Not Quite Lyndon LaRouche!

It's generous of Señorito Michael Rubin to award four stars to a book so hostile to his peculiar subfaction of GOP extremism. M. al-‘Alláwí does not like anybody very much, but he only lets himself off the leash in three cases: (1) Sultan Jerry Bremer, (2) Dr. ’Ayad ‘Alláwí, the Secularist Strongman (no relation), and (3) the "neoconservatives", Rubin's crew. Being rather a para-British gentleman than anything else, M. al-‘Alláwí does not have much feeling for cowpoker culture, and really should have spared us his notions about Prof. Bernard Lewis and Prof. Leo Strauss.

His emphasis on the influence of political philosopher Leo Strauss is both bizarre and cheapens Allawi's works. Certain passages read [like] a highbrow version of Lyndon LaRouche or other conspiracy theorists. His footnotes enhance such inaccuracies, often expanding tangential narrative rather than providing source material. He disparages both Iraqi and U.S. officials--often without self-criticism or introspection--and warns that time is running out.

Authentic LeoStraussianity is so exceedin'ly high-falutin' that it can't exactly "cheapen" anybody's narrative. But it does tend to leave monkeys who borrow it to adorn a tale without understanding it looking very like monkeys. A reviewer who wants to be helpful to readers rather than neocomrades would have observed more generally that M. al-‘Alláwí pays a good deal of attention to Washington and Crawford up to September 2003, when he returned to "Iraq" himself, but after that essentially none at all. Karl Rove's War, probably the most important campaign of all for grasping the Big Picture, is scarcely present. Acordingly this can not be the definitive account of the aggression and occupation, no matter how good it is on those human events that it does not leave out.

The AEI señorito complains with justice about M. ‘A's footnotes, but should have added that when one really wonders "How does he know that?" or even "Did that ever happen at all?" even the nearest tangential footnote tends to be several paragraphs removed. The work is readable -- though not 100% proofread, O Yale! -- but it is certainly not citable. If M. al-‘Alláwí wants future historians to rever his name, he should prepare a shorter account, perhaps one hundred pages, strictly in the first person singular, so there is never any doubt what authority is being invoked.

"He disparages both Iraqi and U.S. officials--often without self-criticism or introspection"? Indeed he does, indeed he does. That M. al-‘Alláwí does not like anybody very much is the first thing any reviewer ought to mention. However there are a few faint traces of self-criticism and introspection and there might have been more in a first-person account. The para-British gentleman is quite capable of mumbling, "Well, actually, I don't like myself all that much either." His censoriousness about his partial namesake, Dr. ’Ayád the Interim Government quasipremier, looks like a case of two of a trade failing to agree. Their common trade, however, is not what the AEIdeologues would prefer, since neither of them has much use for "democracy," let alone democracy.

He "warns that time is running out"? Actually he doesn't. Having no crank panacea to vend, there would be no point in his doing so. The observation is interesting from the señoritoly side, however. Evidently the neocomrades are not to believe that time is running out, and indeed, perhaps it isn't, as viewed from the editorial offices of The Weekly Standard and the ramparts of AEI. However if the day is saved from that point of view, there will be no reason for mere neo-Iraqi subjects to take an interest in a salvation that won't be theirs. M. al-‘Alláwí writes as if "neo-conservatism" has had a stake driven through its heart and can never rise from the crypt to make still more trouble. This matter is located west of the Atlantic where his expertise is inadequate, though, and the señorito faction may have the last laugh yet, which would certainly be no joke for wretched "Iraq." Notice that all three of the victims he really dumps on are presumed to be gone forever, a presumption which seems entirely safe only in the case of Neocomrade P. Bremer. (As I recall, M. Rubin has dumped on P. Bremer himself, which may help explain the four stars. Like me, the señorito prefers in general not to waste time talking about what he agrees with already.)

Like me, the señorito finds that the book suddenly gets better once Sultan Jerry has vamoosed:

Allawi is at his best on coverage of events during his ministerial tenure with valuable perspective about Iraq's reconstruction, the April and November 2004 battles against Sunni insurgents and Shi'i militias, the debate over elections, and the growth of corruption networks. Juxtaposing his account with U.S. newspaper coverage underlines the superficiality of the New York Times and Washington Post.

As often, there is some question exactly whom the neocomrades chiefly crave to be at "war" against. Part of the four star award must be due to M. al-‘Alláwí's providing handy ammo like this against the intellectually respectable press. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." In fact, though, the former quasiminister is not especially hostile to the NYT and WP; he cites them frequently without any lamentations about superficiality. The closest he comes to MSM-bashing is not very close:

The New York Times in a vitriolic editorial [of 2 April 2006] demanded that Jaafari be driven out of office. [p. 443 and fn. 21]

Aunt Nitsy's best friends can occasionally be troubled by that editorial vitriol of hers, and in any case editorials are licensed to be superficial, unlike news stories. Presumably the señoritos agreed with her on this particular occasion. Like the NYTC, but unlike M. al-‘Alláwí, they wanted M. ‘Abd al-Mahdí of SCIRI as quasipremier of the fourth or "permanent" invasion-based neorégime. I believe that pol was regarded as especially in line with economic AEI-think. Instead we all got poor M. al-Málikí of Da‘wa, but the consequences of that curious affair fall outside the chronological scope of the book.

As one would expect, Neocomrade M. Rubin reads the work omphaloscopically, so there are large swaths of it that simply do not interest him. Among these is what I should account the theme of the whole pudding, namely that "sectariarianism" is no delusive appearance, but a real thing not to be explained away by handwavers and bullshit artists and partisan Scandanavian academics. Enough time has now passed since the GOP aggression for M. al-‘Alláwí to be able to offer a sort of developmental theory of sectarianism, a move which must be sound conceptually and in general even if the details need to be revised. He dates the trend towards neoreligionizing in the former Iraq well back into the days of the Ba‘th, and that, too, can scarcely be a total mistake. Naturally he has no truck with Sunnintern fantasies that the paleface invasionites somehow introduced sectarianism along with their bayonets and Humvees into provinces that were entirely innocent of it before.

Equally naturally, the para-British gentleman does not care for sectarianism at all personally, and one supposes that as "senior adviser to the Prime Minister of Iraq" (cf. the book jacket) he endeavours to woo poor M. al-Málikí, and perhaps Da‘wa as well, away from the poison as much as he can. His exact political identity is never made clear, but most likely he considers himself an independent and a technocrat, so that even Da‘wa is rather "they" than "we." His use of that antecedently dubious word "Islamist" is especially hard to pin down: my best guess is that he regards at least some of the adherents to the U.I.A. caucus as non-Islamists, therein disagreeing with the consensus of paleface analysis. (Speaking of which, it's a wonder that Señorito Rubin passes over how often M. al-‘Alláwí refers to Prof. Juan Cole, sometimes with verbal incense burned to him as well. To be sure, most of these references are of the Schlesinger Minor sort, "As Plato once observed, the sun rises in the east." He who omits footnotes where they are needed sticks them in where they aren't, and that makes a certain kind of sense, I suppose.)

There is more solid information about (Twelver) Islamism in this book than in any other invasion-language work available, but M. al-‘Alláwí's exact relationship to his knowledge demands attention. He seems to have learned almost all of it since September 2003. [1] Before that date he no doubt thought of himself as an ’Imámí Shí‘í but cannot have been much interested in marji‘iyya and wiláyat al-faqíh and so forth. He was perhaps even vaguely antagonistic to such seminary stuff, for he remains a (mild) political Iranophobe still. There probably is not anything in Twelverdom that warrants being called anticlericalism, but if there was, M. ‘Alí A. al-‘Alláwí would subscribe to it at once. This has a bearing on his attitude towards the Damascus Da‘wa, so to call it, which resolutely refused to allow the mullahs a big political role. The consensus and I would regard the Málikí-Ja‘farí Da‘wa as "Islamist" all the same, but it is possible that M. al-‘Alláwí disagrees.

Señorito Rubin at AEI is not interested in any of this, which is perhaps no surprise, but it seems a bit curious that he does not mention M. al-‘Alláwí's sui generis account of the Rev. al-Sístání's political gamesmanship. Such a writer cannot criticize the marji‘iyya directly, and he does not, yet he makes it plain enough that he thinks Najaf more part of the "Iraq" problem than of the solution. On the other hand, the Rev. al-Sístání and Dr. Chelabí are the only two native pols he attributes any political talent to. He greatly exaggerates the former's supposed wheeling-and-dealing in my judgment. His Eminence just happens to find himself in a structural situation where a basically very simple policy -- let all the Twelvers stick together, and then they will rule after the militant Republicans finally go away! -- can be perceived as fiendishly crafty. The al-‘Alláwí account is mostly just a mare's nest. (One might speculate that there were objections from the direction of Najaf about the "technocratic" conduct of M. al-‘Alláwí's various quasiministries that he prefers not to mention explicitly. But God knows best.)

Returning to the theme of the pudding, it appears that the sad reality of "sectarianism" is properly appreciated by one very exceptional Iraqi in every generation, by Faisal I of the Mecca monarchy [p. 17 and 21f.], by the off-beat sociologist ‘Alí al-Wardí [p. 12ff.], and now in the fullness of time by former quasiminister ‘Alí al-‘Alláwí [passim]. Mild-mannered is the last named, yet far from modest! The GOP's invasion-based "Iraq" would be a sad disappointment to him even without its more obvious troubles and problems-of-success. This gentleman gives the impression of having attended his thirtieth or fortieth class reunion only to discover for the first time that he is the graduate of an idiot school.

Under the circumstances he has no positive program to recommend to anybody, neither to the idiots nor to to the invasionites. One could hardly expect him to.



_____
[1] One might even speculate that he was still learning the lore as he wrote about it, although this guess is risky as well as unimportant. Certainly there is a howler on page 27 that never recurs subsequently:

At the age of eleven, [Muhammad Báqir al-Sadr] left Kadhimiyya for Najaf, where he joined the hawza (the Islamic study circles) of several leading mujtahids, especially the circle associated with Ayatollah Muhammad Rouhani. He later moved to the hawza of the Grand Ayatollah Abu al-Qasim al-Khoei ....

The quasiminister is also strangely unwilling to translate the Sadrist antithesis of "speaking Hawza" and "silent Hawza" literally, although this may have to do with his determination to make the Rev. al-Sístání out no "quietist." At page 111, he mistakenly claims that the Rev. Muhammad Báqir al-Hakím invented the peculiar SCIRI dogma of marji‘iyya siyásiyya only after returning to "Iraq" in 2003. It is older than that, and originally featured the Rev. Khamene’í, not al-Sístání, as the nonpolitical recursion-point.

