56 Comments

1. biggie:

Including the US’ own worst debacles, its worth mentioning.

Sep 17, 2008 - 5:04 am 2. coyotl:

You seem to be hiding from many of the political developments in Iraq, Wretchard. The pro-Iranian, pro-Hezbollah, Shiite Islamist government has been arresting our “allies” in the Anbar Awakening:

“Iraq Takes Aim at U.S.-Tied Sunni Groups’ Leaders
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
BAGHDAD — The Shiite-dominated government in Iraq is driving out many leaders of Sunni citizen patrols, the groups of former insurgents who joined the American payroll and have been a major pillar in the decline in violence around the nation.

In restive Diyala Province, United States and Iraqi military officials say there were orders to arrest hundreds of members of what is known as the Awakening movement as part of large security operations by the Iraqi military. At least five senior members have been arrested there in recent weeks, leaders of the groups say. ”

(Since URLs get moderated, readers can look it up themselves)

The Shiite thug-government has been raiding voting centers in advance of regional elections, all in order to intimidate the opposition:

“Iraqi elections official fears fair vote in jeopardy
Updated 8/15/2008 1:31

By Charles Levinson and Ali A. Nabhan, USA TODAY
BAGHDAD — Iraqi security forces loyal to the Shiite-led government are raiding voter registration centers and taking other steps to discourage participation in upcoming elections, says the head of Iraq’s voting regulatory agency.”

And alert Belmont readers must know that Iraqi PM Maliki spent 3 days in June conversing with his good friend, the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei before Maliki came out for Obama’s withdrawal plan.

Why should we support, or arm such dubious allies? Why do you Wretchard, believe that the pro-Hezbollah Shiite thug-government is a “liberal” ally?

Sep 17, 2008 - 6:01 am 3. biggie:

They’ll invest in their energy better than Saddam. And won’t invade neighbors. Or gas them. Or proliferate nuclear technology. Are those bad things?

Sep 17, 2008 - 6:05 am 4. Staring In Disbelief:

The things coyotl mention are real issues that bear watching, but totally explainable in the context of Iraqi politics, US politics, and the general ebb & flow of events along a generally positive trend line in Iraq. Eternal lefty-pessimists like coyotl will always point to the “next worry” while totally discounting the immense, real progress in regional security that has been achieved. See Keane, Kagan & Kagan’s excellent article in the (dreaded neo-con) Weekly Standard (www.weeklystandard.com) called “The Endgame in Iraq”. Anyone with any memory of the past three years can cite the challenges predicted, faced & overcome. These are the next ones we face there, and it is in democracy’s nature to always be on the verge of a new existential crisis. Here in the US (right now) it’s financial armageddon, entitlements growth, healthcare costs, demographics, immigration, etc. etc. It is patience and confidence that will win out in the end. Do we have the will to see it through? Like everything else in democracy, we’ll see.

Also, in case anyone has missed them, make sure to read the excellent contributions by “Old Blue” on Wretchard’s earlier posts “Hope” and “Pakistan – It’s Nor Iraq”. Welcome to the club, Old Blue!

Sep 17, 2008 - 6:21 am 5. Martin McPhillips:

One of the things I’ve predicted all along is that once reasonable stability was established in Iraq that then the complaint would be that it’s not Massachusetts.

I recall that when Giuliani was elected mayor of New York City in ‘93 that the word to the wise was that the City was “ungovernable” and that Giuliani’s pledge to get crime under control (the murder rate had gone over 2,000 per annum) was just nonsense. When the job was done the complaint was that Giuliani had a rotten personality.

I suspect that with Iraq the more frequent answer to progress will be that “we should never have been there in the first place.”

In Iraq, as in New York, civil society is the great army. Civil society, like man, is not perfect, and neither is Massachusetts.

Sep 17, 2008 - 6:32 am 6. biggie:

Martin/Staring:

Both your points indicate how poorly served we are by the owners of very influential media. How can we improve our own observations? If Iraq, Afghanistan or Mexico were good or bad, how would we know it?

Sep 17, 2008 - 6:39 am 7. rumcrook:

the left seems to have an inborn desire to see all conflicts we (the west) have end in defeat.

Im thinking it so they can say “see war is not the answer” you know, unless its our idea

Sep 17, 2008 - 6:42 am 8. Lifeofthemind:

When I was teaching I once asked the class if it was wrong for the Conquistedors to invade the Americas and overthrow the native civilization. The students answered of course it was and when I asked Why? the said it was Imperialism, theft, murder,and arrogance. When I asked where they got those ideas from they moaned a little and eventually cited the 10 Commandments or if they wanted to impress tried for Homer or Tacitus. When I asked what the Aztecs and Incas believed about conquest they got nervous. They of course believed it was their gods’ given right to invade other peoples and take prisoners. In the case of the Aztecs they would feed the Sun God thousands of prisoners beating hearts. The Spanish claimed they were offering the peoples they discovered an equal place as members in the Christian civilization. Violations of that policy may have been the norm but they were seen as offences.

Where is the greatest Imperialism? In conquering a foreign people or in expecting them to judge you by your standards or in judging yourself by their standards? That last appears to be what the multicultural left have reduced themselves to in accepting the Islamist paradigm that the non-Western tribes, like the imperialist Aztecs believed before, have a divine right to conquer and that a differant morality applies to crimes committed outside the tribe to those committed within.

Sep 17, 2008 - 7:25 am 9. wretchard:

In the years leading up to the Civil War there was the theory among those who advocated compromise that slavery would gradually fade away and that a direct confrontation was ultimately unnecessary. In a kind of inversion the Left has probably hoped since the 1960s that people would be ‘enlightened’ into voluntarily accepting their intellectual chains.

But the Culture Wars and especially the Rise of Islam have shaken that belief to the core. The Culture Wars meant the program wasn’t working. People were pushing back. And with the decline of the MSM and the growing obsolescence of the traditional university it became less obvious that a certain world view could ‘inevitably’ be imposed by cultural indoctrination alone. But I think the advent of radical Islam really told them the clock ticking. If they couldn’t make their vision happen soon, it wouldn’t happen at all. September 11 had the effect of energizing conservatism and usurping the Left self-appointed revolutionary role. The Left was caught between two fires: the conservative hold-outs and the more militant Muslims. But there was a third, largely unrecognized factor which weakened the Left. Globalization. Globalization has made not just Islam but a whole host of non-Marxist authoritarianisms competitive with their monopoly. The Confucian Chinese and the Russian crime-syndicate types of authoritarianism mean their dream of a multilateral EU-style world is far from inevitable. In fact, it means their politically correct world is unlikely to survive in the fact of such brutal competitors. Not only are the demographics and trends are against them, their silly little Fabianism simply won’t work against thugs. You can’t argue “reproductive rights” with radical Islam who will simply decapitate the staff of their abortion clinics. Nor can you blater on about human rights in Moscow, where a bullet in the head answers all arguments. About the only thing the Left is confident of beating is the relatively civilized, Bible-clinging, law-abiding soccer mom. So that’s who they’re going to beat up on. Not any Shi’ite militias or Janjaweeds. None of those. What they’ll take on is Sarah Palin or an old geezer who can’t comb his hair.

