science, "Harvard" proper, and the Harvard Victory School, the MBA-granting folks over across the river by the stadium:

This admiration for presidents extends beyond politics into society, in which Americans, as republicans, tolerate, and appreciate, an amazing amount of one-man rule. The CEO (chief executive officer) is found at the summit of every corporation including universities. I suspect that appreciation for private executives in democratic society was taught by the success of the Constitution's invention of a strong executive in republican politics.

Would that analysis pass muster in the History Department, though? Mr. Mansfield is certainly right to admit, if not exactly to point out, that the USA had already become democratic before ever it became capitalistic. Few things are more important to understanding why we are so exactly like US and not so very much like anybody else in the world. On the other hand, it is a bit hard to connect the dots exactly between, say, John Tyler and James Buchanan on the "republican politics" side, and the archetypical Morgans and Carnegies and Rockefellers on Lord Mammon's team -- at least if getting the chronology right matters. A political philosopher, rather than "political scientist," such as the neocomrade is may transcend mere chronology, perhaps, but even at that toplofty level, doubts may arise about Mr. Mansfield's account of his own suspicions in the mind of anybody who recalls Herr Prof. Dr. Strauss's a priori account of the interaction between The Philosopher and what he called "the merchant classes" or something similar, referring to gentry who were long dead (and foreigners as well) as viewed from Philadelphia in 1787.

Meanwhile, it is fun to watch Mr. Mansfield of Harvard's characteristic shtik in operation bottom-up. The immediate problem confronting Boy and Party is that two-thirds, or thereabouts, of Televisionland and the electorate appear to have decided that Big Management of all the affairs of neo-Iraq is no longer of vital national interest, if it ever was in the first place. To confront that formidable contingent head-on and tell them they are an ignorant mob, a "great beast," incapable of appreciating all the exhibited beauties of Crawfordite Realpolitik in action, would give offense and maybe it even cost votes. How much more viable it were to sidle in subtly from Cloudcuckooland and remind us all that "Americans, as republicans, tolerate, and appreciate, an amazing amount of one-man rule"! Sen. Reid and Speaker Pelosi and the two-thirds have somehow lost touch with our own roots, with the true Yankee quiddity, don't you know? O tempora, o mores!

The general idea of this gimmick is nifty, no doubt about it, but the Mansfield implementation could, in my judgment, be improved. The neocomrade sidles in subtly at far too high a level. Even at too high a level as regards mechanical punctuation, I fear, for lots of folks are likely to misunderstand the Ivy League fortune cookie just quoted as if it had been "Americans, as [R]epublicans, tolerate, and appreciate, an amazing amount of one-man rule" -- implying that Americans, as [D]emocrats, tolerate and appreciate nothing of the sort. Which is historically ridiculous in itself -- Andy Jackson rotates in his grave! -- as well as not the neocomrade's intended meaning.

The appropriate level would, in my amateur judgment, lies down somewhere around Profiles in Courage, a work which really does seem in retrospect to have had a serious impact upon Televisionland and the electorate. Perhaps even upon George XLIII himself, who knows?

Of course the old book as it stands is little fitted to the present purposes of Mr. Mansfield of Harvard, for it tendentiously featured upper-case-R Republicans breaking out of their Party lockstep and doing the conscientious thing instead. Not quite exactly what the aggression faction requires at the moment, obviously! Yet not altogether wrong, either, because when "President Sorensen" praised selected Congresspersons for defying their constituents as well as their Party, and then his book became at once a best-seller and a prize-winner and subsequently a palpable influence, one can only infer that some constituents in America, at least, are open to the proposition that constituents in America are not necessarily infallible. Apply that openness to the latest poll results about the GOP's neo-Iraq, and voila! Behold, if not everything that Mr. Mansfield of Harvard sidles in from Leostraussville for, well, at least a very great deal of it!

We are led along to the speculation that Mr. Mansfield of Harvard should not so much be trying to remind American constituents of their, "our," traditional folkloric love of "an amazing amount of one-man rule," which is only a tasteless joke with an incumbent uno solo like Little Brother and the track record that Little Brother has accumulated, but rather to their Sorensen-engendered, or Sorensen-fortified, awareness that even American constituents can err. Mr. Mansfield of Harvard will not join us if we move in that direction, for the move implies that Hamiltonian "energy" is not the master category after all, but rather something like its opposite, call it self-doubt in the vernacular or perhaps even call it humilitatem in Latin.

The History Department gentry are best fitted to decide the underlying question, as it seems to me, and as it most ferociously does NOT seem to the Bani LeoStrauss. The underlying question boils down to something like this, perhaps:

"Teach us, o tenured gurus, about the mastery of the master classes! Are they in charge because they really possess Executive Energy™? Are they in charge because, whilst not actually possessing Executive Energy™, their subjects attribute it to them by mistake? Are they in charge only because we subjects lack any Executive Energy™ of our own? Or what?"

Only To Report, Never, EVER To Decide!

What happened at Naaman Hospital yesterday? Resistance web-site albasrah.net summarizes reports about what happened at Naaman Hospital in the walled-off area of Adhamiya yesterday, beginning with a summary of remarks by a Dr Ahmad Mahmoud, a doctor at the hospital, to Al-Jazeera TV. Dr Mahmoud said Iraqi troops, supported by American troops, stormed into the hospital and said there was an order from the Health Ministry to close the hospital, following which they arrested or expelled all patients in the hospital except for three who were in intensive care, and posted snipers on the roof of the hospital and on the roofs of neighboring buildings. The basrah.net writer notes that the Health Ministry has long been in the bailiwick of the Sadrists. And there were hearsay reports that many of those expelled or arrested had been executed. There were similar reports on the resistance website iraqirabita.org and the website of the Association of Muslim Scholars. Some of the reports say this is or was the only hospital serving Sunnis on the east side of the Tigris. What actually happened? In the absence of any explanation, the logical conclusion would be that this event and the silence surrounding it are part of the sectarian strategy behind the building of the wall. The American policy elite is instead being treated today to a piece by a senior US military adviser in Iraq who says the opponents of the Adhamiya wall are not the residents of Adhamiya at all, but Al-Qaeda! "The urban tourniquet", counterinsurgency adviser David Kilkullen calls it.