The View from Camp V

The View from Camp V

Let's start with the view proper, the status of the occupation of "Iraq" as GOP extremism officially conceives it:

. . . Mr. Gates disagreed with recent assessments by Democratic Party leaders in Washington, who said that senior American officers had not accurately described the true, and chaotic, state of affairs in Iraq. Mr. Gates said the generals he met “have been very realistic,” and he characterized Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior American commander in Iraq, as one who “has not pulled his punches” and has the “ability and willingness to call it like he sees it.”

Well, actually, Neocomrade Gates does not disclose the official Party view, does he? He lets "chaotic" pass uncontradicted, no more than that. We are informed yet again what a genius their Dr. Gen. Petraeus of Princeton is, and now we learn that he is Honest Abe as well, but unfortunately "chaotic" comes from somebody else's honesty than Abe's.

But what did you expect? The authentic Petraean Blick ins Chaos comes with TOP SECRET stamped at the top and bottom of every page, and so it does not come to us humble at all. We know that the sage in armour considers in the abstract that neocolonialism ("counterinsurgency") requires full and accurate information ("intelligence") about its patients, so we presume the Prof. Gen. is trying to collect it as best he can amidst conditions of (alleged) chaos, but to be allowed to visit the Wunderkammer? Naturally not. Despite all their shared Honest Abery, the chickenhawk Big Manager from Crawford Enterprises Inc. may not have seen the full collection either.

However we have already learned that this Big Management crew doesn't mind workin' blind, and there they appear to be goin' again:

Although Mr. Gates described his goal as encouraging efforts by the Maliki government in Baghdad, he also expressed a desire to increase cooperation with provincial political leaders and local tribal sheiks. He said that “perhaps we have gotten too focused on the central government, and not enough on the provinces, and on the tribes and what is happening in those areas.” He said he hoped to spark greater attention to this “ground-up effort.”

The public prints are adequate background for this latest BigManagerial swerve, no matter what may be locked up in the Petreaean curiosity cabinet. It's not exactly a question of "focus," though, for focus implies nonblindness. Surely the case is rather that Boy and Party have lately found it more rewardin' to buy up Bedouin retail than to keep on with their wholesale bullyin' of poor M. al-Málikí, and now that that trend has been in existence for thirty minutes straight, why of course it was what they oughta been doin' all along! Ah, Ground-Up Effort, why didn't Honest Abery think of it sooner?

(If you remember back enough thrilling chapters, perhaps Honest Abery once did think of it: before the actual aggression there were a number of attempts to get the future neoliberateds to remove Saddam and destroy all the forty-five-minute terror-tipped specials and thus presumably obviate the necessity of the aggression altogether. However since one would have had to be an indig major, at least, to effect a coup, and probably an indig colonel or a general, "ground-up" may be a bit misleading description. On the other hand, one is to recall that Big Management's executive suite is located so far up the skyscraper that its denizens may pardonably be rather vague at times on exactly where the ground is located. And even now, it is of course sheikhs and tribes that they want to buy, not individual enemy combatants.)

Militant GOP gentry like this R. Gates specimen probably think poor M. al-Málikí is no brighter than they are, and indeed, perhaps he is not, generally speaking. However in this case he is hardly to be bluffed with instant paleface neobaloney like "We don't need you and your 'sky down' Green Zone any more, little man, not when we've got all the 'ground up' sheiks and tribes that taxpayers' money can buy!" Poor M. al-Málikí may presume a bit too much on how badly the big foreign friends that first created him need him still, but he has a great deal of neoimperialist capital to draw on all the same. The threat of an ‘Alláwí Restoration at New Baghdad Centre might be really fearsome to Núrí Kamál Jawád, but "perhaps we have gotten too focused on the central government, and not enough on the provinces, and on the tribes and what is happening in those areas" is transparently mere tripe and baloney. The object of any sane invasion strategy and occupation policy must be that all the outlying yokels shall tremble at and, trembling, OBEY New Baghdad Centre. To provide the Party's neoliberated yokels with independent means of support that are potentially independent of NBC is mere quackery that West Point and the Harvard Victory School would blush to be associated with. Poor M. al-Málikí is far from safe absolutely, but he is safe from that.

The Gates specimen of extremist GOP Big Management has not lost all its patience quite yet, of course:

Mr. Gates said he would discuss with the Iraqis how to make certain that the bombing of a revered mosque in Samarra — and a feared round of reprisals — “won’t further disrupt or delay the process” of political reconciliation. He acknowledged that Mr. Maliki and his government were facing “enormous obstacles,” but he said that the prime minister must do more to demonstrate to the Iraqi people that his government would “lay the groundwork for a future Iraqi state in which all of the different elements can live in peace with one another." “I think the prime minister is trying to address that challenge as well as he can, and I think he deserves our support,” Mr. Gates said.

Does the Gates specimen have either West Point or an HVS MBA on its resumé? Perhaps one individual does not much matter in so great a discrimination of things, however. Elementary MacNamarianity itself has become problematical in neo-Iraq, at this point the imediate reputations of both Big Management and Big Strategy are at risk. Which cause is to triumph in Peaceful Freedumbia, paleface Invasionism or swarthy Chaos? Which crew is to esconce itself in the genuine "Camp Victory" at the end of the day, West Point alumni and Harvard Victory School MBA's, or some pullullatin' mob of trailer-trash local yokels? (Over in the e-gutter with the Bani Horowitz and the jihád careerists, do we not hear this same dichotomy expressly spoken of as if it were Civilisation vs. Barbarism?)

The Gates specimen might perhaps appeal to fas est et ab hoste doceri. "Why should not our sky-down GOP Big Management learn a few peripheral "ground-up" technical lessons from native devotees of Chaos?" Evidently the Doctor General from Princeton thinks so about Big Stategy as well, and doubtless he is more konsequent, as well becomes a violence pro compared to a chickenhawk pol, even if the latter be SECDEF.

The maxim deserves its proverbial standing, I'd say, and yet perhaps it is only secundam quid and not absolutely simpliciter. Obviously if our Sky-Down GOP extremists ever perverted into believers in "ground-up" altogether, that would the last word anybody would hear of them. There is a limit to what the neo-gentry of 2007 can learn from those whom they declare "war" upon, and it is quite a different limit from anything that Rome and Carthage ever had to consider. The palaeo-gentry used to allow that even Carthaginians were more or less human too, sort of, whereas nowadays Boy-'n'-Party Big Management only too obviously wants to be at "war" with mere cockroaches in human form. After they've unilaterally and preëmptively upped the ante like that, fas est et ab hoste doceri probably ought to be revisited. To learn lessons from babykiller Carthaginians may or may not be the same thing as to study with terrorist cockroaches. I shan't pronounce either way, only suggest that the matter merits looking into.


Returning to the individual Gates specimen, "“I think the prime minister is trying to address that challenge as well as he can, and I think he deserves our support." Even a thorough Boy-'n'-Party neocomrade might find that weasel word "support" slightly feeble! Is it to be only "support," then, that poor M. al-Málikí is to be vouchsafed by his Big Paleface Friends? Couldn't the proud possessers of West Point hyperstrategy and the Harvard Victory School 's masterful business administration (plus also in a pinch Princeton University) share at least a little of their Big Managerial and Big Strategic expertise with him also? Did not the Gates specimen itself recognize "enormous obstacles"?

The fate of poor M. al-Málikí is that of Tantalus, ever doomed to these Big Paleface Friends of his who could do everything in "Iraq" for themselves so easily with all their toplofty expertises and all their Sole Remaining Hyperpowers -- except that the BPF refuse to do so many easy-for-them-to-do things, they insist that au contraire it is rather poor M. al-Málikí who must do all the heavy lifting for the extremist GOP, offerrin' no more than this wretched Gatesian "support" of theirs, a "support" evidently consistent with former (and maybe future) ‘Alláwí intrigues, and now with sheikhly tribal intrigues as well.

Tantalus fares better in Hell, where at least there's no question of Father Zeus replacing him and then announcing to a press conference that Tantalus was dismissed because he never tried hard enough.

[Gates] acknowledged that Mr. Maliki and his government were facing “enormous obstacles,” but he said that the prime minister must do more to demonstrate to the Iraqi people that his government would 'lay the groundwork for a future Iraqi state in which all of the different elements can live in peace with one another.'"

Here is the crownin' insufferable insolence of militant extremist Boy and Party, as it seems to me: after denyin' poor M. al-Málikí all the top secret or unclassified Big Expertises of West Point and Princeton and the HVS MBA's, after denyin' him most of their more physical Sole Remaining Hyperpowers, after hintin' unmistakably that if the invasionite GOP's ideal Peaceful Freedumbia never does work out as originally expected it will be the fault of indig ratfinks like him, Boy and Party now suggest through the Gates specimen that poor M. al-Málikí's basic problem has nothing at all to do with his Big Paleface Friends at Rancho Crawford, it's only that he has failed "to demonstrate to the Iraqi people that his government would 'lay the groundwork for a future Iraqi state in which all of the different elements can live in peace with one another.'"

Had sky-downwards Big Management and Big Strategy spoken a bit less imperiously, had they allowed that although BM and BS can pull off many applause-worthy tricks, "to demonstrate to the Iraqi people" happens unfortunately not among them, the insolence would not have become insufferable. And even for shameless sky-downers charitable allowances must be made when possible, although what kind of an allowance is it, really, to grant that exotic invasion-crazed bozos can seriously account themselves more in touch with "the Iraqi people" and "a future Iraqi state" than poor M. al-Málikí is?

The real Gatesian obstacle at the moment seems to be that poor M. al-Málikí innocently or slyly supposes his own neo-régime to be the "future Iraqi state" now already instantiated. No more Karl Rove "milestones," no more Nancy Pelosi "benchmarks," this is IT, guys. We have ARRIVED. Maliki Station, end of the line, everybody out of the bus!

Is not poor M. al-Málikí's "government" to be accounted "sovereign" and "independent" and "democratic" and perhaps even maybe "constitutional"? Well, no, of course it ain't, exactly (?), but Boy-'n'-Party militant Big Management and extremist Big Strategy have fibbed to the contrary so often and so consistently that it's hard to avoid a certain Schadenfreude looking at them in this uncomfy corner they've ingeniously painted themselves into stroke by stroke. Poor M. al-Málikí is more than a Diem to be casually shoved aside by Big Managers and Big Strategists who undoubtedly sympathized far more profoundly with "the Vietnamese people" than any Vietnamese neo-régime ever could have. Maliki is a more serious obtacle than Diem, because Big Management and Big Strategy and GOP genius contributed to set Maliki up in the first place, whereas Diem was basically there already even in advance of the invasionites.

