Though supposedly a translation from al-Maliki's Arabic, there is nothing about this article -- nothing at all - that reminds one of Arabic style, in thought or language. How stupid do the American propagandists who concocted this kind of thing think we are? And are the grotesque and obvious echoes of Lincoln meant to fool us?
This is of a piece with the efforts of Condoleeza Rice and George Bush to convince us that the new "Iraqi Constitution" --the one that tells us that no law can stand that violates Islam, and which makes the highest law of the land not that same Constitution, but rather the Shari'a, as embodying in law the meaning of Qur'an and Sunnah -- was just like the American Constitution, and the framers of that Constitution (thrusting young academic Noah Feldman flauntingly among them) just like the Framers in Philadelphia.
No analogy between the greatest figures in American or Western political history has been too grotesque for this desperate Administration. It appears to be unable to think clearly, because it refuses to go back and study Islam, and from that study to proceed to study the real Iraq, the Iraq whose history has been one, as Elie Kedourie has noted, of uninterrupted violence and aggression, and palace coups and plots.
The Shia now run Iraq. Or rather, they run Baghdad, they run Basra, they run the entire south. They don't need Anbar Province. They don't need the Sunnis. They have been steadily emptying Baghdad of Sunnis -- the Sunni Arabs who constituted at least one-third of the population of Baghdad just four years ago are down to 15%, and falling every day. Baghdad, the most important center of High Islamic Civilization, the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate for 400 years, from roughly 850-1250 (for the first 100 years the capital was in Samarra, 60 miles to the north on the Tigris, with its celebrated, guggenheimish Mawliye), is now, and forever will be, Shi'a-controlled. This is something that the Sunnis will not "get over" -- as Rice famously said about the enmity between Sunnis and Shi'a: "they'll just have to overcome it." This is a remark similar to that sometimes made, in ignorant exasperation, about that Arab-Israeli matter. Yet that too is not, I'm afraid, a question of "getting over it," for the Arabs will never ever "get over it." They, can, however, be held in check. That is a different thing. They can be held in check while the Infidel world, far beyond little Israel, and for its own purposes, works steadily to chip away at the economic and military power of Islam.
This article by Maliki is so comical a production that one should not be angry, but rather pleased, that it has been put up. It invites ridicule. And it will get it.
And amid that ridicule, do not forget: again and again Maliki has shown an indifference to American desires. He was preparing some months ago to offer amnesty to those “insurgents” who had killed "only" American soldiers, until an outcry in this country forced the Bush Administration to tell him he couldn’t do it. He expects the Americans to fight and die for his regime, a regime like the previous one prepared to soak the Americans for all they are worth, all the billions they can provide. And how many former high Iraqi officials siphoned off how many billions, paid for by American taxpayers, most of whom will never know the high life now to be enjoyed for the rest of their lives by those “Iraqi” patriots who made out like gangbusters on American aid, and are now living it up outside Iraq, or in Europe, possibly attending the same defiles on the Avenue Montaigne as Suha Arafat?
Maliki is not, and cannot be, a “friend of America.” He is willing to endure the American presence only so long as it strengthens him, and weakens the Sunni insurgents. And the Sunnis, in turn, or those not in the immediate “insurgency,” may now want the Americans to stay for the same reasons – in order to protect them from the full force of the Shi’a. That’s it. The Administration refuses to understand this, and keeps making policy based on hope, and on all the Unrepresentative Men (Chalabi, Allawi, Makiya, and the tiny group of semi-decent mid-level former Iraqi officers who have unduly impressed American officers, and thus lead them to all kinds of rosy misconceptions and hopes, but are in fact the rare exceptions, not the rule) that were in exile, or have tried with this or that group of soldiers or policemento do the impossible in Iraq, which is to make them drop their sectarian and ethnic and even tribal allegiances. Simply cannot be done.
Why is this hard to understand? What is so complicated about it?