I’ve come to believe that the extraordinary rancor associated with the Obama campaign is driven more by anxiety than anything else. They’ve pulled out all the stops, dropped all the masks, dispensed with all the subtlety because this is Last Chance Saloon. They’ll run whatever media they’ve got left into the ground in the hope that if they can just get BHO into the White House, history will stop. But it won’t. BHO’s administration will be about as safe as British New Labor is against militant Islam and Russia in a world without America because the whole guiding principle of BHO is that America is part of the problem, if not the whole problem. Which is to say, that after he succeeds in sawing off the limb, he’ll wait for the tree not the branch to fall. But he’ll be in for a surprise. What’s BHO going to do after he sells both Iraq and Afghanistan down the river? What are the Kos people going to do after they’ve cancelled all advanced combat systems and made it a crime to criticize their shibboleths? What are they going to do after they’ve made every apology and paid every reparation and Hezbollah still wants more? Who’s going to bail out Chavez and Morales after they’ve Mugabeized their countries? Get money from Obama? Basically the Left is up against it and must burn their shirts for a little bit more flash.

They may get it their momentary blaze of glory, but the fire they see will be that of the house burning down. I feel sorry though, for the bystanders of their gotterdammerung.

Sep 17, 2008 - 7:53 am 10. Konyok:

Lifeofthemind,

Actually, I think it’s even worse than your “greatest Imperialism” dilemma.

The multiculturalists want to judge us by their reconstruction of how indigenous peoples would judge us if equipped with the raised multicultural consciousness. Obviously, an Aztec commentator would envy or fear us, but also respect our ability to project force. He might feel some disdain for our squeamishness, but he would never, ever subscribe to a view that we are ipso facto illegitimate because imperialist, except as a tactical ploy to limit our power or replace us as the hegemon.

The multicultural argument is circular. European enlightenment values are rejected because they contradict European enlightenment values; therefore, the more perfect implementation of European enlightenment values is the nullification of European enlightenment values.

The same dialectic can be seen in the argument that aggressively using intelligence to interdict terrorists is in fact a victory for terrorists. It is not that the multiculturalist cheers for the terrorist, but, rather, that our progressive friends are so monocultural, so absorbed with the contradictions of European enlightenment values, that they cannot recognize the existence of alien thought universes. The terrorist must have a grievance to be so intractable. Such a severe grievance must be evidence of a great injustice. Treating aggrieved terrorists, or incipient terrorists, as enemies is an injustice that does not weigh the prior grievance. Therefore, a “war on terror” multiplies injustice and creates more terrorism.

The same logic applies to feminist acquiescence in Sharia family law courts. An *authentic” muslim woman cannot be denied the comfort of her own vibrant culture in her struggle against the white patriarchy.

Sep 17, 2008 - 8:04 am 11. Lifeofthemind:

@Konyak,
For the multi-cultural Marxist the woman in the Pakistani community in Birmingham cannot engage in a legitimate struggle against an oppressive power. Struggle is evidence of alienation and alienation is a product of the contradictions of Capitalist Patriarchal cultural oppression. For the emotional Marxist by definition once you are immersed in the totalitarian womb of a non-Western culture then you cannot be alienated. That is why there is this tremendous affinity between Islamism and Marxism. They both celebrate the submission of the individual to a collective.

Sep 17, 2008 - 8:27 am 12. Eggplant:

Wretchard said:

“They [the Left] may get it their momentary blaze of glory, but the fire they see will be that of the house burning down. I feel sorry though, for the bystanders of their gotterdammerung.”

I wouldn’t mind so much if it was just the Left that got burned down with the house. Unfortunately there is this minor detail that the rest of us will get burned up in their Götterdämmerung.

I have a better idea. Let’s arrange for the Messiah to lose. Then the moonbats in their despair can do their mass suicide and the rest of us can go on with our lives.

Sep 17, 2008 - 8:45 am 13. Martin McPhillips:

I’ve come to believe that the extraordinary rancor associated with the Obama campaign is driven more by anxiety than anything else. They’ve pulled out all the stops, dropped all the masks, dispensed with all the subtlety because this is Last Chance Saloon.

The Islamists blow up buildings and kill people; they would happily detonate a nuclear weapon in a Western city, if they could. But the Left destroys entire civilizations. Look at how badly Europe wants to die now, with that craving built into the very methods of EU bureaucrats, and how Europe wants to drag the U.S. down into death with it. And how the American Left so wants to accomodate them.

The torchlight riot in the media, coming to drag Sarah Palin into the street and stomp her to death, is a reaction not to how conservative she is but to how American she is.

That is what they can’t stand, and they will never give up on their narrative. The hope is only that Americans will stop paying any attention to it, as they should.

But the Left still has the big megaphone, and they won’t put it down while they can still issue commands to so much of the American public.

Sep 17, 2008 - 8:47 am 14. wretchard:

Fred Kagan is alleging that Senators Schumer, McCaskill, and Kerry effectively prevented US firms from bidding for Iraqi oil, in order to avoid the appearance of “blood for oil”, an accusation the Left largely invented, resulting in the award being given to China. In a perverse sense this is good because it “punishes” America, which as we all know always deserves punishment. It doesn’t have to make sense. You just to make up a charge, plead guilty and keep paying.

Sep 17, 2008 - 8:48 am 15. ridgerunner:

Wretchard,
The Gotterdammerung may come when an Obama administration tries to eliminate the individual right to bear arms. Unless you have lived in the South or Mountain West, you have no idea how strong the reaction would be.

Sep 17, 2008 - 8:56 am 16. Konyok:

So, Stalin wasn’t that far off of the mark:

“There’s a man, there’s a problem. No man, no problem.”

Eliminate the bourgeois elements of European enlightenment values (ie. the entirty) and there is no reason to struggle.

Which leads us to Wretchard’s gotterdamerung – “We had to destroy the village in order to save the village.”

I fear that it doesn’t matter who wins the US elections. The moral and intellectual reckoning that our cultural/academic elites have avoided with the the excuse of an “illegitimate” Bush administration becomes increasingly painful to contemplate. A president Obama might hasten the process, but at the cost of mortally weakening us at a historically important inflection point. A president McCain would use the powers of the executive to tread water and avoid the most obvious disasters, but the emotional Marxists would find a new lease on life with a renewed narrative of resistence and speaking truth to power, thus kicking the can down the street again.

Sep 17, 2008 - 8:59 am 17. Mark:

The Triangle of Death seems to be turning into something like the Wedge of Democracy/self-determination that Pres. Bush envisioned Iraq becoming from the beginning of his leadership of the Iraq invasion. Iraq will not be an American client. But it will not be agressively against U.S. interests. Iraq’s immediate concerns are the same as those of the U.S., i.e. keep the oil flowing, resist the Saudi salafists, resist the Iranian version of Shiism, etc.