But let's not rush to judgment:

The defense secretary cautioned that an official assessment on the impact of the troop increase due in September and ordered by Congress might not present a full picture of the situation in Iraq. “There still will be a lot of uncertainty,” he said. “But I think we will have some sense of direction and trends.” (...) He agreed that the security situation is “a very mixed picture.” He urged patience until the fifth and final Army brigade ordered by President Bush to bolster forces in Iraq could begin full operations. That brigade arrived this month.

Do the Party hopes of the Gates specimen-- SECDEF to USA! -- now hinge on single brigades, then? After we have laughed at that absurdity, we may set it aside and forget it forever, I trust.

"Some sense of directions and trends" would do none of us any harm, but that's rather a vague formulation, and perhaps not Imposition's best guide to Chaos. And what is to be said of a Big Managerial Impositionizer who does not just buy "The Exiled Insider's Guide to Indig Chaos" by Ahmad Chelabi, Ph.D. et al., as a curiosity, but actually attempts to invasionize and occupate other people's countries by a manual like that?

Predictions about the future are almost impossibly difficult, and what prediction I have to offer is the very cheapest and shoddiest: the Big Strategy and Big Managment neo-future is here already, Maliki Station really is the end of your Party line, O Boy-'n'-Party thugs. If you choose not to rally around Maliki Station as the definitive Success and Victory that your Karl Roves have always panted after, that's your affair, but if you seek farther, you'll fare much, much worse and find no better product than this product to rally around at last

In another post I may attempt to explain why poor M. al-Málikí is not really quite as bad as the invasionite neo-gentry despise him, but that explanation is optional and extra. The immediate point is only that all the Big Bignesses should see that he's the best they're likely to get and therefore immediately stop knockin' and start boostin'. And I mean really boostin' and not just some wishy-washy Gates creature's kind of "support." Maliki Station is the end of the line, a veritable terminus. No more casually switchin' trains any time you choose, O gentlecreeps! You must either defend your Maliki Station or abandon it -- weaselin' your way around as usual happens to be impossible. (You can't weasel your way around the end of the line, not on a railroad!)

Let Big Management and Big Strategy now do their utmost for poor M. al-Málikí, always tryin' to uphold the client, never even for an instant doin' anythin' to undermine, never even for an instant flirtin' with the notion that some other client might be better upholdable! Let all the secrets of how Big Management and Big Strategy would solve neo-Iraq be communicated to poor M. al-Málikí forthwith! He's bound to think most of it misguided paleface sky-down rubbish, but perhaps it is not all entirely rubbish, perhaps if it was raked through carefully a gold ring or two might turn up.

The Rally for ‘Alí

Has there ever been anything like it, Mr. Bones? The whole "Iraq" aviary loves Mr. ‘Alí al-‘Alláwí; chickens and hawks and chickenhawks and vultures and doves and buzzards and dodos and bulbulshit-artists unite to warble his praises!

That's the invasion-language aviary that I speak of, to be sure. If he had had the bad taste to write such a book in Arabic, things would be rather different. Fortunately his taste is exquisite. He's such a perfect facsimile of Ayatollah J. H. Newman's British gentleman that the genuine article might as well withdraw from the unequal contest at once. Anyway, ‘Alí has definitively mastered the lesson about never offending anybody unintentionally.

Before we get to those whom Mr. A. offends deliberately, we need a little OB, however:

[1] ‘Alláwí, ’Ayad (not "Iyad", no article on the surname) is the former caudillo

[2] al-‘Alláwí, ‘Alí is today's hero, author of The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace

[3] al-‘Alláwí, Hasan wrote Al-Shí‘a wa l-Dawlat al-Qawmiyya fi-l-‘Iráq.

[2] must assume either that [1] is not going to prove a once and future caudillo, or else that [2] will be well out of New Baghdad when the [1] coup happens. Ali's almost as deliberately offensive about no-relation Ayad as he is about the late Sultan Jerry, who is definitely never coming back to do more damage, as well as treated with deliberate offensiveness by a number of his Party co-conspirators against peace. Being nasty about the GOP's Neocomrade Paul Bremer is so safe and easy that it is scarcely worth the effort, but painting a moustache on Dr. Ayad Allawi's posters and posturings takes a bit of nerve. Yet needless to say the pluperfect replica of a Anglo-Saxon gentleman cannot be an effete wimp! The claws may be velveted, but they are there all the time. All our paleface planmongers for the provinces of the former Iraq had better keep a careful eye on this guy, at least if there is some slight chance that their preferred occupation policies will actually be attempted to be implemented. Ali stopped taking notes for the book about a year ago when he will have started writing it, but now the book is written and its author can pay full attention to all the latest neostumblebumisms. Rear-Col. Freddy Kagan, among others, should consider himself hereby caveated.

Back on the literary side, it seems pretty clear why all the birds and all the bird-brains swoon over Ali. He does not, at bottom, like anybody very much, but he is also very circumspect about his disrelishments except in a few special cases like Jerry and Ayad, where he lets himself go. The doves perceive that Ali doesn't much care for the chickenhawks, but the idea that anybody might disrelish the doves is so alien and offensive (to the doves), that they manage to overlook certain pretty plain tip-offs. And of course over there down across the road a piece in Chickenhawk City, it's the same contract, only doubled, redoubled and vulnerable: eight times the self-autonarcissism means eight times as much unattentive reading. Bremer the invasionites no longer care about, and apart from Bremer, Republican Party extremism is handled very gently and gentlemanlike indeed. Ali usually just refers to "the superpower," which Godzilla of Yale is bound to take as a compliment. I shouldn't go quite so far as to maintain that Ali means "the superpower" only as a sneer -- "Look what an almighty pigsty of an 'Iraq' you have created for yourself to wallow in, Mme. Superpower. (And now you say you want to wallow for fifty years, as if in South Korea? Wow!) Golly, it must be nice to be omnipotent like you are! Could you maybe give a humble beginner like me some pointers about how you did it, ma'am?" --, yet if you don't appreciate that sneering is ONE of the active ingredients in this panaviary-acclaimed intellectual cocktail, you are not doing Gentleman Ali full justice for his mixological skills. (Plus furthermore you miss most of the available fun for yourself.)

If this pluperfect facsimulation of a Newmanoid English gentleman is as good as I confidently expect it to be, it will extend as far as "Actually, I don't really like myself that much either," the utterance being perfectly sincere and maybe even heartfelt. Unfortunately one cannot judge of this matter from the book. Gentleman Ali is not so vulgar as to write in the first person, nor yet quite so imperious and _systematisch durchgeführt_ as Julius Caesar when he writes in the third. Yale University Press prints Ali more suo with lots and lots of footnotes. Although of course Gentleman Ali is a gentleman rather than some tertiary-educationalist pedant, nevertheless, or maybe accordingly, whenever one seriously wonders "How could Gentleman Ali know that?" or even "Did that ever really happen?", the nearest footnote seems always to be eight paragraphs back or six paragraphs ahead. In a very few cases there is no doubt at all, however. Consider page 211:

In a conversation with Bremer about the significance of the Sadrists as an expression of the disempowerment of the Shí‘a poor, Bremer angrily retorted that he 'didn't care a damn about the underclass and what they [the Sadrists] represented!'[14]

Note [14] to page 211 reads

Bremer exclaimed this to the author during the April 2004 crisis with Moqtada.

It takes a little working-out that we are in First Personal Singular country here, but proceding via back-of-the-book detours we do eventually arrive at last. Unfortunately this exception only goes to illustrate what seems to be Gentleman Ali's general rule. Only flagrant jerks abandoned to their flagrant jerkishness require that Gentleman Ali be fully present, if only in an endnote, to officially announce the abandonment. That faint cloud of disrelishment that lingers over pretty well everybody else involved in or about the provinces of the former Iraq is to linger still, it seems. Perhaps they -- any "they" you like, O aviary! -- have not YET revealed that they are only so many flamin' jerks, but the revelation is expected to come at any moment, and so please stay tuned!

On the back flap of its momentary masterpiece YUP scribbles

Ali A. Allawi is senior advisor to the Prime Minister of Iraq. Since the Coalition's invasion of Iraq, he has served as his country's first post-war civilian Minister of Defence, was elected to the Transitional National Assembly as a member of the United Iraqi Alliance, and was appointed Minister of Finance under Dr. Ibrahim al-Jaffari. He divides his time between London and Baghdad."

Gentleman Ali must find that stereotypical claptrap quite as funny as I do, although our exact occasions of mirth may not overlap altogether.

The "Minister of Finance" angle I have indeed overlooked. Once Gentleman Ali is off and running in THAT technical direction, as he is for brief spurts in the masterpiece in question, he leaves you and me in the dust instantly, Mr. Bones. Yet why should not the pluperfect Brit facsimile be that of J. M. Keynes, after all? ("What do you want instead, a xeroX of Enoch Powell?")

Between London and Baghdad he divides his time, then, Gentleman Ali does. Can a time divided ever hope to stand?

But seriously, Mr. Bones, the pathos of this _shtik_ is that Gentleman Ali is both far too Baghdad for London and yet . . ..

Who shall explain to thee, O Bones, what Gentleman Ali, this Yalie-published Newmanoid facsimile, encountered when it first went "back home"? Allow me to attempt an analogy, sir: suppose you had graduated from some no-'count wannabe prep school (much like our own LFA, Bones) years ago and never thought of secondary educationalizing again until you began to grow old and sentimental and attended "your" fortieth or fiftieth reunion and then suddenly discovered that it is now more like an idiot school that you've been a lauded alumnus of all these years.

The facsimile returned to its "native" neo-Iraq far better equipped than we might return to our neo-LFA, hopeless to think that after so many years we should become at once "minister" of this, or "elected to" that, nominally Headmaster or Overseer or Corporaton Member whatever. (OK, sure, sir, I conflate my tertiary Harvard with my secondary LFA! You wanna make somethng about that?)

The facsimile returned, 11 September 2003, to its native Mesopotamia as recently neo-Crawfordated and was appalled by pretty nearly everthing in sight, as well it might be. "THIS is HOME? HERE is the _marji‘_ ever to be returned unto?"