"As your country was fighting that great CONTEST... iraq was a province of an ottoman empire steeped in BACKWARDNESS and IGNORANCE." And so? Flash forward, is he implying that to date, iraq is now forward and evolving? maliki is definitely a manipulative knuckhead. President G.W. chuckles the clown, needs to give it up.
Maybe it's because Americans are not accustomed to being used as "a tool." They think they're in charge...but, they aren't.
Slightly Off Topic. Debby Schlussel put up an article (a portion of it anyway) from the Washington Post (think the Wa po article was published on Sunday?), and it suggested that maybe Americans don't really want to win the war in Iraq. Among other things, the CIA sabotages the very people who designed methods for getting rid of the IEDs (the IEDs responsible for so many American deaths). The article is titled: "Improvised Explosive Defeat." (a must-read, I think).
Hugh, I wouldn't call that article comical. It's more dangerous than that.
He compared Iraq's struggle to our Civil War. He failed to note how that war ended: Lee's surrender. Only after the Confederate Army had surrendered did we make headway on rebuilding our nation. One side had to win.
Maliki isn't willing to do what it takes. He isn't willing to go after the Shiite militias. He clearly has no understanding of what it means to unify a country. It's not clear that he even wants a unified country.
And what about us? We're so squeamish we don't want to see force used. The all you need is love crowd is at it again. Peace and understanding. Before you can have reconciliation the killing has to stop. Maliki puts the cart before the horse. How does he expect to reconcile people who still kill one another on religious grounds and at the same time making that religion a force in governing?
How does he expect to unify the country while at the same time tolerating interference from Iran? Is unity his goal or is it merely domination?
What is Iraq but a collection of tribes? Isn't that the problem? They still don't see themselves as a nation. The only thing that unifies them is opposition to infidels. Hate is not sufficient to build a country.
Okay so they got a bad deal through history. First it was the Ottomans, then the British, then the Baathists and Saddam. Does that history make them incapable of self-rule? Is dictatorship all they understand? We can't save them from themselves. To see a leader making excuses for failure is disheartening, to say the least.
They have a lot going for them even now. They have modern technology and the means to develop their country and they have many non-Muslim countries rooting for this experiment to succeed and willing to lend them a hand. That's what we've done for the last four years: lend them a hand. The problem is they just refuse to stand up. So maybe it's time we left them lying on the ground. If they want freedom they're going to have to stand up and fight for it. We can't give it to them. If the Iranians or the Sunnis ride in and crush them then it's their tough luck.
They seem to crave dictatorship. It frees them of all responsibility for their own futures and it gives them someone to blame for their own failures. The fact that their leaders feel the same way means that country in its current state hasn't got long to live.
"the CIA sabotages the very people who designed methods for getting rid of the IEDs"
As I understand it, the lawyers were the ones who put the kibosh on the detectors. The CIA agents came up with the technology and the lawyers quashed it.
That's one of the big problems in this war. Lawyers are running the show, riding along with troops and clearing every raid, as if they were with DEA in New York or California searching a home for illegal drugs.
PMK,
I believe the article referred to CIA operatives (in the field, in Iraq) who came up with a means to have IEDs blow up in the hands of the bomb-makers. "But the CIA general counsel's office said no" (I'm quoting from the article). It's up to the general counsel's office to determine what's a go and what's a no-go. Ultimately, it's their call. (The article then goes on to note that, according to an unidentified source, lawyers claimed that the agency "lacked authority." But what does that mean? If the CIA lacks the authority to give the go-ahead to destroy the IED bomb-makers, then who does? Isn't this "passing the buck?" I don't think it's necessarily that the lawyers are "the problem" -- maybe it's higher up, eh? or who's listening to the interpretations presented by a certain group of lawyers, that's the problem.(?))
Mohammedans consider infidels subservient dogs to be exploited until they can be subjugated - or destroyed if they resist the global gulag of tyrannical Islam.
