AFTER THE RETREAT: BURY IRAQ

First draft

Please read IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER and LEBANON AND THE CARRY TRADE at the end of this post.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF NATIONAL EXPECTATIONS: THE ARAB PUBLIC V. AMERICA’S JEWISH RIGHT AND CHRISTIAN RIGHT

It’s over for the Arab public holding out hope for the Arab Sunnis of Iraq. And it’s over for the Arab Sunnis themselves in that plantation. In retrospect, it had been over the moment the harmful idiots had dispatched the troops.

Though, for a while, hope had sprung eternal for all: for the American Jewish Right and its ally, the Christian Right (one more step and Israel will rein supreme in America’s strategic calculus) and for the Arab people (the Sunni resistance will show them.)

Israel still reins supreme in America’s strategic calculus (note the latest joint maneuvers) - - but no thanks to Iraq. The Sunni resistance got bought out and seems to have become a mix of proxy guerrillas for foreign countries.

IRAQ AS A LESSON FOR THE NEXT WAR

For Americans (for those who aren’t into Israel-as-essential-to-America’s-strategic-calculus), the wars already are over - - more troops to Afghanistan notwithstanding.

What’s left is a headline in the New York Times: “From Iraq: Lessons for the Next War,” by Alissa Rubin. That’s all: Iraq - - millions of refugees later - - is a lesson for the next war. (FYI: I didn’t bother to read the article.) What’s left, too, is a photo from another one of these so-called wars, really a fall into a systemic power vacuum trap - - Afghanistan. What’s left is the photo, no more, on the front page of the Washington Post, of a soldier missing a leg, maimed. On the inside of the same issue there’s another photograph of the same soldier being wheeled about at the hospital by his brother. My heart went for both.

It’s not that the Washington Post has gone humane and wise. The Post, after all, had hoorayed with anti-Arab poison the naked aggression against Arab Iraq. It is, you see, that the Washington Post is preparing us for retreat from the entire war business. But the Post, as the reluctant ones, doesn’t want the retreat to look like a rout - - to the American public, that is. It’s finding a reason for the retreat to present to the public; and what better reason for retreat than a maimed U.S. soldier being wheeled about by his brother? (Remember: retreat is a state of mind, too.) The Post is behaving as if no one could’ve predicted that the military campaigns against Arab Iraq and in Afghanistan would result in the maiming of U.S. troops, or that these campaigns would help bankrupt us.

THE KURDISH NATION RULES

Turkey’s Foreign Minister visits the independent nation-state of Kurdistan. For peace with that nation, he likely will be willing to let it grab Kirkuk - -for now, until the Kurds make their mistakes and awaken the Turkish Giant. I don’t care that he says that all- - Kurds, Arabs, and Turkmen - - should love each other. The fact is: he needs the Kurds and accordingly he will give them leeway. He needs their cooperation badly. He had seen that the Kurdish nation within his own country, Turkey, had come out en masse to welcome as heroes the returning PKK fighters. It was nothing short of a victory parade. The fighters had left the mountains to come home. Home is KURDISH Turkey - - Kurdistan-in-Turkey. You’d have to be blind not to see that the Kurds are a nation-apart, and that in Turkey the PKK is their spokesman. Too, you’d have to be so dense not to realize that the establishment of a Kurdish nation-state in northern Iraq has emboldened the Kurds throughout, including in Turkey. For now, the Kurds are victorious.

FURTHER SOUTH: PLANTATION IRAQ, A “NATION” OF PROXIES OF FOREIGN COUNTRIES

Further south, you have the rest of Plantation Iraq. Superficially, it’s run by a part of the team the harmful idiots had brought over, a part of a team which had been adopted by the reluctant ones. (Institutions, you see, preserve idiocy, at-times-harmful-at-times-reluctant, across Administrations and Presidential terms.)

That team is helpless. Its sponsors, the institutions of the reluctant ones, hand the Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRG) a painful lesson in Sistan-Balushistan. (MY OWN SPECULATION!) IRG promises “crushing” retaliation. Has that retaliation been executed when over 150 people were killed and hundreds wounded (how many maimed?) by the suicide bombings against Government buildings in Baghdad - - Black Sunday? Has IRG decided that, for this phase, retaliation for acts against it by the institutions of the idiots would take place in Iraq - - against the proxies of the idiots? It seems so.