What a hero was the JHNewmanoid facsimile, our "Gentleman Ali," that it did not just puke and flee the Shock-'n'-Aweful spectacle of the militant GOP's Peaceful Freedumbia instantly, but actually attended his umpteenth class reunion and really tried to make the idiots act more like proper alumnuses and less like idiots. _Niyya_ is ever precious, no doubt about it! And other people's _niyya_ is never to be hastily inferred from what Yale University Press is pleased to print on book jackets. Yet is even that the whole story?


God knows best.

Not Exactly An Autoleak

Students of Crawfordology may have trouble classifying this attempt to advance Big Management's special interests.

It would have been unconventional already to dispatch one of the military hired hands to intimidate a political associate like poor M. al-Málikí. "Ambassador" R. Crocker must seem considerably less lordly and proconsular and cowboy-connected than Khalílzád Pasha used to, and so perhaps the new operative really does need to bring along an enforcer when he tries to collect debts to Boy and Party. Unlike the former "Zal," this Crocker person is by way of being only a hired hand himself. There is no possibility whatever that this guy makes the Party's occupation policy for it the way His Excellency of AEI used to.

Personalities apart, and categorically considered as hired hands, violence pros are much more congenial to extremist GOP circles than career diplomats. The former recommend themselves ideologically, if that's the proper word, because Force looks like Big Management in action, whereas negotiation looks as if the omnipotent executive were seriously considering sharing its potency, in patent violation of the Harvard Victory School guidelines for MBA's.[1] Violence pro hired hands recommend themselves more practically to Big Management as well, being a good deal more likely to shut up and do what they are told, however dumb and dubious: "Into the valley of death rode the six hundred . . . ." Whereas "arguing back" is almost the definition of what diplomacy pro hired hands do to earn their wages from the ever-august Meeters of Payrolls. (At a less exalted level of Parteigeistlichkeit, the Rio Limbaugh level, admirals are presumed to be heroes and ambassadors only wimps.)

Nevertheless, it is not customary, even in the Party of Lee Atwater, to deal with one's political friends by bringing big Bruno along to conferences in order to maybe break an arm or a leg or two, lest friendship waver. Probably it happens, but when it does, it happens in secrecy. The great oddity here is that perps have dispensed with secrecy, they clearly want the whole world to know that poor M. al-Málikí is potential Bruno-fodder, and accordingly they brought along Mr. Michael R. Gordon, an employee of the New York Times Company, as well:

This reporter, who is accompanying Admiral Fallon on his trip to Iraq, was allowed into the meeting. It was only at the end of the meeting that American officials agreed that it could be on the record.

Mr. Gordon presumably means us to understand that if the encounter had gone less satisfactorily from the Boy-'n'-Party standpoint, we consumers of the New York Times would not be reading about it this morning. That raises the material question of why Big Management should find the meeting particularly successful. What did poor M. al-Málikí say that especially pleased them? Alternatively, what might the little foreign friend of GOP invasionism have said different that would have caused a blackout to be imposed?

These are not easy questions, at least for one who does not instinctively sympathize with Big Management. There does not seem to be anything outstanding here. It is only a curiosity, at best, that Bruno should ignorantly lecture the patient about native politics:

“You have the power,” Admiral Fallon said. “You should take the initiative.”

Needless to say, Khalílzád Pasha's "constitution" has made quite sure that poor M. al-Málikí does not have any such power as the enforcer speaks of. The patient responds as he can scarcely avoid:

"The admiral’s appeal . . . elicited an assurance from Mr. Maliki that he hoped to make some progress over the coming weeks. But he also offered a lengthy account of all the tribulations facing the Iraqi government, including tenuous security, distrustful neighboring Sunni states and a complex legal agenda. “There are lots of difficulties that are not well understood from outside,” Mr. Maliki said. “Still, we’re trying hard.”

What could be less remarkable than that? Poor M. al-Málikí did not rudely reply that his buddies of the militant GOP must be the world champion misunderstanders from the outside. Compliant Mr. Gordon does not bore NYTC customers with any details of the patient's "lengthy account" of his latest symptoms, and especially not of any "complex legal agenda." It sounds as if there might be something interesting lurking in that second thicket, but probably there is not: the indig pol will have only been alluding, as delicately as possible, to obstacles imposed by the Khalílzád Konstitution, without having developed any particular "agenda" of his own to work around them.

The closest the worm comes to actually turning is as follows:

The instability the Iranian arms shipments are fueling, Admiral Fallon said, is diverting American forces from vital security tasks. That prompted Mr. Maliki to ask what the Americans were doing to persuade Syria to stop the flow of foreign fighters, which have included suicide bombers, across the border. Ambassador Crocker said that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had raised the matter with her Syrian counterpart. But so far there has been no resolution. “We need the cooperation of Iran and Syria,” Mr. Maliki said. Sunni Arab states, he added, needed to be reassured that a Shiite-dominated Iraq would not be a threat. “We won’t allow the Iranians in,” he said. “Nor will we allow it to become a safe haven for terrorists.”

Surely that is not very close? Poor M. al-Málikí did not dispute Bruno the enforcer's Party excuse-mongering about supposed interferences by (non-Crawfordite) foreigners , he only tried to play the same card a little bit for himself. And he did not try very hard. The most notable thing about this tepid non-clash is how wimpy Neocomrade R. Crocker ends up looking, and that subtle shading must be due rather to Mr. Gordon's reportorial pencil than to any mischievous intent on the part of the Chairman of the Council of Quasiministers.

Frankness between him and his Boy-'n'-Party pals is fundamentally impossible, so one cannot judge whether he seriously believes that a Twelver Ascendancy is threatened only the Sunnintern from the outside and not by TwentyPercenters native to the colony as well. The man's plight is pathetic, but naturally it would not follow from that that his judgments must be good, even should one be able to discern with certainty what his judgments are. Only Dr. Chelabí and the Rev. ‘Abd al-‘Azíz al-Hakím have yet evinced any clear signs of what an American would regard as political talent, which means, if you like, that the neoliberateds have no unfair advantage over Rancho Crawford in the brains department.

Perhaps it is as well they do not, because otherwise they'd been even more pitiful, always attempting in vain to get the Big Managers to do something smart that mere natives recommend rather than some comfy HVS MBA stumblebummery of their own. I suspect the only thing worse than hired hands usurping the prerogatives of their Executive betters would be for lowly indigs to do so. (These two cases could be reconciled on the supposition that everything the neoliberateds know about "their" neo-Iraq that Boy and Party are not interested in hearing about is to count as "technical," even though a great deal of it is mere common knowledge out there in the boondocks, obviously.)

==

What the Ryan and Bruno Show was really all about is not impossible to guess, but it is disagreeable to talk about a matter that tends to reflect discredit upon the Democratic Party. The perps down at the ranch suppose that being seen to push poor M. al-Málikí around like this will appeal to their domestic opposition, which has been getting uppity of late, and I'm sorry to say they are probably right. Viewed from the perspective of a Karl Rove rather than a Rear-Col. Freddy Kagan, the only slight miscalculation was perhaps to single out the petroleum bill:

In the meeting, Admiral Fallon focused on Iraq’s oil law, assuming it was closest to completion. “Is it reasonable to expect it to be completed in July?” he asked. “We have to show some progress in July for the upcoming report.” Mr. Maliki said that the Kurds had raised concerns about revenue sharing arrangements, but he indicated that some progress on the oil law would be made. Ambassador Crocker pointed out that it was important that progress include the resolution of that thorny issue. At one point, Mr. Maliki wondered aloud whether Congress would really give the Iraqis credit for tackling tough issues if they completed the oil law. Admiral Fallon reassured him that most Americans wanted the Iraqi government to succeed.

Bruno's briefers might have reflected that Oil Law Success in particular tends to appeal to only a certain segment of Americans, rather unfortunately that segment which least needs to be persuaded to grant the Big Party a few more decades to muck about in its Peaceful Freedumbia. Actually resolving Kirkuk, for instance, or revision of the Khalílzád Konstitution to include lots of yummy affirmative action for all those oppressed Arab Sunnis are (even) less likely to actually happen, I suppose, but factual improbability is rather beside the immediate point, which is to try to get Senator Reid and Speaker Pelosi and their troops to put up with the Crawford stumblebumism as long as possible. (While Dr. Gen. Petraeus of Princeton somehow saves the day, presumably, but that's another story.) For Rovean purposes, a "success" rather more democratic and less capitalistic would have made a more suitable carrot to lure the jackasses with.

Naturally this is only my own view of the case, and I have already admitted that I have no special insight into the secrets of Big Management, being inclined to doubt that such secrets even exist. I therefore do not at all insist on my guesses about what the cowpoker vigilantes are really up to. God knows best about that.


_____
[1] My comparison assumes that both the Force and the negotiating are technically successful. When they are not, the relationship is perhaps reversed from the congenital HVS point of view, with the bigmanagerial apprentice who can't get her way with Force accounted even klutzier than her colleague who failed to make the diplomacy thing work for him.

However this is a tricky Party-spiritual matter, because under no circumstances that have ever come to my attention was a GOP Big Manager ever admired for diplomatic success in the spirit of a sportsman who takes a large fish with a light line (instead of tossing dynamite into the Tigris à la Saddam Hussein, don't you know?) That is the safer end for the Crawfordologist to begin from, because the imagined show-off's successful angling would undoubtedly a matter of technique, and technicalities are automatically -- axiomatically, even -- the province of mere hired hands, not of Party gentlepersons.

This, too, is one of Mr. Whitehead's "footnotes to Plato." Like their distant and unacknowledged ancestor, Harvard Victory School alumni are in mild perplexity if Socrates pesters them to find out whether "Big Management" is or is not itself the name of a technique. Plato decided that it was not, or at any rate, whoever wrote Epistle VII decided that that was what Plato finally decided. The epigones of Grant's Old Party show no sign of agreeing, for is not Big Management "taught" in "schools," not to mention hawked to the audodidact mob in millions of copies of The Dummies' Guide to Management Secrets? If there can be schools and teaching and (conveyable) secrets of it, how shall Big Management be other than a mere banausic skill or technique?

'Tis basically their class problem, not ours, but probably the explanation is to be sought in history and bunk: until about a century ago, the Big Managers really were only hired hands, owners and shareholders and directors still counted for something more than they did, and that in fact and not in word alone. Our current OnePercenters are thus rather like the ministeriales of mediaeval Germany, except that those neo-gentry never entirely got rid of their former betters. In this light it seems odd that none of the cultivated despisers of the GOP who write political books against the Big Party's "imperial presidency" have distinctly noticed that the executive perps are only trying to treat the United States of America the same way they treated the Ford Motor Company, which was perhaps the last significant fortress of the older economic order that held out against them.