Wrichard is on a roll:

“About the only thing the Left is confident of beating is the relatively civilized, Bible-clinging, law-abiding soccer mom. So that’s who they’re going to beat up on. Not any Shi’ite militias or Janjaweeds. None of those. What they’ll take on is Sarah Palin or an old geezer who can’t comb his hair.”

The whining outrage of the left brings to mind the words of a famous person:

“Whereunto then shall I liken the men of this generation? and to what are they like? They are like to children sitting in the marketplace, and calling one to another, and saying, We have piped to you, and you have not danced; we have mourned to you, and you have not wept.”

And those children are mad and have had enough of your ignoring them!

Sep 17, 2008 - 9:03 am 18. Konyok:

I am also reminded of “Belisarius, the General” by Robert Graves.

The fans of the chariot teams at the Hippodrome were the political parties of the time of Justinian and Theodora in Constantinople. The ruthless struggle of the main factions for power and position was absolute and stretched through the marketplace to the army. Theological positions were taken on the basis of whether one was “white” or “green,” giving the respective partisans that wonderful feeling of struggling against the forces of darkness which justifies any means to achieve domination.

Thanks to Al Gore’s unprecedented recount strategy in 2000 the American left has steeped in a demonology that criminalizes honest differences of opinion. It has become nearly impossible to find common ground.

Sep 17, 2008 - 9:23 am 19. Roderick Reilly:

This may be a non-sequitor, or just tangential to this thread, but the American Left is attempting its own version of the Tet Offensive with the Obama Presidential campaign.

Hopefully, it will be an actual defeat for them like it was for the Communists in Viet Nam. Even in defeat — should that be the outcome — they will continue to gnaw their way into the institutions of American society.

Sep 17, 2008 - 9:33 am 20. Mark:

R. Reilly writes: “–they will continue to gnaw their way into the institutions of American society.”

Interesting to see how it plays out, over and over.

Today is Constitution Day, in case you didn’t know. Sen. Byrd inserted (2005) in an omnibus funding bill a requirement that recipients of federal dollars observe Constitution Day. So what was optional is now required. And so every campus has to make a nod to Constitution Day. Which becomes an occasion for student groups to hold sessions on “voter rights,” i.e. voter registration, etc., and for Annenberg and Pew to develop “resources” for the Day:

“Question 10 – Do we need an Equal Rights Amendment?

“Expert Commentary: Justice Ginsburg explains what the Equal Rights Amendment was and why so many people thought it should have been ratified.”

Ad infinitum nauseamque.

And Konyak writes:

“I am also reminded of “Belisarius, the General” by Robert Graves.”

Great book. Thanks for reflecting upon it.

Sep 17, 2008 - 10:01 am 21. Martin McPhillips:

Thanks to Al Gore’s unprecedented recount strategy in 2000 the American left has steeped in a demonology that criminalizes honest differences of opinion. It has become nearly impossible to find common ground.

It began before that. The assault on Iran-Contra was largely a hoax, made worse by huge defensive mistakes by Reagan’s people. That was foreign policy criminalized. Nixon, of course, helped get the ball rolling years before that by setting a trap for himself and falling into it. Suddenly, the history of presidential misbehavior disappeared and Nixon was accused of “unprecedented” crimes.

Of course, Bill Clinton lying in the face of a federal judge in a civil rights case where he was the defendant was nothing like that! Waving his pudendum in the face of an Arkansas state employee and inviting her to “kiss it” somehow became “only about sex” when M. Lewinsky, a White House intern, was brought into the case as an example of someone else who had been invited to “kiss it,” and had.

Imagine for a second the volcanic eruptions if George Bush, father or son, had so much as patted an intern’s rear end. It would have constituted the end of civilization itself.

Likewise, Jeremiah Wright is on tape asking God to damn America, and Obama, his 20-year congregant and protege, is O.K.’d by the Democratic Party as its presidential nominee. And no one anywhere even addresses James Cone’s “theology,” which is the foundation at Obama’s church.

It’s enough to make me wonder whether when the graveyards vote in Chicago if they don’t use the graves to bury the truth.

Sep 17, 2008 - 10:22 am 22. NahnCee:

I don’t think the Left will self-destruct when Obama loses. They should, given the overt and repeated repudiation of their reign of terror by most Americans, but they’ll just get more and more hateful and will – more and more – try to make sure NO legislation is ever passed in DC again.

I’m even seeing KosKid talking about taking it to the streets if they lose, which is ludicrous when you stop to think who has the guns and the warrior training/mentality.

I guess Jill Greenberg would be a sterling example of a progressive liberal taking it to the streets in her frustration with Da Man and the system. I wonder how that’s working out for her. (P.S. No one seems to have mentioned that Greenberg is Canadian …)

Sep 17, 2008 - 11:48 am 23. Eggplant:

NahnCee said:

“I don’t think the Left will self-destruct when Obama loses. They should, given the overt and repeated repudiation of their reign of terror by most Americans, but they’ll just get more and more hateful and will – more and more – try to make sure NO legislation is ever passed in DC again.”

Let us hope the Messiah loses. The worst case scenario that the economy tanks just before the November election is happening. A whole bunch of people are getting wiped out in the stock market, losing their jobs and their homes. These people are going to be very pissed off and looking for someone to blame. For a smooth talking demagagoue like B. Hussein, it’s going to be like leading sheep to slaughter.

Sep 17, 2008 - 11:55 am 24. NahnCee:

Yeah, but Eggplant – will B. Hussein be able to lower himself to the level of people poor enough to have lost their homes and savings and everything? I just don’t see him being able to talk to them on an elitist to wiped-out level.

“I feel your pain – just a moment, please, while I pull on my surgical gloves so I don’t have to feel it *too* much.”

Can you imagine Obama wrappng his arms around someone in a big commiserating hug like there are pictures of Bush doing?

Sep 17, 2008 - 12:36 pm 25. coyotl:

Staring in Disbelief writes:

” Eternal lefty-pessimists like coyotl will always point to the “next worry” while totally discounting the immense, real progress in regional security that has been achieved.”

The Coyotl laughs, for he is no Leftist. Why think so small? Where is the fight in the Left? Communism/Socialism is unkind to free-ranging thinkers, Cynics and other scavengers . . . but back to the problem at hand:

Islamist regimes must be defeated and you can not defeat them by turning power over to . . . Islamist regimes! We’ve seen this happen in Gaza, and the funding we’ve given to the Pakistani military has ended up in the grubby hands of the Taliban.

Fact: Despite Wretchard’s desperate need for illusions, the Dawa-led government of Iraq in not a liberal democracy. They are thugs who are arresting the leaders of the Sunni Awakening while Wretchard studiously ignores it. BCers know this if they’ve been paying attention.

Fact: Maliki spent three days in June talking with the Ayatollah Khamenei and came away asking for a timeline for troop withdrawals. Enter in Maliki and Ahmadinejad into a google image search and see what you get.

Fact: Despite Wretchard’s fantasies, Dawa (The Call to Islam) is a Shiite Islamist party that supports both Iran and Hezbollah.

