Mohammed's Briar Patch

Calhoun's Cannons for June 16, 2014

We warned long ago that the adventurism the Americans and the British started there would not end well."

                                                  Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov

Would somebody please send Senator John MaCain to Iraq so he can bomb something -- anything.  Right now, his war-lust, like all the old men who send other people's children to war, is running amok.  And who invited all those zombies back on TV?  Kristol, Wolfowitz, Bremer, the Bush-era Unrepentant Undead are flooding the airwaves once again to peer out from the TV screen to proffer more wrong "advice," singing the old PNAC song.  They were wrong then and wrong now.  Dear God, please make them go away. 

Well, it's not like anybody knows what to do, except "something."  But  what?  Even McCain's longed-for desire to bomb somebody, anybody, would likely end up with a supreme irony: American forces fighting on the same side of Iran, an official terrorist state.  That's how cork-screwed the Middle East has become, thanks to our "help."

Watching the predictable news out of Iraq, I can only ask, "Is America finally ready to get schooled in the terrible price we always pay for our willful ignorance, our deliberate know-nothingness, both of which fuel our pathological willingness to fall for the Big Con?"

The Neo-Con Philosopher Kings, their media pundits and their chosen President deluded themselves into thinking that folks living in the oil-rich middle east  under those funny clothes,  were, at heart, conservative-minded Rotarians from small-town Iowa who were just waiting for someone to bring them "freedom" so they could open up a Levis store, make lots of money and send their daughters to study Am. Lit. at a nice liberal arts college, then marry a stock broker.  

And what better excuse to launch this PNAC plan than after 9/11, when America had blood in her eye, no world history in her head, and didn't know a Sunni from a Shi'a, and  Iraq from Yemen?  If you "looked muslim," that was good enough.  You were a terrorist and a threat to "our way of life" and if we shocked and awed the wrong country in our pursuit of al Quaeda, who cared?  We'd be greeted as liberators and the oil money would pay for this grand jingo jaunt, and we'd have a fine time kicking some Muslim ass.

Only it didn't turn out that way, as old Sergey knew, Russia having had it's own "Iraqi" moment in Afghanistan.  As Colin Powell knew with his "you break it you own it" rhetoric.  As history itself would/should have told us, had we bothered to read or even talk to some old coot in British Intelligence, one of the old guys who arbitrarily divided up these countries after WWI, a fateful division of spoils with built-in poison pills that are finally coming due.

And poor Iraq may also be ready to be schooled in the terrible price to be paid when sectarian ideology trumps practical reality.  When dogs fight over a bone, it is the wolf who will settle the hash. And in this case, ISIS, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, appears ready to collect a good deal of the bones. Yet another lost lesson:  Beware the religious or political  fanatic whose "purity" (and weaponry and tactical smarts) is greater than your own. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi dreams of a neo-Caliphate and that dream may prove to be more costly than anyone can imagine.

No, Sergey, this adventure did not turn out well.  It's possible that the Middle East simply isn't ready for any good solutions, except for their own hideous version of The Thirty Years War.  As long as fundamentalism appears to be an attractive bulwark against modernism and western  imperial designs, too many Islamic countries will remain  locked in the 16th century.  Democracy and modernity cannot thrive with a fundamentalist boot on the neck of the body politic. 

Or it's possible that tribal societies simply can't operate as large modern nation-states. That Iraq, hastily cobbled together by the British and French at the end of World War I, was never sustainable.  Right now, ISIS is re-drawing the map, forcefully, murderously creating something of a fait accompli  dual state -- Sunni to the north, Shi'a to the south.

If that division holds, the next lesson the people of the middle east will have to learn is an old one:  Be careful what you wish for, you might get it. And if Mr. Baghdadi turns out to be the Devil who will deliver the deal, it will not turn out well.

At War Over A Peace Prize

Calhoun’s Can(n)ons for October 12, 09

I don’t understand all the furor over President Obama being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. I think some of the confusion comes from the title of the award – Peace Prize. Maybe if they renamed it the “Nobel We Keep Hoping For Some Peace Prize,” people wouldn’t be so touchy.

But let’s face it, that award has always stirred people up. I mean, every year the Committee seems to award the Prize in Literature to some obscure writer named WhoThe Hell? that nobody’s ever heard of, so in the international literary salons eyes roll and peer down sniffing noses, sneers slide onto faces and sotto-voce mutters are heard – This is an outrage! Whoever heard of WhoTheHell?’s book? It sold 40 copies, 39 to his Mom, and he gets the Nobel, while my books are international best sellers and I get bupkis?

So, this year’s Outrage du jour is no different, except it does have a couple of extra wrinkles. First, of course, is our country’s poisonous political climate. Since Obama is a Democrat, the Republicans felt they had to knee-jerk damn with faint praise as Michael Steele, the Republican National Committee Chairman sniffed, “The real question Americans are asking is, ‘What has President Obama actually accomplished?’” Which is a hilarious question coming from somebody who would qualify as a Nobel WhoTheHell?? himself. Of course, so much of what’s left of the Republican party has gone so far to the right that they’re now stuck with the likes of Bill Kristol and Rush Limbaugh, that gang of Right Wing No-Nothings who were all cheering when the U.S. lost the bid for the Olympics, which means that Republican Conservatives now Hate America And Want The Terrorists To Win.

The second wrinkle is that Obama is Commander in Chief and is heading up a country still actively mired in two wars, so a “peace” prize carries its own curious cognitive dissonance. And, since he was only in office a very short time before he was nominated and selected, the prize seems to be an a priori award, which is like giving the prize in literature to an author for a work-in-progress: A sort of Nobel Prize for First Draft Literature.

True, the historical list of Nobel Peace Prize winners doesn’t include many people who actually secured some kind of “official peace,” i.e. single-handedly negotiated a treaty or cease fire that stopped a war. And despite the best efforts of many noble people over the years toiling in the vineyards of peace, their harvests have too often been fleeting and thin, even though they got the Prize for At Least Trying. Or they got the award because their efforts on other fronts were focused on creating system changes that could help avert future wars, such as Al Gore’s work on global warning, a climate disaster that, if not mediated, will indeed lead to resource wars on an unimaginable scale.

In Obama’s case, what I find so fascinating, is that the Committee seems to be acutely aware of the old saying, “appearance is reality.” Indeed, our modern viral communications often turns appearance into actual reality in a trice. The fake can travel the world five times over before the “real” puts its shoes on, and intentions actually can shape reality. And since the Nobel Prize is powerfully about perception – the award money’s nice, but there’s nothing like having that title before your name to open doors and so move your career and hence your work forward – then an award that’s a sort of Good Job So Far, may accomplish more than an after-the-fact, Thanks for Your Past Efforts, Too Bad They Didn’t Do Much award ever could.

I mean, rewarding good effort and intentions is often a great way to get MORE good efforts. And if we want to end up with a peaceful world, we’ll need more good efforts, more good intentions, more cooperative efforts, and more world-wide problem-solving that doesn’t involve bombing people. Then, when peaceful interaction becomes the norm and not the exception, selfish, greedy, unilateral, corporate plunderers and cowboy warmongers will be considered shockingly tres gauche outliers – easier targets for the world political salons’ eyeball rolling and down-the-nose sniffing.