Feldman's Folly

One of the foremost experts on what he refers to as Islamic democracy, Noah Feldman, explains in his book After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy how the Western paradigm has focused on two diametrically opposed models of government, each tracing its origin to one of two ancient cities: Jerusalem, the birthplace of Christianity, and Athens, the birthplace of democracy. In broad strokes, Jerusalem represents a model in which religion is dominant, there is no separation between church and state, and is characterized by near-absolute rule by an emperor who is also the head of the church. Athens, in contrast, represents reason, where religion is strictly "privatized," the god of science is dominant, and the people have a direct say in who is to lead them. Western history is characterized by a dynamic tension between these two cities. This leads to the assumption that if a society's conception of an ideal government does not fit neatly into the secular Athens model, it must of necessity be opting for the Jerusalem model. In this binary paradigm, no third choice exists. However, Feldman asserts, Islam's political history originates in another city altogether, Medina, the place of origin for both Islam's spiritual and democratic tradition. A recent Gallup survey shows that while there is a great deal of diversity among Muslim nations, some salient themes emerge which fly in the face of conventional wisdom. One of these findings is Muslims' widespread support for Sharia - Islamic religious principles that are widely seen as governing all aspects of life, from the mundane to the complex.

The Herr Professor Doktor disappears abruptly and mysteriously as soon as Gallup shows up. Are we to suppose his drool about Western Civ. is in agreement with conventional wisdom or in contradiction of it? For that matter, is Ms. Sapientia Conventionalis really still unaware that Muslims and neo-Muslims think highly of sharí‘a? Poor Sappy is always getting picked on, and perhaps she only exists to be picked on, but still . . . .

And the antithesis of "mundane" and "complex" is quaint, if not illuminating.

Often assumed in the West to be an oppressive corpus of law supported by only a small handful of fanatics (and especially detested by women), the incorporation of Sharia as one source of legislation enjoys the support of a majority in the eight Muslim-majority nations surveyed. Perhaps more surprising is the general absence of any large difference between men and women regarding their support for the incorporation of Sharia into governance. The only outlier is Turkey, where 57 percent say that Sharia should not be a source of legislation. But how is Sharia understood by the majority of Muslims? Does its inclusion mean a rejection of democratic values and a call for the absolute rule of an infallible clergy? The findings suggest that this is not the case. The vast majority of those surveyed, in addition to expressing their admiration for political freedom in the West, say they support freedoms of speech, religion and assembly, as well as a woman's right to vote, drive and work outside the home. Indeed, majorities in every nation surveyed except for Saudi Arabia (where the number is 40 percent) also believe it appropriate for women to serve at the highest levels of government in their nation's Cabinet and National Council. In addition, a mean of 60 percent say they would want religious leaders to play no direct role in drafting a country's constitution (and even among those who take the contrary view, most would want clerics limited to an advisory function). Should the West be surprised by this response? Richard Bulliet, in his book The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization, explains that Sharia traditionally acted as a limit on the power of government. He writes, "All that restrained rulers from acting as tyrants was Islamic law, Sharia. Since the law was based on divine rather then human principles, no ruler could change it to serve his own interests." To use more familiar language, Sharia in Muslim understanding represents those inalienable rights each person is endowed with by their creator. Government's role therefore should be to protect those rights. Thus, complete secularism can mean for many the lifting of all constraints on the tyranny of government - in fact taking away people's God-given rights. That most Muslims support an approach that refuses to exclude God from the governmental sphere even as they embrace democratic values may bewilder many who can only fathom a secular democracy. However, what is surprising is how many Americans may embrace a similar model. In a recent Gallup poll of American households, 46 percent say the Bible should be a source, but not the only source, of legislation, while 9 percent more say it should be the only source of legislation.

[sigh] "To use more familiar language" to say something rather different from the text one is supposed to be translating! After nine minutes of spinach about unshirkable duties, perhaps one minute of dessert about inalienable rights would be admissible, but no more.

However, a majority of Americans, like Muslims, does not favor handing control over to religious leaders. Interestingly, American views of the role of religious leaders almost exactly parallels those in Iran, with 55 percent of Americans and Iranians saying religious leaders should have no part in drafting a constitution for a new country, while the balance believes they should have at least some role. Understanding this third model of government, one embracing both religious principles and democratic values, may be America's key to helping build authentic, popularly supported democracy in the Middle East.

Poor Neocomrade N. Feldman never does get found, then. A pity, of course, but no great loss.

Meanwhile, what on earth is Dr. Gallup up to? I hadn't heard that either the Islamic Republic or the Homeland of Father Zeus is planning to assemble a constitutional convention any time soon. Are they speaking of the former Iraq when they say "drafting a constitution for a NEW country"? What's it all about, Alfie?

Out in the GOP's Peaceful Freedumbia, it would seem a bit harsh, possibly even "undemocratic," not to let the turbans vote at all. Yet what's for anybody to vote about? Have not Khalílzád Pasha and the aforementioned Feldman graciously bestowed a "constitution" upon their Party's neo-liberateds already?


"Dalia Mogahed is an author and director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies." What's to be said, except that obviously she shouldn't be? Couldn't they find somebody who actually knows a little bit about it?

Tiger Timmy's America

Mr. T. G. Ash was educated at sufficient expense to make one expect something more than he brings to market this morning. He, if anybody, ought to be able to pull off the act that Buckley Minor and General Lord George Will never get altogether right. Mr. Ash does have the Sir Oracle side of their common business down pat: "This is not good for US policy," "This long limbo is not good for the world." 'Tis a pity the man did not go on to alert us against something that would be bad for the whole universe!

From the way the editors at The Guardian caption his piece, one might suppose that "not good for the cosmos" is more or less Mr. Ash's estimate of le religionisme en Amérique, but probably that would be only the estimate of his editors. Mr. Ash is a Hoovervillain now, even if only an honourary and exotic sort of one, so he is not permitted to say anything that smacks too much of M. Voltaire and Col. Ingersoll. The flaming walls of the tank-thinkers' world are located somewhere around "Jesus - I found myself inwardly exclaiming, as a post-Christian European - Jesus, what century are we in?" Mr. Ash can get away with more than any native of Wingnut City would be allowed, but that sentence is about as far as even a post-Christian Old Euro can safely go. I doubt that the Thought Police would have passed the sentence itself, did it not bear that explicit warning label that Timothy Garton Ash is not exactly a regular guy, which means that allowances must be made.

I'm not entirely sure I can read the minds of the Thought Police, however. It is possible that they would be influenced by the musty stereotype according to which expensively educated Brits must be eccentrics of one kind or another, with this one specializing in the flagrant dottiness of questioning whether the Homeland of Father Zeus is really "on the cutting edge of societal evolution" -- as Dr. Limbaugh likes to say a bit too often about Dr. Limbaugh. In that case, the audience response required would be "Ain't he cute?" rather than "Almost all of 'em think like that over there." Either way, though, the neocomrades are not to take this performer altogether seriously.

Not surprisingly, there is no sign that Mr. Ash does not take Mr. Ash with perfect solemnity. If he didn't, he would not be playing the same game as his neocomrades Buckley and Will. To set up as Sir Oracle for a joke is fun too, but that is not what we have here. I'm afraid TGA is really trying to be the Alexis de Tocqueville of the tank-thinker epoch, and it takes a bit of work to unearth the funny side of the original M. de T. Should you care to attempt the exercise, read the august masterpiece in conjunction with Mrs. Trollope, who is almost all funny side. At least she is funny now, although a lot of postcolonials in the 1830's were very earnestly annoyed by what she wrote about them. Anyhow, read her Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) side by side with the Titan of Right-Wing Intellect, who visited in 1831, and ask yourself which of the two gives you a clearer notion of what General Jackson'a USA was really like.

Mr. Ash's worst fit of detocquevillizing I take to be the paragraph that begins "Saint Anselm's most famous formula was . . . ." Especially the first half of it, since after all there may be something to be said for "seeking to understand what this religiosity actually implies for Democrat or Republican policies in the world." (There is, however, nothing to be said for, or even simply about, "Democrat policies" except that Mr. Ash is a Hoovervillain, which we have noticed already. I doubt the Thought Police would have red-penciled "Democratic policies," especially coming from the keyboard of the exotic Mr. Ash, whose mandatory eccentricity might easily take the form of referring to us donkeys the way we refer to ourselves rather than Dr. Limbaugh's way.)

Since poor St. Anselm does not belong in this performance at all, we need not discuss him any more than Mr. Ash discusses that "deeply reasonable argument" of his, whatever it may consist in. Anselm and argument are only icing on the cake, ornamental rather than functional. The literary fault, the detocquevillizing, is to apply such high-class icing to rather commonplace cake.

It is a different sort of fault that after announcing the grand program of "seeking to understand what this religiosity actually implies" &c., Mr. Ash supplies no follow-through beyond telling us that even the Devil and Bill Clinton can quote Scripture with fluency. Not exactly news, that.

At the end of the day, or rather, the end of the scribble, it is not just difficult to take Mr. Ash as seriously as he'd like to be taken, it is impossible. He does not give us enough to go on. For example, it would be natural to wonder whether he supposes that the religiosity of extremist Republicans is different from the religiosity of Democrats. It's quite true that both can pick out congenial passages from the Vetus and the Novum, but that well known fact does not even begin to address the question. Do they treat their pet passages differently, or don't they? Mr. Ash makes us want to know what he thinks about it, but he declines to tell us. Assuming that there are some differences in the application as well as the selection of prooftexts, which I suppose off-hand a competent sociologist or journalist could probably establish to be the case, what implications do these differences have for the policy of the Big Management Party as opposed to that of us donkeys? Mr. Ash may or may not think he knows, but he certainly is not telling, even though he's the one that raised the question.