In response to these facts of misguided strategy, we hear from Wretchard that the Left is deluded, self-contradictory and will soon implode if it doesn’t achieve power. Stunning analysis to the problem at hand, no doubt.

Sep 17, 2008 - 12:45 pm 26. coyotl:

From The Atlantic, Philip Bobbit elaborates on the incoherence of the Bush Doctrine, an incoherence that Wretchard has fully embraced in his race to turn Iraq over to Shiite Islamists:

“Two aspects of his [McCain's] answer were interesting to me: his conscious use of the term withdraw with honor, with its explicit echo of Vietnam; and his equally explicit echo of an idea advanced by Philip Bobbitt, a Columbia law professor and former member of President Clinton’s National Security Council, who argues in his new book, Terror and Consent, that the struggle against terrorism is in fact a war but that, unlike with previous wars, we will not know when this war is over.

McCain calls Terror and Consent “the best book I’ve ever read on terrorism.” He has been carrying it with him this campaign season, showing underlined passages to his staff and to reporters, and he invited Bobbitt to fly with him for two days. Terror and Consent was recommended to him by Henry Kissinger, for understandable reasons: Kissinger, a foreign-policy “realist,” embraces Bobbitt’s argument that the so-called Bush Doctrine is “incoherent” because its call for the democratization of Arab states undermines another of its principles, the need to “preclude” states from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. “When we try to square the circle by connecting the means offered by the doctrine (unilateral action, preemption of the acquisition of WMD, counterterrorism) to its ends (promoting democracy), the doctrine falls apart,” Bobbitt writes. “It is highly implausible that the president intended to suggest that the U.S. would, or should, use preemptive military strikes to impose democracy, or that democracy, whether imposed or not, supplies a check on proliferation, terrorism, or ethnic cleansing.”

Sep 17, 2008 - 12:48 pm 27. Martin McPhillips:

From a an incoherent mess, pick a moment:

“Enter in Maliki and Ahmadinejad into a google image search and see what you get.”

Enter in Roosevelt and Stalin and see what you get.

And Roosevelt and Stalin weren’t even leaders of countries that shared a border.

Is Maliki an Arab and an Iraqi? Being Shiite, therefore, is only part of what he is, because he is not an ethnic Persian and he is not an Iranian national.

Sep 17, 2008 - 1:02 pm 28. biggie:

Scarcity of water and energy will defeat many political movements, perhaps including the “Islamist” regimes.

Perhaps the Iraqis can buy some water with the China’s oil money.

Sep 17, 2008 - 1:15 pm 29. Uncle Jefe:

Coyotl quoting the Atlantic, the magazine of Andrew Sullivan and Jill Greenberg??
Why am I not surprised…

Sep 17, 2008 - 1:26 pm 30. Konyok:

Coyotl,

Your Shia = islamism formula is a bit simplistic.

The “one man, one vote, one time” problem is very real. There is a great danger of authoritarians/totalitarians/extremists gaining power in immature democracies, cf. Russia, Venezuela, Algeria, Zimbabwe, etc, etc. But, I think that Iraq is a special case.

Wretchard’s reference to the triangle is especially apt when the tripartite nature of Iraq is taken into consideration. The Shia do form a bare majority of the population, but the Kurds and Sunnis constitute a considerable counterweight. The Shia themselves are not monolithic and there are no few secularists in their number. It is nearly impossible for any one party to obtain a dominant position.

Could a Hezbollah-like movement develop in Iraq? Al Sadr certainly tried and has apparently failed. The essence of an organization like that is resistance. Hezbollah thrived because of the presence of Israel. Does Iran have pan Shia ambitions? Certainly. But, the Arab Shia of Iraq don’t necessarily like or respect their Persian coreligionists. Most consider Najaf and Karbala to be senior to Qom in scholarship and authority.

As Iraq develops economically it will become very competitive to Iran. Blessed with both oil and two rivers, a peaceful Iraq will be the economic center of gravity of the Middle East. Iran’s moment to dominate Iraq is nearly past and their is danger of the tidal forces reversing.

I think that even a sketchy Dawa government in Iraq is enormously preferable to the previous Baath regime. Iraq may not be our ally, but, with a little oversight, Iraq is unlikely to require sanctions, no fly zones and armed interventions in the near future.

Sep 17, 2008 - 1:31 pm 31. elijah:

1
“Shiite Islamists” -

Is the center Najaf or Qom and why?

2
“Shiite Islamist party that supports both Iran and Hezbollah”
“race to turn Iraq over to Shiite Islamists”

so then, with this rationale…
both Hezbollah and Iran seek collaboration with world leftists/marxists

should one therefore be wary of individuals/political ideologies that share similar views of the U.S.?
If not, why not, if these Shiite Islamists are so dangerous to the U.S.?

Sep 17, 2008 - 1:33 pm 32. Richard Moorton:

Dear Wretchard,

Spot on in all your analyses. No, the left will not collapse if Obama loses. The reason was given in some acute analyses by the political philosopher Eric Voegelin. He wrote that by the early twentieth century the best minds in Europe knew that the ideology of the left was intellectually untenable. If so, one naturally asks, how could Communism sweep through so much of the world in spite of its intellectual unsoundness? Because, as Voegelin pointed out, great dead ideas have a kind of forward momentum, like the undead. Communism lurched forward like a zombie until it realized it had no life and then collapsed.

Why did the left not dissolve after the palpable failure of their dream? Because, as Voegelin wrote, given their premises, they had nowhere else to go. The compulsion to repeat lives.

Best,

Richard Moorton

Sep 17, 2008 - 3:12 pm 33. OldSalt:

“But he’ll be in for a surprise. What’s BHO going to do after he sells both Iraq and Afghanistan down the river? What are the Kos people going to do after they’ve cancelled all advanced combat systems and made it a crime to criticize their shibboleths? What are they going to do after they’ve made every apology and paid every reparation and Hezbollah still wants more?” – Wretchard”

Well, then they’ll be French. They’ll roll over, put on their Chardor’s and send their daughters to service Putin’s friendly FSB.

What they won’t do, is fight, or risk anything real or personal.

Sep 17, 2008 - 3:42 pm 34. F451_2.0:

@Nahncee (11:48am)

Excellent point. Its also the case that no one’s mentioned that the only Canadians (not having been raised in Detroit as she has) who are taking it to the streets right now are in S.E. Texas.

Well, one is and he begins with thank you.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20080917.COLETTS17-6/TPStory/Opinion/letters

Regards

Sep 17, 2008 - 4:05 pm 35. Lifeofthemind:

Methinks the voice of the Lubyanka has returned from a brief vacation.

Sep 17, 2008 - 4:28 pm 36. fedya:

@Richard Moorton:
Communism lurched forward like a zombie until it realized it had no life and then collapsed.

Why did the left not dissolve after the palpable failure of their dream?