A Clear-Cut (to me) Iranian Shift

If this linkage is correct, then wouldn’t it stand to reason that the idiot-institutions when they strike against IRG are hurting the very team they had sponsored in Iraq? Or is it that their brain can’t comprehend linkage? Or do they need multiple events-of-the-kind for their brain to reach a conclusion? Or is it instead that their “experts” didn’t think that Iran would risk and intra-Shia civil war by retaliating against mostly Shia government buildings? Can’t these bureaucrats not take their lunch hour, interrupt dreaming about their retirement places, interrupt surfing the net, stop snooping on me (God are they snooping on me, saying either you accept the “friendship” of the low-life we pick for you, or we’ll make your life miserable. I would talk to you: Send Senator George Mitchell. Else: ask me who my friends are and contact them. I’d rather that my friends make the money and the Finder’s Fee. I’m not open to new friendships with assholes and chance-encounters with what looks like nice people but who I don’t know from Adam and who got to me by snooping on me. I don’t appreciate snooping - -as you can tell. Look who I’m talking to!) - - and try to stay ahead of the game - -to learn that the process is forever dynamic? That means that the choices by the actors are forever being re-defined.

That perhaps, for IRG, post-Retreat (retreat is a state of mind before being an actual withdrawal), it’s no longer solely (it never was fully, anyway) about the Shia realm-as-protector of Iran - - but about pro-idiots and anti-idiots - - proxies of idiots and non-proxies of idiots. If a Shia civil war, post-Retreat, do the idiot-institutions have any doubt about who will win it? Iran doesn’t. And I don’t.

At any rate, the possibility is now distinct (I would say: clear-cut) that the Iranians have linked retaliation in Iraq to what the idiot-institutions do against IRG or Iran elsewhere.


SHATTERED: THE ARAB SUNNIS

In the middle, between on one end the powerful nation-state of Kurdistan, a long-time friend of the institutions of the harmful-idiots-and-the-reluctant-ones, and on the other end the state ruled by the proxies of the idiot-institutions and those of IRG’s - - between the two sit the hapless Arab Sunnis - - -badly wounded, defeated, and betrayed.

It’s easy, and quite naïve, to think of them as divided between the tribes and the al-Qaeda types. It seems to me to be much worse. The bombings against the Ministries and Government buildings -- of Black Wednesday and Black Sunday - -, the attacks by the al-Qaeda types on Sunni government troops, and the attacks on Shia civilians - - these events tell me that proxy armed groups within the Arab Sunni community represent not only the Sunni community but, too, an array of countries. I have no evidence, but I would nonetheless dare deduce, for instance, that those who attack Shia civilians would be sponsored by Saudi intelligence; those who blow up the government buildings of the idiots’ proxies: by IRG; those who attack Sunni government troops: possibly by Syria.

NO HOPE

No, Turkey can’t do it.

Syria is too poor and has land occupied by the idiot-institutions’ friend. (The idiot-institutions love their friend because, you see, Israel shall save the Western World. It’s written somewhere.)

Egypt, try as it does, is no more than a manager of Gaza for the idiot-institutions and for their Beloved.

Saudi Arabia: it doesn’t believe in fielding not even a semi-able army.

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LEBANON AND THE CARRY TRADE

Correction: notes of a non-economist who’s tired of the bourgeois economists:

I had noted that the likely source of the tens of billions of dollars flowing into Lebanon’s banks was Iran. I was wrong. It’s the carry trade. Lebanon’s Central Bank has found yet one more means - - the carry trade - - to keep that state alive. The danger for Lebanon is three-fold: (1) that it’ll be paying out in interest way more than what it needs in loans; (2) that the real estate bubble in evidence would explode and create tons of misery - - as the Central Bank whispers to the private banks to get out of the real estate market when it is ready to announce lower interest rates and catch the public with its real-estate investment pants down; and (3) that, in spite of the hushed warning by the Central Bank to the private banks, Lebanon’s banks which likely are helping fuel the real estate bubble, would get caught short, too, needing the Central Bank to bail them out and depleting what resources that Bank currently has.

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IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER

No connection do I have
To any state
Or to any government bureaucrat
I send Arabs to a firm
To attend to their needs
They return as informants
And in my computer they plant
Virus and Trojan seeds
They were never my clients
Nor my friends
Parasites, I now realize
A pain in the ass
I now surmise.


I embarrass the state
For their idiocy I search
They don’t like it a bit
They set up traps for me
From which I lurch
Good cop, bad cop
They say I’m “this Arab”
A Hezbollah terrorist
Who cares?
An insult
A wise man says, yet
Not nice or easy to bear
They want to silence
“This Arab”
…
And his free mind
To snare

To rob me of my serotonim
Walking the Courthouse hallways
To sit me on a chair
Jail me behind a desk
Like an Egyptian bu-reau-crat
Looking out the window
Dreaming of freedom
Away from the mukhabarat

Leave me alone, I say
Let me be
Let me write
This one more essay
About idiots who create harm
Unnecessarily
Mediocre Ones
Who fall into power vacuums
And systemic traps
Going after Israel-tied illusions
Momentarily
To wake up later and say,
We didn’t know
Daaa

Let’s enjoy the rain
Here,
Not in Spain
Thanksgiving
The season’s rites
Let’s not be
Assholes, pests, and parasites