Perhaps the editors of the Guardian did not feel slightly swindled after reading the piece as I do. If so, they will have taken Mr. Ash to agree with them that Yank religionism is little more than local colour, a sort of folk-dancing equivalent. Mr. Ash did not say that, and of course the Thought Police would never allow any Hoovervillain, however exotic and quaintly eccentric, to say such a thing. If the "deeply reasonable argument" rigmarole means anything to him -- which there is no way to decide, but also no reason to doubt -- Mr. Ash must in fact regard Yank religionism as being of considerable significance. Unfortunately he refuses to reveal to us exactly what it is significant of. At the Guardian they seem to have decided from Mr. Ash's saying nothing about its significance that he considers it to be of zero significance -- a non sequitur if ever there was one. Nevertheless, Mr. Ash did rather ask to be misread that way. A bottom line like "The candidates' professions of faith merely tell you they are American politicians. Everything else depends on which of God's messengers you get," especially if taken in isolation, might not unreasonably be understood to mean that one can know everything one needs to about American politics without paying any attention to the religionizing. Or if not that, then at least that Yank religionizing is an optional icing on the political cake: everybody (in the USA) would notice at once if it wasn't there, but given that it is present, the exact colour and flavour and texture of it are not worth investigating, because such an investigation would turn up nothing that could not be learned from other sources. Mr. Ash did not say that, and I doubt he believes it.

Actually I am more confident that he does not believe it than that it is not in fact more or less how America works. Even granting that religionistical elephants and religionistical donkeys select different prooftexts, deploy them differently, and deploy them differently towards different goals, it remains entirely possible, for all I can see to the contrary, that the whole prooftext business is a peripheral and redundant sideshow, at least from a strictly political standpoint. It would be interesting to see a sociologist or journalist or perhaps a Church historian actually do the work that Mr. Ash proposes and then shirks, yet after the data have been collected and analyzed and published, perhaps one would read the study through without learning anything new or remarkable about US politics. It does tend to be the case that competent sociology ends up providing firm tertiary-educational and scientistic proof of what everybody knew already. And that's perfectly OK, because if we had a Copernican Revolution in social studies every six weeks, the implication would be that we radically do not understand our own society, a proposition that is improbable as well as repugnant.

Mr. Ash and M. de Tocqueville are not exactly "our society," to be sure, but the proposition that such toney outsiders are likely to understand us better than we understand ourselves has an unpleasantly Copernican air about it, as far as I am concerned. On the other hand, "understand" is an ambiguous word. I should say that all Americans understand what's going on when our pols start laying on the God stuff with a trowel or a dumptruck, but that does not mean that we can all write down a good account of what they are up to. It does mean, maybe, that we don't really need a good written account of it, and in that case we should not feel too swindled when Mr. Timothy Garton Ash fails to deliver the goods he promised. It would have been nice to have them, but we can do without.

=====

There's one thing the US presidential contenders all have in common: God With 17 months to go, the 2008 race is already well under way, and the first signs are of a resentful, defensive America Timothy Garton Ash in New York Thursday June 7, 2007 The Guardian We all know Christmas begins earlier every year, but imagine if it were to begin in May. And that's May the year before. This is what's happening with the presidential elections in the US. There are another 17 months until the actual vote next November, but the campaign is well under way. On Tuesday, I watched a television debate between 10 Republican contenders, following a similar one between the Democratic hopefuls last Sunday. At this rate, election fatigue will set in before we've even reached election year. Candidates are not merely nailing their colours to the mast; under media interrogation, they are compelled to take up detailed positions that they'll then find difficult to shift. This is not good for US policy. Meanwhile, the inhabitant of the White House is, in an important sense, already ex-president Bush. As a key former vice-presidential aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, goes to jail for perjury, the Bush administration increasingly resembles a badly shot-up, heavily listing aircraft carrier, limping towards port with, still faintly visible on the bridge, the tattered remnants of a sign proclaiming "Mission Accomplished". Even the Republican candidates in Tuesday's debate either damned Bush with faint praise or praised him with faint damns. Or not so faint. Asked by CNN's Wolf Blitzer what use he would make of ex-president Bush if he became president, congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado said Mr Bush would never darken the doorstep of the White House again. Yet for another year-and-a-half, Bush will be the most powerful man in the world, invested with the powers needed to block a G8 initiative on climate change, push through an irrelevant and divisive antiballistic missile shield and order a tactical nuclear strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. The one thing he'll find it difficult to do is to put together international coalitions for action based on trust in current US leadership. Apart from anything else, everyone will be looking to his potential successors. This long limbo is not good for the world. The post-2009 US one begins to glimpse in these early pre-presidential debates is a defensive, resentful, slightly truculent place. Although leading Republican candidates such as John McCain will not accept this, the American people have basically decided that the Iraq war is over and the mission has not been accomplished. It's not a matter of when but how the US withdraws militarily, even if that withdrawal is, in the first instance, only to a few fortified camps and a fortress embassy in the green zone in Baghdad while the carnage and ethnic cleansing continues all around. The lesson that most Americans seem to have drawn is that the US should have less of these foreign entanglements in future, and look to its own. Both on trade and on immigration, the atmosphere is increasingly protectionist. The fiercest clashes in the Republican debate were about immigration. Partly this was internal politics. Because leading candidate John McCain is co-sponsor of a bill that could have the effect of legalising some 12 million illegal immigrants, other candidates had a chance to score off him. Rudy Giuliani described the bill as "a typical Washington mess". But there's something deeper going on here as well. The undertones of panic recall nothing so much as Europeans agonising about Muslim immigrants in their midst, despite the fact that the majority of migrants here come from a western cultural background, being mainly Spanish-speaking and Christian. "We are becoming a bilingual nation," said one of the candidates, "and that is not good". A sentiment that would be entirely at home on the French or German right. What remains fundamentally different from the old continent is the way American politicians not merely have religion but wear it on their sleeve. An extreme example is former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. Answering a question about evolution versus so-called intelligent design, Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister before he became a politician, said simply: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth." He didn't know when or how exactly God did the business, but do it He certainly did. To say you didn't believe that, he added, was in effect to say that you didn't believe in God. Then he quoted Martin Luther: Here I stand, I can do no other. And he earned, from the audience at St Anselm College, a Catholic liberal arts college in Manchester, New Hampshire, a fair round of applause. In answer to a follow-up question, he said: "If anybody wants to believe that they are the descendants of a primate, they are welcome to do it." Jesus - I found myself inwardly exclaiming, as a post-Christian European - Jesus, what century are we in? Yet other candidates hastened to second him, albeit in more elliptical ways. John McCain praised the eloquence of "Pastor Huckabee" and went on to say he had no doubt God played some part in "the time before time". (Code-phrase for the Christian right. Decoded: this speaker is one of us, you can give him your vote.) Senator Sam Brownback assured us that "there's a God of the universe that loves us very much and had a part in the process". Well, that's all right then. But don't think this religiosity is confined to Republican candidates. In an earlier debate, organised by a left-liberal Evangelical group called Sojourners, the three leading Democrat contenders, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barrack Obama, vied with each other in testifying to the importance of their faith. Edwards did say firmly "I believe in evolution", but he quickly added that "the hand of God today is in every step of what happens with me and every human being that exists on this planet". Asked a painful question about how she coped with Bill's infidelity, Hillary Clinton said she was sustained by "my faith and the support of my extended faith family, people whom I knew who were literally praying for me in prayer chains, who were prayer warriors for me". Angela Merkel, who chairs this week's G8 summit, comes from a party described as Christian Democrats and a church called Evangelical, but I don't think you'd ever catch her talking about prayer warriors. Next to the Atlantic ocean, this is perhaps the greatest European-American divide. On reflection, I realise I was wrong about Christmas. Over here, it doesn't merely start in May the previous year. In US politics, every day is Christmas. Saint Anselm's most famous formula was "faith seeking understanding". There is a deeply reasonable argument to be had - and many secular rationalists are conducting it - about the basic claims of this faith. But since religion is not going to disappear from US politics any time soon, there is an equally important exercise which consists of seeking to understand what this religiosity actually implies for Democrat or Republican policies in the world. That is a very different question. Religious American politicians who may seem to secular Europeans to be irrational in one area of their being can be reasonable, rational and liberal in their policies in the world - more so, on occasion, than some secular European leaders. For proof positive, you need look no further than another Clinton, Bill. The candidates' professions of faith merely tell you they are American politicians. Everything else depends on which of God's messengers you get.

(( Hmm, no Middle East at all, Mr. Bones. Well, we never actually promised, did we? not even implicitly like Timmy. ))

Concerning a Certain Highjackin'

Let Rio Limbaugh, and all free-lance downdumbees and neo-wombscholars whatsoever, take notice in advance that this is only a figurative or metaphorical highjackin' that Mr. McCloskey uncharitably and impatiently goes on about. We "Reagan Democrats" were of course never a properly highjackable entity to begin with. We had no formal organization at all, let alone anything for hostile takeover artists to take over with glee and malice. If I hadn't been there myself, I might very well now suppose that "Reagan Democrats" was only a slogan of journalists, a phantom.

Thus to reflect is at once to wonder whether I have not been rather unfair myself in supposing, for instance, that the "Velvet Revolution" in the former People's Czechoslovakia consisted of nothing more than M. Václav Havel's impeccable Commencement Day windbaggeries. Perhaps there were more decent and sensible folks than he further down in the Bohemian ranks who cared, and care, about "Velvet Revolution" the way I cared and care about "Reagan Democrats"? If so, I daresay they probably feel about as highjacked as I do. But naturally that must be their story to tell, not mine.

The villain of my own tale is not M. Havel, but Mlle. Piggy Noonan, who does not much resemble M. Havel. The trouble with Miss Piggy is that she has become the alone icon of a "Reagan Democrat," which, to be scrupulously fair, is perhaps more lazy journalism's fault than Piggy's own innate piggishness. Nevertheless there it is is, and here we are: a "Reagan Democrat" in 2007, if ever alluded to at all, is a former New Deal fan who went Miss Piggy's way, the way of total perversion and reversal of one's traditional régime preference, a really lusty apostasy all the way over to militant OnePercenterism and Wall Street Jingoes and the Big Management Party. We donkeys who decided to stick with Democracy when there was no longer a pretty decent and adult St. Ronald over across the aisle to have truck with might as well not exist, compared to the paradigmatic Miss Piggy.

Nobody is all bad, of course, and Miss Piggy undoubtedly tried to mitigate the barbarism of the barbarians she had lewdly and lasciviously defected to, especially at first, when she agitpropized for George XLI about "kinder and gentler" and "a thousand points of light." But then OnePercenterism swallowed her up altogether, and she became a fixed star in the firmament of the Wall Street Jingo op-ed world, where of course she was on as tight a Boy-'n'-Party tether as all the rest of the hired help. (The Rev. Torquemada must admire the consistency and stability of the WSJ opinion pages from down there in the Hot Below! Why couldn't he ever manage to do the same for Castilla and Aragón?)