The left did not dissolve because it still offers a “meaningful” life to young intellectuals-to-be. Yes, by the end of the fifties, *Communism* as embodied in existing states was utterly unappealing. This, however, did not matter due largely to the genius of Italian Communist Party leader Antonio Gramsci and those who (broadly speaking) followed along with him: (a) the post-mods and (b) the [West] German Frankfurt School created The World’s Most Excellent Adventure, especially designed to appeal to college students.

So, what comprises this Most Excellent Adventure? First and foremost it is a cultural struggle, a Long March through the “reactionary” institutions of darkness. A war without guns, a war of progressive brains over reactionary stupidity. First, you join the crusade against the all-time source of evil, Christianity, in order to stamp out philistine Bourgeois morality (who said revolution can’t be fun?). Dethrone all Authority and undo the sheeplike belief in the masses’ hearts that their traditional authorities have any legitimacy.

Then, having softened up the Old Order, engage in masskult activism to (a) prepare the vanguard for concerted action at the point of societal collapse, and to (b) prepare the population for post-individualist life.

Who says you can’t push people around and enjoy victories along the way? From Critical Mass bike rides tying up traffic to mass shout-downs of radio talk shows, it’s “the Movement” on the march. Hoo-rah!

From this “revolutionary” perspective, Obama going down in defeat is a actually good thing because it supposedly exposes the need for revolution to the masses and because it radicalizes groups of have-nots who will serve as addtional shock troops in The Struggle.

Of course, the vanguard is an academic elite of puppet masters who work this dialectic on and on to ever-increasing levels of exposed contradictions and ultimate victory.

Hasta la Vitoria Siempre! [sic? I can't be bothered to look it up].

So, yes, this is a dream life for rich intellectuals and corporate leaders. Like many religious converts they never reject their youthful first love, and they continue to feel guilty that they “haven’t done enough”. Bill Ayers is a spiritual leader for them, one who actually employed bombs and published manifestos that tens of thousands eagerly studied, and HE only regrets he hasn’t done enough.

Dialectical Materialism has become the ultimate rich kid’s kick, a Romantic Life in which each one is himself a god among the gods. Since these little gods are not God and their Romantic Life is a hollow shell, yes, “zombies” is an excellent descriptor for them. And, yes, they are going to keep coming back again, and again, and again…

Sep 17, 2008 - 4:41 pm 37. coyotl:

Uncle Jefe:

“Coyotl quoting the Atlantic, the magazine of Andrew Sullivan and Jill Greenberg??
Why am I not surprised…”

Now this is just the sort of ignorance and anti-intellectualism conservatism doesn’t need. It reads like the sort of knee-jerk Leftists that fear any viewpoint other than their own.

1.The Atlantic offfers a broad spectrum of contributors, including Bing West (Assistant SoD under Reagan, Lt. Col. (ret.) Andrew Bacevich, P.J. O’Rourke, Reuel Marc Gerecnt, David Brooks, Reihan Salam, Megan McArdle, Ross Douthat and Robert Kaplan. I suppose these are all hysterical Leftist who should be ignored for you Jefe, which is too bad ’cause there’s two articles on counter-insurgency and military doctrine in the current issue that are worth reading.

2. If you actually read the Belmont Club, you know of Wretchard’s fondness for Philip Bobbit (quoted in the Atlantic blurb you objected to) and his worth as a thinker. Check out the Old BC location (5/22/06, 4/06/08) or the current location 8/15/08. But if Bobbit’s quoted in the same magazine that runs Sullivan’s rants then his words must ignored, eh?

3. Oh yeah, you did ignore Bobbit’s point, didn’t ya Jefe? Is it above your intellectual “pay grade”? Are Kissinger and Bobbit correct that democracy promotion and the methods used to fight the War on Terror (pre-emption, counter-terrorism, etc.) are incompatible, or have you learned nothing from Pakistan and Hamas?

Martin McPhillips:

“Enter in Roosevelt and Stalin and see what you get.”

Roosevelt and Stalin? Roosevelt and Stalin. Yes, exactly, Roosevelt and Stalin! I could work with the soft surrendering of Central Europe to Soviet tyranny, but the metaphor becomes a bit strained. How about Honecker and Brezhnev? Was Honecker not a German? Was Jaruzelski not a Pole?

Here’s the expanded question that a little bit of research can easily answer: are Dawa and SCII (SCIRI) ISLAMIST parties? Do they support Hezbollah? Did Nouri al-Maliki run Dawa’s Jihad Office out of Damascus in the 80s?

Sep 17, 2008 - 4:46 pm 38. Bob Murphy:

We gotta make sure the Canucks don’t overstay their visas!

Sep 17, 2008 - 4:51 pm 39. Michael B:

“Some of the worst policy debacles, such as the fall of the Shah, have their roots, not in a chaotic Third World political situation, but in the corridors of power in the DC. They often spring directly from fixed world view, of which two main variants are the most common. The first, common to either Republican and Democratic administrations is “we never made any mistakes” and usually serves to maintain a policy regardless of consequences. The other, more common to the Left, is the idea that “we are always wrong”. This usually manifests itself in the policy of pre-emptive self-defeat or anticipatory apology.”

[...]

“The immutability of political world views means events like the Surge, the rise of Khomeini or the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza will simply be reinterpreted, as often as necessary, until it is twisted into an ideologically convenient shape.”

Yes, and if but in general terms this analysis or overview is spot-on throughout.

The commentary focused on the “triangle” is localized to Iraq and is in contrast to what is occuring, for example, in Pakistan and Afghanistan. But it is by individual and difficult and measured steps – steps that will never result in a finality or a stasis – that progress will be made; either that or regress will be the result. It is highly probable that any kind of stasis will not be an option for the next century or more; that is the reality.

Likewise, the fall of the Shah’s regime in Iran offers a noteworthy – in fact a necessary – point of reference. Does that suggest the Shah’s regime was in any sense a perfect solution? Obviously not, but any reality-based comparison must be with the large-scale regression evidenced by Khomeini and post-Khomeini Iran. On a related plane the comparison with the Shah’s regime needs to be with this type of scene recently in Denver, CO during the DNC, i.e. the Islamicist/Left alliance, an alliance that is more de facto than formal, but an alliance that has substantial ideological motivations nonetheless.

The subsequent note concerning Senators Kerry, Schumer and McKaskill is – on a different plane still – similarly indicative of this profoundly corrosive set of interests and assumptions and influences. As Kagan writes:

“Why, after all the assistance we’ve given to Iraq over the past five years, was the first major Iraqi oil deal signed with China and not with an American or even a western company? The answer is, in part, because three Democratic senators intervened in Iraqi domestic politics earlier this year to prevent Iraq from signing short-term agreements with Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total, Chevron, and BP.

“The Iraqi government was poised to sign no-bid contracts with those firms this summer to help make immediate and needed improvements in Iraq’s oil infrastructure. The result would have been significant foreign investment in Iraq, an expansion of Iraqi government revenues, and an increase in the global supply of oil. One would have thought that leading Democratic senators who claim to be interested in finding other sources of funding to replace American dollars in Iraq, in helping Iraq spend its own money on its own people, and in lowering the price of gasoline for American citizens, would have been all for it. Instead, Senators Chuck Schumer, John Kerry, and Claire McCaskill wrote a letter to Secretary of State Rice asking her “to persuade the GOI [Government of Iraq] to refrain from signing contracts with multinational oil companies until a hydrocarbon law is in effect in Iraq.” The Bush administration wisely refused to do so, but the resulting media hooraw in Iraq led to the cancellation of the contracts, and helps to explain why Iraq is doing oil deals instead with China.”

