RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.
THE BACKGROUND
The Hizbollah attack has forced the Bush administration to rethink its estimate of the “democracy” plan using Shiites — Islamic heretics — as the majority. All Shiites everywhere, Arab or Iranian, are being driven by the ones with the money and even deeper imperialistic ambitions than A-Q’s, namely the so-called ayatollahs at Qom, Iran. That was the significance of President Bush’s expletive that got onto the air recently from an open mic. It was about Hizbollah, indicating that he/the administration had misread their nature and thus their intentions.
Hizbollah and Sadr are Shiites. The Sunni governments and peoples — Jordan, Egypt, Sauds, Morocco, Gulf States, etc — have decided the Hizbollah attack spells the writing on the wall also. They see themselves, accurately, as dancing on strings pulled by Iran. So are the Coalition Force in Iraq. The Europeans also see it, especially I am sure France, as well, of course, as England.
Right now the Israelis are hewing the wood and hauling the wet stuff for all of those other governments and peoples, Arab, American, European and Indian — against a single enemy: Iran, who encourages A-Q, to keep their target occupied and unfocused. Even Sunni Hamas had to turn to Shiite Iran for support in their Palestinian AO. So the Sunni nations, excepting Syria, which Israel I suspect is heading to take down — Sunni’s being the Islamic majority numbers-wise — are not going to go against Israel and are not going to overtly support A-Q or keep stirring trouble. Even the Sauds, I suspect, are looking for ways to de-potentize the illiterate morons posing as Wahhabi clergy. At least in their own lands. Outside the kingdom, Saud is the world’s principal financier of A-Q and Salafists everywhere, worldwide.
These movements in the grand political situation perhaps are grasped by our senior Army leadership and their MI shops. They should be.
Liberal dogma in general and in re the WGOT in particular vacillates between cowardice and hubris. One minute it is we comprise everything important, understand everything needful and can manage everything possible and the next it is we must take care lest we offend someone. Both the cowardice and the hubris, grotesque as they are, are secondary evils. The root evil is the vacillation.
Vacillation, itself, whether between two bad things or two good things, is the problem, the prime cause of destruction. Vacillation is what really angers us. We can take someone being good and we can take someone being bad. But when they go back and forth we feel only threat, as indeed we should. To someone who is vacillating between liberal attitudes, mention that they are vacillating between cowardice and hubris and to be one or the other.
It is assumed in our industrialized, infinitely separated, pieced out, morbidly misanthropic pop culture that centered wholes, such as a personal self, neither exist nor act as a unit from conscious, or even more so, unconscious drivers. To a certain extent a mission-focused organization, especially an armed force, must do this. But ultimately, and very soon, unless the entire force, as both individuals and as a group, sees and feels its purpose-in-being, it will disintegrate in the several ways that can happen.
As one understands, soldiers are not stupid, even the dull ones. They have to know finally why they are doing what they are doing. An officer has to explain that to them simply but adequately so that the entire circumstance that is significant has been offered to everyone’s understanding. Not everyone can fully understand, of course, but offering everyone understanding is necessary and then holding everyone to the understanding they can achieve and have achieved is equally important.
The standard has to be the nature of the war and the battle, which includes their preparatory reasons (the past), their executive actions (the present) and their missionary fulfillments (the future).
The liberal dogma is just what our experience since 9/11 has defeated.
As a measure of the truth of that statement: 20 states have banned queer marriage (as if such a thing could be) and currently 19 more are considering it. Even the Episcopal Church last month had to forego consecrating more avowed queers. They were stopped cold by the facts — the queers are not enough to sustain the priests’ pension fund. Yet we hear in the pop culture that queers are making great strides and planning greater ones. Actually, they have lost and are maintaining a vigorous PR front to hide the fact. Multiculturalism too has lost. The civil war in Baghdad did it in!
THE POLICY
Responding to this by Ralph Peters:
I understand this and would support it if the circumstances required it. Best I can see, at this point they do not.
Ralph fingers Sadr. So do I.
Indication are that whereas, as Peters mentions, we let him go on so far, that mistake is not going to be repeated a second time.
Hitting Sadr would be bloody, desperate, but it would open a second or actually third front on Iran, who has been gaily opening fronts of late. It would also flush al Maliki, who is sounding more and more an Iranian plant, although that is my impression through the press so I would not insist that it is accurate.
At the start, I argued for a three-way section of the territory — Kurd north, Sunni central, Shia south. Someone at Council on Foreign Relations argued the same at the time. I think Gelb. The Bush administration did not want that approach and, one hopes, saw things on the ground which indicated, rightly, its unwisdom.
Basically that is what Peters is arguing, although making it come about through Sturm und Drang rather than political dealing. That is risky, but as he points out, it has commending aspects.
My sense is that we are not there yet, that the administration’s decision to unify Iraq democratically is still possible and so worth/necessary trying. But the man in the USA street is fast losing his taste for that, notwithstanding his concurrent and reprehensible insensibility to global disastrous ramifications of Iraq going Shiite or Wahhabi Islamist, by which is meant jihadist, or, jackwagon.
If al Maliki starts criticizing US/Europe/Sunni nations or warning generally about wanting to redraw the map of the Middle East (the deflecting rhetorical formula recently created by Tehran and appearing from there and from Hizbollah), then he definitely is a Tehran plant and at that point Peters’ essentially split-the-country-in-three idea rises from useful option toward necessary policy.
If the Administration’s one-Iraq policy is to succeed the first requirement is to make Sadr dead and his friends and relations with him. If that is not done, then tripartite section of the area becomes, so far as I can see, the only option — except Sadr, his friends and relations, along with competing Shia armed forces still could/should be made dead. That would include, probably, at that point, al Maliki and his band.
In other words the administration would more or less openly admit failure of the one-Iraq democracy policy and proceed, with full justification, in my view, to liquidate those who caused its failure: Sadr, al Maliki, and the other Teheran proxies/Shia militias.
Even now, anything Shiite that is not explicitly, publicly opposed to Teheran should be taken as run by Tehran, including in this country.
Iran abandoned Sadr a few years ago at Najaf, I think it was, when the Coalition was forcing his folks at the mosque there. They will again if he is forced in Baghdad. Evil cannot stand or prevail against persevering good. Its very persevering causes all obstacles to melt away from before rampant good. Dharma upholds those who uphold Dharma. The power of non-Being depends on the power of Being, notwithstanding its effort to present itself as a co-equal or superior of the power of Being.
The issue will be decided by whether Sadr and his people are made dead, and soon.
Update 1: And Al Saud intends to keep it up.
AMDG