Rumors have reached us lately that Miss Piggy Noonan has now broken with her Kennebunkport-Crawford Dynasty Little Brother. We're sorry to have to report that the emotion this rather peripheral human event wakes in us is technically called Schadenfreude. Philosophical indifference or Christojudaean Charity™ would become us far better, yet Lady Veritas forbids us not to report that what we really think runs more like "About time! And serves Piggy [exp. del.] right!"

To add to this, admittedly rather spiteful and unworthy fun, the rumors say that Miss Piggy Noonan and her apostasized-to Little Brother have quarreled at last about xenophobia, with Little Brother holdin' by and large the "kinder and gentler" position. We acknowledge, of course, that Miss Piggy Noonan has thereby put herself at odds with her Wall Street Jingo employers, as well as with her new-found ideobuddies of Grant's Old Party. Such a step as that demands courage, and far be it from us to think that courage is not a genuine Pagan Virtue or seek to avoid applauding any exhibition of it!

Nevertheless let the record show fair and square that ""About time! And serves Piggy [exp. del.] right!" was what we thought instantly and, as it were, "instinctively," whereas caveats about Pagan Virtues and 'a that and a' that were only secondary.

At a tertiary level, how comes it that we are so upset about the GOP's and WSJ's Noonan? She has never done us any actual and demonstrable injury, if "actual" means actionable. Fancy trying to persuade a jury that it's some sort of felony for Miss Piggy to "highjack" the "Reagan Democrat Movement" and hog it all to herself! Perry Mason would chop that nonsense to bits in a flash.

Fourth level down: perhaps we might not unreasonably be indignant about a Miss Piggy Noonan the same way we are indignant about Massachusetts motorists? It can't REALLY be the case that they are all secretly in league to exterminate the whole race of pedestrians, ourselves included, yet for practical purposes of self-protection and avoidance it seems sensible to assume what we know to be theoretically or academically false. I think that will do provisionally, given the obvious parallel between Piggy's adopted Little Brother's Big Management Party's Shock-'n'-Awe and the unwitting (?) arrogance of the progressive motorist vis-à-vis the residual pedestrian: pedestrians and Democrats are not yet extinct, and one doesn't quite exactly want to help make make them become extinct, but . . . .

Somethin' like that, maybe.

At Last A Consistent Wingnut!

One of the great puzzles of this Epoch of Preëmptive Retaliation that we live in is how often Republican Party extremists are deliriously in favor of bestowin' boons on their little foreign friends that they have always stoutly resisted for themselves back in God's Homeland. The folks who killed the Equal Rights Amendment solemnly advise us that among the very worst sins of Islamophalangitarianism is the shabby way females get treated. The folks who can't speak badly enough of Affirmative Action insofar as it may impact brain-dead white males at home are quite sure that special panderin' to Arab Sunnis in the former Iraq is bound to work wonders.

Havin' once conquered the provinces of the former Iraq, did the militant GOP try to bring their most recent conquests up to the Kansas City level by inflictin' the Kansas City sort of governance on the neo-liberateds? Did they insist on a strong central Fedguv of the sort that has engendered their own George XLIII Bush? Did they insist on "first past the post" and "winner take all" in the spirit of Floridagate 2000? Of course not, what a silly idea! What Khalílzád Pasha and Prof. Dr. Noah Feldman (&c. &c.) did was to give their subject indigs a "constitution" that reads like a hostile travesty of proportional representation -- that Old Euro system so utterly un-American that we have adopted it here in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (We alone in all of Greater Texas, or so I'm told.)

Even the Big Management Party's holy of holies -- which is of course what I'd call "Political Capitalism" and which pious OnePercenter devotees account far too sacred ever to be named at all -- turns out not to be an export product, although to be sure in this case the Boy-'n'-Party stumblebums did at least take a whack at exportin' it. For a brief season of carnival under Sultan Jerry Bremer, New Baghdad was overrun with the nephews and nieces of AEIdeologues and Heritagitarians and Hoovervillains who attempted to drum elementary AdamSmithism into their Party's alien and bewildered neoliberateds. There has been nothing quite like that show since the Russian intelligentsia condescended to "go to the people" back in eighteen seventy-whatever. In both instances, however, the OnePercenter señoritos and señoritas got bored very rapidly when it turned out that there would be serious sales resistance to the ideoproducts that they hawked. Neoliberatin' individual peasants or indigs face-to-face turned out to cost far more than it brought in, and it is therefore in strictest accord with the Big Management Party orthodoxy of 1869-2007 that it should be dropped. (Russian Populist orthodoxy of 187? had perhaps not the same excuse available, but that's their problem, not America's or neo-Iraq's. Anyway, they're all long since safely extinct, Russian Populists are.)

Clearly there is a pattern here, a systematic discrepancy. Sooner or later somebody over across the aisle in the Stupid Party was bound to notice it and write it up from the extremist GOP standpoint.

So, then, without further preliminary ado, I give you

Reagan Could Save Iraq / By Bill Steigerwald What would Ronald Reagan do -- with Iraq? President Reagan was way too wise to have gone to Mesopotamia in the first place. But what if he had to extract us from Iraq today? And what if he wanted to make sure Iraq had a chance of becoming a functioning, semi-civilized country after we left? The Gipper probably would be in favor of doing something the Bush administration won't do -- decentralize and federalize Iraq’s government. As is documented in the new book The Reagan Diaries, Reagan understood the value of a weak central government in countries boiling with ethnic, religious and political hatred and violence. On July 2, 1986, he wrote in his diary that one way to solve the tricky transition of power in South Africa from 5 million whites to 26 million blacks might be to set up “something like Switzerland's ‘Canton’ type of govt.” A lot of smart folks -- conservatives, liberals and libertarians -- have always argued that decentralization is exactly what Iraq needs to avoid total meltdown. Some have proposed a three-part split of Iraq -- a partition that gives the Kurds, Sunni and Shia control of their own turf. Republican 2008 presidential dreamer Tommy Thompson has mentioned a vague plan to create 18 provinces ruled by Iraq’s main Muslim sects. But Democrat 2008 presidential dreamer Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, with the help of Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations, has proposed a more detailed scheme. Under Biden's plan, a unified Iraq would be maintained but government power would be seriously decentralized. Oil money would be shared proportionately among the Kurds, Sunni and Shia. Baghdad’s mixed population would become a federal city protected by international peacekeepers. The Biden plan, Biden's presidential Web site says, is not a partition and it is consistent with the Iraq Constitution. Biden, like many others, believes that giving Kurds, Sunni and Shia their own territories is the only way to ensure that their militias don’t slaughter each other trying to get sole control of the central government. Overall, Biden contends, his plan is in the self-interest of the Kurds, Sunni and Shia -- as well as Iran. Ivan Eland of the Independent Institute, who discounts fears that federalizing Iraq will bring even worse chaos and instability or result in meddling by Iraq’s neighbors, believes decentralizing power in Iraq is still the best -- and last -- hope for saving it from “going up in smoke” after we leave. Biden's Web site lists nearly 40 people or editorial boards that support his idea or want to pursue it -- including Henry Kissinger, Republican Sens. Richard Lugar and Sam Brownback and Bill O'Reilly. Unfortunately, the idea of formally decentralizing Iraq's government -- which is already occurring neighborhood by neighborhood on its bloody own -- is going nowhere. The idea barely registers on the mainstream media's radar screen. It has not been seriously addressed in the presidential soundbite-trading "debates." And the Bush administration still isn't interested in it. Ronald Reagan would not have been so stupid. He obviously understood that Switzerland’s Frenchmen, Germans and Italians lived in peace and prosperity in part because of their loose confederation of 26 highly autonomous cantons. But unfortunately Reagan’s not coming back from heaven to fix Iraq or anything else the Bush Republicans have broken -- no matter how hard the GOP's faithful pray.

Quite a strong performance for a OnePercenter fan, is it not?

A severe critic might criticize that the moral for the Stupid Party is not pointed absolutely unmistakably with some language like "Look, guys, if we are for states' rights and not any kind of Fedguv supporters at all here at home in Greater Texas, as of course we are, shouldn't we back states' rights out in our Party's newly conquered boondocks as well?"

Such criticism strikes me as way too harsh. Beyond a certain point the stupidity of the stupid is inexpugnable, so to subtract points from anybody's score because she declines even to attempt the impossible is unreasonable and unjust. If the Elephant People cannot make out their own Neocomrade W. Steigerwald's meaning from his scribble, that will be their fault, not Bill's.

Prescinding from any narrow Big Management Party context and speaking absolutely, it is perhaps not very impressive that Bill should need to take refuge with "nearly 40 people or editorial boards that support." If Mr. Bones and I send in our names, that will make it nearly forty-two, but even so . . . .

Which brings us to St. Ronald: would he really agree to up the ante to nearly forty-three if he was still with us in the same way Jimmy Carter is still with us? I suppose I ought to know as well as anybody, having voted for the man three times, though the third time he was somewhat disguised as "George Herbert Walker Bush." But in fact I have no idea at all. Certainly Mr. Reagan thought it an excellent idea that the Soviet Union ought to be decentralized and Swiss-cantonized even to the point of partition, but that was about somebody else's conquests, not about the militant GOP's conquests, and thus it is a very dubious parallelism indeed.

Neocomrade Steigerwald should perhaps reflect that St. Ronald was always basically on the defensive, still always engaged in Mister X's "containment" exercise dating from 1947. Now that Republican Party extremism can safely be a hyperpowerful Godzilla if it chooses, a terrifyin' menace to every ninety-pound weaklin' in sight with a changeable regime, the fundamental parameters of Weltpolitik are become so different that it would probably be better to just let Ronald Reagan go in peace and not speculate about what he might have done, had he ever been in a position to aggress and invasionize with the Kennebunkport-Crawford Dynasty impunity.

The Dick and Hillary Show

Tricky Dickie reduces the idea of political technology or insider expertise to absurdity. How did this clown ever get a reputation in the first place? It's not as if Mr. Morris ever knew all the electoral results in Sangamore County back to the Flood in the manner of Kevin Philips and Pat Caddell. Can it be that he is so thoroughly mediocre and unoriginal that his instincts match those of many swing voters by dumb luck rather than by skill and diligence? It is easy enough to find human barometers like that amongst committed partisans, as for instance Mr. Bill Moyers, who can always give us the latest trendy American liberalism entirely untouched by human thought. Naturally Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh are full of anti-Moyerses. There are so many of them that no individual specimen is of much value.