That’s China (the link is to a documentary on China’s extensive human rights abuses), the same China that is doing extensive business with Hasan al Turabi’s Sudan, the same China that has its own extensive hydrocarbon “issues,” the very issues which putatively motivated Senators McKaskill, Kerry and Schumer.

File under obtuse legislators and ideologically motivated pieties.

Sep 17, 2008 - 5:07 pm 40. Bob Murphy:

@Eggplant
“The worst case scenario is that the economy tanks just before the election is happening.”
Seems to me that McCai/Palin should be preparing counterpropraganda about the Clinton government PC meddling that resulted in loan institutions being required to make loans to people in certain areas that otherwise not have qualified.
That seems to be the main trigger for the sub-prime mortgage meltdown and it is a direct result of leftie government is the solution thinking.
Obama would deliver more of same so his mindset is part of the problem not the solution.

Sep 17, 2008 - 6:21 pm 41. Bob Murphy:

“Culture Wars” is a term used in the MSM and elsewhere that always implies that it was a mutual declaration of war.
It was not.
The Culture Wars were joined by those who reject traditional American values and who have learned nothing from history about the inevitable outcome of what they espouse.
They are the invaders and thus the ones that initiated hostilities.

Sep 17, 2008 - 6:24 pm 42. NahnCee:

“Seems to me that McCai/Palin should be preparing counterpropraganda about the Clinton government PC meddling that resulted in loan institutions being required to make loans to people in certain areas that otherwise not have qualified.
That seems to be the main trigger for the sub-prime mortgage meltdown and it is a direct result of leftie government is the solution thinking.”

Shouldn’t be too hard, either, to conjur up apparitions of Enron / Ivy-League educated people (like Obama and Harvard) continuing to game the system on Wall Street after they’d been shown the way by the Texans.

Sep 17, 2008 - 6:45 pm 43. Eggplant:

Bob Murphy said:

“Seems to me that McCain/Palin should be preparing counterpropraganda about the Clinton government PC meddling that resulted in loan institutions being required to make loans to people in certain areas that otherwise not have qualified.”

The guys running McCain’s campaign seem to be very intelligent. This scenario with the economy should have been anticipated and prepared for. Also I find it hard to believe that there isn’t some sort of October Surprise waiting for the Annointed One (lots of skeletons in his closet). It probably boils down to scheduling, i.e. the general public’s memory span is about 2 weeks. Where McCain’s people might get into trouble is with the MSM supressing McCain’s October Surprise or burying it under the Annointed One’s surprise for McCain. However the MSM seems to be immediately trotting out any dirt they can find on McCain and Palin so maybe there won’t be any surprises left for October (stupid MSM).

Sep 17, 2008 - 6:57 pm 44. Martin McPhillips:

coyotl,

Your analogies get less effective when you position Iran as the Soviet Union to Iraq. That was a extrapolative mangling of my analogy about photographs of two leaders together.

Iran is a geopolitical island.

If there is any excuse for not having done something about its outsourcing of terrorism for nearly 30 years it’s that it has nowhere to go (other than, now, to Putin). So, Maliki has an Iranian connection. What will it get him? Nada, if he sees himself as its secret agent.

Do you believe that Iran will wag the Arab dog in Iraq via Maliki? Good luck with that hypothesis.

Maliki has been introduced to American power. He knows what it can do for him, and he knows what it can do to him. He, not that pathetic runt Ahmadinejad, has seen it first hand and knows its lethality. He is the prime minister in a parliamentary government. He is responsible for Iraq, not to Iran.

Maliki’s interests lie in the Arab world, not the Persian world, regardless of his Shi’a association. The assumption that Arab Iraqi Shi’a want to submit to the political domination of Iranian mullahs is a weak hypothesis. The hypothesis that Maliki is a jihadist is equally weak. He has a sovereign state to manage, under the aegis of an American security commitment, and you want to contend that he’ll do that by getting entangled with a terrorist outfit (Hezbollah) that is no more than a few ticks away from getting its clock cleaned.

Plus, he wants to buy three dozen U.S. jets, which would give him prestige but become burning rubble on the ground if he used them in any capacity outside of the box.

As far as your contention that promoting democracy is incompatible with pre-emption and other forms of counter-asymmetrical warfare, that may or may not be so, on a case by case basis. Citing Hamas doesn’t quite make your point.

Iraq is a work in progress, and an opportunity for the advent of modernity and reasonable civil society in the Arab world. That has many more advantages to it than open or covert submission to Tehran.

Sep 17, 2008 - 7:26 pm 45. cedarford:

Wretchard – In the years leading up to the Civil War there was the theory among those who advocated compromise that slavery would gradually fade away and that a direct confrontation was ultimately unnecessary. In a kind of inversion the Left has probably hoped since the 1960s that people would be ‘enlightened’ into voluntarily accepting their intellectual chains.

History seems to have born out those who advocated compromise, who noted mechanization was making slave systems uneconomical, as well as states and nations steadily outlawing it. It ended in the Western colonial empires and in the Americas Hemisphere without mass warfare, except in the United States.

The last country in the Western Hemisphere to renounce slavery was Brazil, in 1888. But Brazil and buyers of Brazilian products had made it clear, it was a dying institution by 1870 with more and more laws. In 1878, no child of a slave was a slave. The act 10 years later was just the final nail in the coffin.

And it should be noted that the Civil War was the 4th and gravest flaw of an inordinately worshipped US Constitution. First the bar on a standing army had Briish troops and Canadians make ramshackel American militias their pussy bitches on the battlefields of 1812-14. Leading to the US choosing practicality over lawyers commands on the matter.
Second, the great banking crisis as stupid Constitutional law caused Jacksonian Democracy to rise and blow off the Constitutional entrenching of elites and banking interests over democracy and interests of The People (repeated in the Bush II years with no Jackson to whip the Jewish and WASP financiers into line)
3rd, the Constitution utterly failed to see that territorial expansion was inevitable and nothing was written to balance state rights with Federal ones, and no balance of loyal American Indian rights with European settlers.
Then all the failures of the Holy Founding Fathers regarding the “peculiar Institution” led to the death of 660,000 out of a population of only 31,440,000 and 490,000 additional casualties – with 170,000 afflicted with at least the loss of a limb.
With 50,000 civilians, almost all in the South – dead of Union action, starvation, disease brought on by war. And some 20,000 Southerners killed in black rape, looting crime waves in the early years of Reconstruction before whites armed and won the guerilla war (early KKK beat black thugs for dominance of areas of the South).