The Muslim Ummah, even as they fight as "Shi'ites" and "Sunnis" for internal power over the 'religion', always unite in their over-riding contempt for the unclean "pigs and apes" AKA Jews, Christians, Hindus, Zoroastrains, Taoists, Wiccans, pagans, agnostics, atheists, etc..
That our leaders doggedly and studiously failed to understand the enemy is the tragedy and folly of this entire enterprise in "democracy spreading" (a Pollyanna madness when the liberated "demos" is force-fed with a theocratic poison which decrees death to anyone who disagrees with the inculcated-from-birth Sharia-drive of the majority- VIZ: HAMAS IN GAZA).
Withdraw the Coalition forces to the oil fields and the Kurdish area, and shoot at jihadists from the skies from now on should be the plan.
Wasting our soldier's blood and our nation's treasure on these brainwashed ingrates is the shameful shadow that will make the current Administration and Congress look as historically mad and useless as the 1930's West.
Those isolationists and pacifists who squandered Europe's and America's chances to squash a nascent Terror, as Nazis, Fascists and Japanese Imperialists openly rose to threaten Civilization.
Islam is a toxic combination of those three totalitarian impulses, made still more dangerous by the grotesque addition of a Hitlerian Allah/God at its head.
Our current leaders are wishfully blind or self-blinded or seditious pimps for raw power.
Unless we get those who will behave with the tenacious directness of a Lincoln of Churchill for our survival, we will have our miltary and technological advantages slowly chipped away.
By open borders that weaken us from within, and allow jihadists to infiltrate with a WMD.
And by a foreign policy that thinks you can win the hearts and minds of those who think you are subhuman suckers ripe for robbing. (The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, ad nauseam.)
Madness is in the saddle, and it is calling us "bigots", "nativists", "Islamophobes", et al, for resisting it. (To try to silence any opposition with rote attempts at p.c. intimidation.)
When you fail to learn your opponent's belief system (disguised as an 'Abrahamic faith') that animates their drive for a terroristic imperialism, you can never fight them effectively.
Where are the realists who love the West?
I see only panderers and sleepwalkers.
Or useful idiots.
He compared Iraq's struggle to our Civil War. He failed to note how that war ended: Lee's surrender. Only after the Confederate Army had surrendered did we make headway on rebuilding our nation. One side had to win.
Maliki isn't willing to do what it takes. He isn't willing to go after the Shiite militias. He clearly has no understanding of what it means to unify a country. It's not clear that he even wants a unified country.
But "winning," for him, wouldn't require him "to go after the Shiite militias"; it would require him to go after the *Sunnites*. For him, the Shiite militias are the equivalent of the Kansas Jayhawkers (like old Ossawattamie Brown).
Saamus:
But unless he goes after the Shiite militias they will have a free hand in killing the Sunnis and the Kurds. He doesn't unify the country by going after the Sunnis.
Even within the Shiite community you have militias from different tribes battling one another. Until they are stripped of their power the country cannot survive.
If the CIA lacks the authority to give the go-ahead to destroy the IED bomb-makers, then who does? Isn't this "passing the buck?"
J.S.:
You've put your finger on the problem. But the reason it is necessary to pass the buck is because unless those with the weapon get approval from higherups they risk being thrown in a stockade and accused of war crimes in the event of an adverse outcome. Look at the US Marines in Camp Pendleton.
Lawyers are among the higherups. Lawyers are the ones who decide that something is wrong, both before and after the fact. Lawyers gave us the ICC. Lawyers have set up the rules for war. I don't blame the CIA people who refrained from using this weapon because it wasn't cleared. I blame the lawyers. They took the authority away from the generals. When was the last time a general or colonel had to get approval from a lawyer before he could hit a target? Thank heaven they weren't in charge on D-Day or in the Battle of the Bulge or when we bombed Hiroshima.
But unless he goes after the Shiite militias they will have a free hand in killing the Sunnis and the Kurds.
As far as his political base is concerned, this isn't a bug; this is a feature.
Isn't it a good thing that we invaded Iraq to establish democracy?