A specimen that is not up to "ideology" and also lacks any faintest sense of loyalty, yet somehow swerves and twists exactly like the political undistributed middle, might be well worth investing in. (That canary down the mineshaft is useful even though nobody ever dreams of asking for her bird-brained opinions.) Still, how did anybody first notice that Neocomrade R. Morris, as he now is, possesses his uncanny knack of divining what Americans who "hate politics" -- that's Dr. Dionne's diagnosis from the late 1990's -- want from their politicians? Any single banality would only be what millions of other politics-haters think also at such-and-such a point in time; what makes Tricky Dickie special is that he has embraced a long series of banalities that is the same, or close to the same, as those chosen by the unaccountable fickleness of Ms. Swing Voter. The peculiar nature of this talent makes it very difficult to detect, surely?

Once detected, the talent remains almost impossible to discuss critically, because nobody has the faintest notion how it works. It might as well be witchcraft. Should Tricky Dickie someday wander off in a direction diametrically opposite to that of Ms. Swing Voter, presumably that would be the end of him, yet his termination would be as mysterious as his commencement. In between, how is one to judge whether Dickie deploys his trickiness well or badly? The obstacle is not merely that one cannot performs this man's tricks oneself, as Dr. Johnson observed about the violinist, it is that one can't begin to imagine how anybody can perform them.

Nevertheless I'll venture upon a small bit of criticism, basing myself upon a negative conjecture about how Mr. Morris does not do his magic. It cannot be important, as I guess, that Mr. Morris is a political insider in the sense of knowin' lots of pols personally. If he lived in a yurt in Central Tibet (a yurt with good Internet service, naturally), Dickie could do his characteristic shtik just as well.

The substance of my criticism is that probably he could do it even better from Tibet. That is to say, knowin' pols and polesses personally probably degrades Dickie's performance, at least a little. After all, Ms. Swing Voter has no such acquaintance with them, although very likely as a faithful subject of Televisionland, she kids herself that she does. (Dr. MacLuhan has much to answer for! But that's another scribble.) Admittedly one does not understand either the lady's fickleness or the clown's, but surely it is unlikely that the clown bein' in a radically different situation from the lady helps him read her mind better?

Which brings us to Dickie's Other Lady, the junior Senator from New York. Dickie detests her. So far, so good, considering that the pollmongers inform us that quite a number of Americans detest her also. The trouble is that Dickie detests Mizz Hillary personally, which only a tiny percentage of Americans are in a position to do, even if having shaken her hand once is to count as personal acquaintance. One can't really say "Visceral loathing might warp Mr. Morris's political judgment," for the shtik in question cannot possibly be judgment-based. If it was, the audience would not be completely in the dark as to how the tricks are done. All the same, it seems reasonable to speculate that havin' all his hormones run berserk at the very thought of Senator Clinton might interfere with the clown's performances somehow. (Who would care to engage a mine canary that nurses a bitter, and perforce a bird-brained, grudge against the Warbucks Coal and Smog Trust LLC in particular?)

And now, perhaps we may begin:

Iraq will become Hillary’s war / By Dick Morris It’s a good time to read Robert Dallek’s new book, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, an agonizing presentation of the difficulty the two men had in figuring out how to pull out of Vietnam and end the war “honorably.” Their problem was familiar to anyone who has been following the war in Iraq: we were losing. Any move to pull out American troops would inevitably be followed (as it was) by a collapse of the South Vietnamese military resistance. Impaled on the horns of their own indecision, Nixon and Kissinger kept troops in Vietnam for the administration’s entire first term and only pulled them out five years after inheriting the war from Lyndon Johnson. If she is elected president, Hillary Clinton will probably have to follow the same trajectory whether she wants to or not. What she called “Bush’s war” in the televised debate on Sunday night in New Hampshire will inevitably become Hillary’s war before her first term in office is over. No American president will be able to pull our troops out and watch the Iraqi government dissolve in chaos, only to be taken over by the very terrorists who are planting IEDs to kill our troops. And if a male American president can’t do so, a female president certainly cannot.

Dick Canary may know by knack how Televisionland and the electorate would react to his proposed scenario, but his qualifications to write scenarios about the former "Iraq" are nonexistent. If we politely attempt to take him seriously, "the very terrorists who are planting IEDs to kill our troops" must at least mean that it would be the natural masters, the Arabophone Sunnis, who prevail after the GOP extremists finally go away. Not entirely impossible, but not outstandingly likely either. But Dick Canary almost certainly means something far narrower than that, probably that al-Qá‘ida will hit the jackpot, and the odds against that are very high indeed. We might edge backwards into Mr. Morris's proper sphere and guess that his "expert" advice to whoever succeeds Little Brother would be to label whatever faction clearly triumphs in the GOP's Peaceful Freedumbia -- supposing that any one faction does so, itself a risky bet -- "al-Qá‘ida" without any regard to indig opinion about such things, without any feeble attempt at reality-basing. At the moment he is "advising" Sen. Clinton, however, and that plan would, by his own account, get her into the hottest hot water in sight. This may not be an accident.

As a woman, as a Democrat, from the first moment Hillary Clinton were to take office as president, she would face the task of proving herself tough enough for the job. Even if foreign leaders and our enemies do not doubt her on this score, she will feel the need to prove herself. Any signal of weakness, such as a withdrawal from Iraq, would embolden our enemies and weaken her credibility. Remember how President Eisenhower let Khrushchev threaten to “bury” the United States without pointing out our huge lead in missiles? As a former general with an illustrious past, he had no worries about his credibility on military issues. But former 2nd Lt. John F. Kennedy had reason to worry that his bona fides as a military leader might be questioned, and he hastened to tell the world that the U.S. had a huge lead in missiles (after winning the election of 1960 campaigning on the “missile gap”). The price for JFK’s insecurity was, ultimately, the Cuban Missile Crisis, as Khrushchev felt he had to close the gap Kennedy had publicized. Hillary Clinton will not be able to pull out of Iraq.

As always, Dick Canary's substantive view is a banality, something millions of good folks who are not paying much attention would assent to -- without paying much attention. Before his last turn of coat, he would doubtless have spun Ike and JFK quite differently, although that would have been banality too. Today's spin is a bit off the mark, insofar as Republican Party extremism does not have any candidate in sight with military credentials as good as Sen. Kennedy's, not to speak of Gen. Eisenhower's. (The Flyboy Hero from AZ does not count, since bein' a pilot scarcely made him a Clausewitz. It didn't even give him any command experience of the sort that JFK had at least a little of.)

Pay no attention to her politically motivated vote to “end” the war by cutting off funds or her support for a mandatory withdrawal schedule. Both votes were cast in the heat of a presidential race in which she cannot allow Edwards or Obama to flank her to the left. But do pay attention to her interview with The New York Times a few months ago in which she said that she would keep sufficient troops in Iraq to provide training, logistical support, air support and intelligence to Iraqi forces and to police the border with Iran to prevent infiltration and to hunt down al Qaeda operatives throughout the country. As much as she would like to, Hillary cannot back away from these missions.

It's quaint, if nothing better, to listen to Mr. Dick Morris pooh-pooh "politically motivated." That is as if Dr. Einstein had told the world that physics is not really so very important.

Apparently our mine canary does not detect anything "political" in that particular occupation policy, which is of course not peculiar to Sen. Clinton by any means. If being "bipartisan" after the fashion of the CFR and ISG gentry removes one from "politics," Dickie is quite right, although not very significantly right, because this is an issue of words rather than facts. Anyhow, what does Dick Canary want us to do, once we have paid attention to that article? Above all, what does he want us to do specifically because it was Mizz Hillary that wrote the article and not somebody else who happens to be running for President?

Remember how long it took Bill Clinton to withdraw even a token force from Somalia after the Mogadishu killings? It was almost six months before our forces pulled out. We couldn’t be seen to be fleeing after our troops were killed and their bodies dragged through the streets by the local warlords. A withdrawal from Iraq would be even more complicated. The most likely course of events is that Hillary will undertake a limited withdrawal (if Bush has not already done so) but will be forced either to keep a substantial force on the ground or to add to it if the military situation proves untenable.

Dick Canary is a little weak on logic, as well as Mil. Sci. How can the lady be "forced" to do what she herself has proposed doing? Has she changed her mind since writing what she wrote? Was she only kidding her readers in the first place? (Golly, what if the article was "politically motivated" after all!)

The Democratic left does not realize that simply pulling out is not a viable political or military option and that no president, of either party, is going to pursue it. And particularly not a woman with hawkish inclinations during her first year on the job. ,

Since you and I are no doubt part of Dick Canary's notion of "the Democratic left," Mr. Bones, let us engage in a moment of self-criticism. Do we, or do we not, "realize that simply pulling out is not a viable political or military option and that no president, of either party, is going to pursue it"? It looks like the answer has to be one of those shifty yes-and-no contraptions with subordinate clauses in it that arouse such suspicions in the honest breast of the wombscholar: "Yes, Mr. Canary, we understand that our irresponsible withdrawal is not likely to happen, but No, we cannot agree with you that the policy would necessarily not be "viable," should somebody competent undertake to pursue it from the White House."

Meanwhile, back in darkest Dickmorristan, what's "the Democratic left" doing in an anti-Clinton piece? Few of us unpatriotic fiends are going to vote for the lady in the primaries. Dick Canary probably wishes that more of us felt inclined to do so -- that way he could rub off a little of our fiendish unpatriotism on Sen. Clinton, who is pretty well dug in against that line of attack. Exactly why he, of all people, should take such trouble to point out how strongly defended she is in her bunker of Responsible Nonwithdrawal is mildly puzzling: this scribble would make more sense if Tricky Dickie himself preferred some other invasion and occupation policy, but there is no sign that he does.

It's also a puzzle why he allows himself to sound at some points as if the Senator's Presidency were a sure thing, everything already settled except the actual count of votes. Does Mr. Morris really and truly believe that? It seems unlikely. Certainly he can not want that. Maybe he's just havin' a nice comfy wallow in pessimism, hobgoblinizin' himself with the worst of all possible worlds. That seems a bit out of character, though, and if it is really the case, this guy's usefulness as a political mine canary ceases to exist at once.

Oh, well, although it is an important and interesting question exactly how the Responsible Nonwithdrawal marketing campaign is going to be conducted, the big push has not yet begun, and when it does begin, it will not be conducted on a level where Dick Canary's special knack is likely to be pertinent. The marketeers must begin with the assumption that what Televisionland and the electorate want in their ignorance is of no consequence. Ms. Swing Voter therefore does not matter, and if she doesn't matter, neither does Mr. Dick Morris, whose opinions are only of interest insofar as they cast light on hers. Q.E.D.