With that poisoned well of mass bloodshed and postwar grievances – no country entered it’s post slavery period with the racial animosity the USA did. Except maybe Haiti, with its mass slaughter of French colonialists…back in 1804..protected by the Brits…

Was the liberation of 4.4 million noble purple fingered freedom lovers (the Negro population of 1865) worth the deaths of 660K white combatants, 70,000 civilians, and 170,000 maimings – one of every 29 in the North, one of every 12 whites in the South worth advancing black emancipation by 10 years?

I think not.

The Left? Always wealthy Jews and WASPs demanding the rest of the population accept the shackles of their more cultured, sophisticated, and intelligent betters who would do them the huge favor of eliminating the existing Ruling Class and appoint themselves the new, benevolent dictatorship of the proletariate.
Which they then franchised out to advanced Asian malecontents, then – 3rd and 4th world shitholes lacking wealthy Jews or old money atheist WASPs as “liberation theology”. Hey, yoo-hoo! Any of you eager for the shackles and chains of a solid social safety net?

Sort of a nasty lie -sad and cheap – sadder still that the lesser people bought it…

But then again, the proles also bought tax cuts for the wealthy and “trickledown” if it was marketed properly. Yes, the champagne the rich drink will taste just like the bubbly good stuff as we trickle and pee it out onto your heads. Yes, we want an Ownership Society where the poorest can live in a 400K mansion they can’t afford on easy credit.

Sep 17, 2008 - 7:39 pm 46. Wadeusaf:

Coyot1,

Good question about Malaki in the 80’s, running Shia jihadi’s to a Sunni enclave to fight the Ruskies must have been tricky biz. Here also lies the question of whether or not Hezbollah is an Iranian or native Lebanese organ. The link would have been an office or an association in Beirut(?) or was it already in Damascus(?) What does that say then about Hezbollah leadership from that era?

Unfortunately I have not found the hard evidence to support your POV on Malaki. What I have seen in Al Sadr’s decline is an in your face statement opposed to Iran hegemony in Iraq, and Iranian interference in Arab affairs clearly served via another surgical death in Damascus. The fight for Syria’s soul is surely started, but still barely begun, and it is my recken’ing that Iraqi interests will be a key in wresting Damascus from Iranian (and Russian?) overseers.

Your take, while feasible and certainly a concern, is not consistent with the circumstance or with the way the cards are being played. But as most of what I think I know is speculation supported by events, we will have to see.

Sep 17, 2008 - 7:42 pm 47. Wadeusaf:

Damn seider-ford, where do you find the time and energy to hate so much?

Sep 17, 2008 - 7:49 pm 48. Bob Murphy:

Jesus, Cedarford, that must have been a good coffee. I need a drink.
And what you say rings a couple of bells in my head.
Look at the number of dead!
And I’m still troubled that the answer over a state’s right to secede was decided by the gun.
I wonder what Jefferson would have thought.

Sep 17, 2008 - 9:01 pm 49. whiskey:

Slavery was not going to go away, ever, by itself, and even Jefferson knew it and predicted the Civil War as such.

If nothing else, Westward Expansion only made the question worse, as slave and free states fought over what territory would be free and which slave. It took war and the dead to end Slavery, because Southerners would not free the slaves ever. They all feared the consequences, even those who had no slaves and would have benefited from only free labor being available. Even the poorest, most destitute Southerner understood that ending slavery would bring retaliation, and the most poor would be the first target for retaliation (of being made a slave). Since they were the most convenient and least powerful. It’s why all those poor Southern whites fought and died. Not for slavery itself, or secession, or states rights. But because they feared retaliation.

Ironically, the long fight and Federal Occupation made the retaliation a non-event, given the dominance of White Northern troops that cared neither for White Southerners or Freed Slaves.

Despite mechanization, the number of slaves in the Antebellum South grew rather declined from the 1830’s to 1860. That’s with the Royal Navy essentially ending the trans-Atlantic slave trade by then.

I’ll note Cedarford’s usual fixation on Jewish financiers as the source of all evil which speaks for itself as to ignorance and bigotry.

Sep 17, 2008 - 9:18 pm 50. fedya:

@Bob Murphy:
The Culture Wars were joined by those who reject traditional American values and who have learned nothing from history about the inevitable outcome of what they espouse.

Yes, in the mind of the Long March revolutionary left, it is a sign of success whenever they “sharpen the contradictions” to the point that the primitives on the right raise their standards in formations as of war.

Their expectation is that these manifestations are strictly analogous to the antebellum hardening of Slave Power, the viciousness of the Klan, or the brutality of Bull Conner and George Wallace.

They have no clue about American character. They comprehend neither Cincinnatus nor Lincoln nor the Cowboy ethic. Without a spiritual awakening of their own interiors they will ever repeat their zombie-like invasions, uncomprehending and undead until they win or the universities stop creating them.

(just to keep a few of this thread’s themes going, you know… doin’ my best Mr. Cat imitation–smile)

Sep 17, 2008 - 10:11 pm 51. cedarford:

Whiskey opines –

1.Slavery was not going to go away, ever, by itself, and even Jefferson knew it and predicted the Civil War as such.

Jefferson was good, but he was no all-knowing Sage. He did know he and Madison had created a great flaw in the Constitution in preserving the “Peculiar Institution” then making the Constitution so difficult to fix, enshrining the rights of private property (as in slaves), and the right to secession.

He did not anticipate the economic model of the Southern Slave system would become antiquated and the South left behind in population, power, economic wealth by the Northern industrial system. Efforts to modify the slave system and have slaves on small, family-run mechanized farms and slave factories were general failures.

This mirrored global trends and had as much to do with slavery as an institution being dropped, without war, in both hemispheres. The only instances of it ending in armed struggle were Haiti and the USA.
Which, with historical hindsight, look to be avoidable tragedies.

2. It took war and the dead to end Slavery, because Southerners would not free the slaves ever.

Except every other slave holding nation outside a few African and Arab despot’s turf did just that.
And by the 1850s, the South was having fits about the North and Europe seeking alternatives to “slave cotton” as production began booming in other countries under British and French rule. It was just a matter of time, British abolitionists said, before enough alternate cotton could be produced to begin an embargo on slave cotton. Same with sugar cane.

3. Even the poorest, most destitute Southerner understood that ending slavery would bring retaliation, and the most poor would be the first target for retaliation (of being made a slave).

There were only 4.4 million blacks in the USA in 1860, out of a population of 31.5 million. Neither the North nor the South had any fear of black thugs running amok after emancipation and retaliating by making the whites the slaves.

4. It’s why all those poor Southern whites fought and died. Not for slavery itself, or secession, or states rights. But because they feared retaliation.

Not true. They fought because they were invaded, did not want to lose state sovereignity. And thought the flawed US Constitution gave them full legal right to seceed and resist. The Confederate Constitution was virtually identical to the US Constitution.

5. Ironically, the long fight and Federal Occupation made the retaliation a non-event, given the dominance of White Northern troops.

Hard to be ironic when you are so wrong. Troops in Reconstruction did not enforce a blissful peace and become beloved by Southern black and white alike. They were hated. Reconstruction was a mess. After a few years, guerilla war had started, and Northern troops couldn’t wait to leave. Blacks who did engage in land seizures, thefts, rape and killings were dealt with by white self-defense organizations. One of which, the KKK, went from near universal support in the late 19th, early 20th Century to becoming more of a problem in everyones eyes – a backwards, lawless embarassment – beginning in the 1920s.

6. Despite mechanization, the number of slaves in the Antebellum South grew rather declined from the 1830’s to 1860.

You talk apples and oranges. As slavery was becoming economically obsolete globally, as more efficient and skilled immigrants from Europes wars and famines were flooding the Western hemisphere – the number of slaves did go up. From a high black slave birth rate.

7. I’ll note Cedarford’s usual fixation on Jewish financiers as the source of all evil which speaks for itself as to ignorance and bigotry.

Ignorance and bigotry is actually with those who word-twist to make any criticism of SOME people of a group into a collective criticism of ALL in that group – by Marxist identity tactics. Try and deny it and demonize all that mention it as bigots who must HATE ALL JEWS – but there has always been a huge, disproportionate Jewish involvement in radical Leftist politics. From anarchism to communism to the SDS.
Nor are they all financiers, as Whiskey tries using the tactic of exaggeration to render the criticism absurd.

One great reason why antipathy for Jews is rising so high in Europe and Asia is the Jewish inability to admit that they are in any way culpable as powerful individuals and associations for some very sorry episodes in history. Other nations and ethnicities HAVE found admissions of error and need to change their ways essential to get greater harmony, cohesiveness. Refusal to admit mistakes, errors makes others see such holdouts as arrogant, intransigent.

Sep 18, 2008 - 5:22 am 52. coyotl:

Martin McPhillips:

“Maliki’s interests lie in the Arab world, not the Persian world, regardless of his Shi’a association.”

My apologies for brevity but duties call. I would simply point out that for the majority of Arabs, being Sunni is integral to being an Arab. Shiite Islam is apostasy, and this draws Dawa and SCIRI closer to their sponsors in Iran than the rest of the Arab world. Let me put forwardd an illustration of this dynamic: why do the Saudis keep insisting that the Iraqi government is nothing but Iranian stooges? Maliki consults often with Ahmadinejad and Khamenei,which is why the Bush admin. have bugged his office (Woodward’s new book reports this.) Can you name a Sunni Arab politician he meets with on a regular basis?

Wadeusaf:

“Unfortunately I have not found the hard evidence to support your POV on Malaki. What I have seen in Al Sadr’s decline is an in your face statement opposed to Iran hegemony in Iraq, and Iranian interference in Arab affairs clearly served via another surgical death in Damascus.”

Don’t just look at Sadr, look at SCII (SCIRI), the Shiite Islamist party that is deeply allied with Maliki’s Dawa. They are cousins and parliamentary partners. SCII was created as an outright Khomeneist party and their upper echelons are still attached to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. The Iranians have multiple channels and forms of influence within the Shiite Governemnt in Iraq, including Ahmed Chalabi, who is a snake.

Check out the NYSun article from July 22nd entitled “Maliki Bets that Obama Will Prevail”. From that article will learn:

“We are opposed to the hot button issues like immunity for contractors and the granting of Iraqi air space and the granting of permanent bases. Ahmad Chalabi has said this on a regular basis,” Mr. Brooke said.

A scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and one of the architects of the surge, Fred Kagan, said that Mr. Maliki has come under some political pressure to oppose a status of forces agreement from the Iranians, who he said have launched an information operation.”

Fred Kagan even knows this, but Wretchard hasn’t heard it yet. As to whether the Dawa (The Call to Islam) Party is an Islamist party or not, I suggest that this is easily ascertained. Simply read up on their history, where they were during the Iran/Iraq War and what they believe in, what their party platform is. Don’t forget that Sharia has been enshrined in the Iraqi constitution.

I don’t see why Americans should die to protect a Sharia/Islamist state.

Sep 18, 2008 - 11:17 am 53. Martin McPhillips:

Integral to being an Arab is being an Arab, speaking arabic, and living in the Arab world. The Shi’a/Sunni divorce in Iraq was long ago in reconciliation by intermarriage even as the Sunni minority, embodied in the Tikriti mob, held sway over the Shi’a majority.

That “loan” of power seems to have been put through a workout during the factional adjustments of the past few years.

Again, Maliki has a sovereign country to run; he’ll meet with another destiny if he accepts Iran as a surzerain.

Sep 18, 2008 - 12:04 pm 54. Martin McPhillips:

This:

I don’t see why Americans should die to protect a Sharia/Islamist state.

It isn’t about theocratic elements in a constitution; it’s about bringing what was previously the most unstable and destabilizing state in the most unstable and destabilizing region in the world within range of reasonable modernity.

That’s a cultural change that allows two parallel tracks: a traditional Islam track and a secular track.

If it all falls apart, then so be it. It’s the Iraqis, first, who will bear the suffering. But there are opportunities here for Iraq, the Middle East, and the world that needed to be created.

So, the pretense that there’s no serious objective in this mission, with the implication that U.S. troops have died for something unworthy of their effort, reeks of the sour grapes of losing the policy argument about how to handle the Hussein thugocracy and take care of the mess in the aftermath.

There are serious consequences in a failure to reform the Middle East off this intervention, and they could easily be far worse than anything we’ve seen in this small, long war, inclusive of things I don’t even like to mention.

Sep 18, 2008 - 12:31 pm 55. Wadeusaf:

I find it the height of irony that the very man accused by so many opposed to American intervention in Iraq, the man accused of not knowing, not representing and not being in touch with his countrymen is now being held out as the be all end all of Iraqi opinion.

State and CIA would have nothing to do with fellows like him both in the Kurdish and Shi’ah regions before the war and a major portion of the shit we’ve been through can be traced directly to that dereliction of duty on DoS and CIA. Your analysis is the stuff of paranoia and lacks cogent and coherent support for its major supposition which is that the suppressed Iraqi majority, the very ones MOST affected by the Iranian attacks during the Iran and Iraq war, have sold Iraq down the river due to some notion of religiosity that never stopped the blood flowing before nor yet has staunched the flow of Pilgrims to mutual holy shrines I might add. Deeds man, deeds tell the story in that culture. You offer as evidence no deeds. The Deeds Of the Malaki government stand in opposition to your charges.

I will listen attentively to evidence of deeds that support your claim.

Also, I understand the reluctance of the Shi’ah to forgive and forget insurgent actions. Commiyted on the heals of Saddam’s reign of terror, it will take much to heal the wounds, and there is much to be gained in the attempt. The Shi’ah will require more than the self interest of the Sunni to overcome their reluctance. You have to know that, the Sunni should be aware as well.

Sep 19, 2008 - 4:52 pm 56. Bob Murphy:

@Wadeusaf
Nice points.
I will be interested to see how the Iranians play out in Iraq.
Especially assuming a US guarantee against large scale Iranian invasion.

Sep 22, 2008 - 4:46 am

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