by Pat Lang
Acceptance of the charter won’t open any magic doors, but it would demonstrate that the government won’t be moved by violence,” Jonathan Lindley, head of the Middle East unit at the Royal Services Institute, a London-based research organization, said in an Oct. 7 interview. “If it fails, it will be a setback.”
Shiite Muslim and Kurdish negotiators said Oct. 12 they had reached an agreement with Sunni politicians on the constitution, ending months of wrangling and ensuring the charter’s passage. ” (Bloomberg)
 Col. Patrick W. Lang (Ret.), a highly decorated retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces, served as “Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Terrorism” for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and was later the first Director of the Defense Humint Service. Col. Lang was the first Professor of the Arabic Language at the United States Military Academy at West Point. For his service in the DIA, he was awarded the “Presidential Rank of Distinguished Executive.” He is a frequent commentator on television and radio, including PBS’s Newshour, and most recently on MSNBC’s Hardball and NPR’s “All Things Considered.” His CV and blog are linked below the fold. |
Full results of the referendum won’t be known for days.
They won’t yield to violence? Are we to believe that the “Shiite Muslim and Kurdish negotiators” reached this agreement with some of the Sunni Arabs on the constitutional draft because their hearts were filled with the milk of human kindness?
Something caused the ruling ethno-religious coalition to decide to, at least theoretically, give up something of value to the Sunni Arabs. There is no free lunch, not in America and not in Iraq.
Think Hegel! Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis. That is called dialectic, and not the marxist kind either.
- Thesis (constitutional draft rogering the Sunni Arabs)
- Antithesis (Sunni Arab-backed guerrilla war of great ferocity and persistance)
- Synthesis (deal on the constitution).
Now if one were a Sunni Arab Baatho/nationalist insurgent, would one not believe that one’s antithesis was the cause of the subsequent synthesis?
Therefore — The government has ALREADY yielded to the pressure of violence, and one might think that further politically targeted violence would yield yet more and BETTER syntheses.
As if, in demonstration of this hypothesis, we have learned Friday night of a massively effective strike against the power grid in the Baghdad area.
The spinners are spinning. The official and un-official spokesmen for the adminstration are minimizing, but the fact is that the insurgents were able to analyze this target system (partly through previous experimentation) and then strike a node that blacked out the city on the eve of the referendum, thus promising more and better antitheses.
I predict that the constitution will pass the referendum and then, after a few days of giddy talk, the war will go on.
Think Hegel.
Personal Blog: Sic Semper Tyrannis 2005 || Bio || CV
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Novel: The Butcher’s Cleaver (download free by chapter, PDF format)
“Drinking the Kool-Aid,” Middle East Policy Council Journal, Vol. XI, Summer 2004, No. 2
This vote may be spun as another purple finger moment in the march to democracy but, in reality, it won’t make any difference in the level of the insurgency in Iraq.
than have to read him again. A sentence chosen at random from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: “Now, although it is true that the contradiction in the objective essence is in this way distributed among different Things, yet the difference will, for that reason, attach to the singular separated Thing itself.” I even underlined the last part of this sentence, so it must have meant something to me at the time.
I think Hegel is saying that there are LOADs of reasons why the war in Iraq is an abysmal failure but the wingnuts only see one reason: disloyal liberals.
And that that’s probably true because the avg. human mind cannot take in many reasons and tends to need to focus on one reason.
(Awaits BooMan The Philosophy Major’s smackdown.)
and I don’t have to re-read Hegel and you can’t make me. Nyah, Nyah, Nyah.
I would think your thoughts on this is accurate. As far wishful thinking, I hope that they soon would see the error of their ways, but I am just a day dreamer. I think you are most right on this. The war will go on and will until we exit from the land. If my readings on this is correct, we do not intend on exiting at all. so the war will go on and on and on, no matter who, what, when or where of it all.
on an active thread at Kos.
“In an interview with the Scottish Sunday Herald, former CIA officer Larry Johnson said the OSP was “dangerous for US national security and a threat to world peace. [The OSP] lied and manipulated intelligence to further its agenda of removing Saddam. It’s a group of ideologues with pre-determined notions of truth and reality. They take bits of intelligence to support their agenda and ignore anything contrary. They should be eliminated.” (Mackay, 2003)”
Yeah, I still go there. Flame me if you will.
Hey, we all have our guilty pleasures… 🙂
CNN is doing exit polling. That’s just bizarre.
How much did the U.S. gov’t pay for THAT service?
It almost goes without saying doesn’t it that some repug company is getting paid for that service…and doing a lousy job for lots of money.
Excuse me but wtf?…after our last election the ‘exit polls’ were supposedly discredited due to the fact of kerry winning exit polls but not the votes…anyway all the networks had all that crap about NOT using exit polling anymore as it was useless etc etc etc…or am I somehow not remembering that big to do about the polling correctly?
Perfectly appropriate with Hegel.
Hegel wrote back when Exclusive Middle Logic ( p OR not-p) was all that existed. Today we know much more about Multi-Truth Values (0 through 1). Without going too deeply into it: Hegel’s Thesis/Anti-Thesis/Synthesis is obsolete when it is not completely superficial.
Rarely is a Complex situtation simple enough to be reduced to a Thesis resolving into a Synthesis. (Here I can start talking about Strange Attractors, Class III and IV Fitness Landscapes and and and – but I restrain myself.)
Certainly it seems the “Sunni Arab Baatho/nationalist insurgent[s](sic)” have, through violence, succeeded in being ‘at the table’ during the discussions on the Iraqi constitution. And it seems the “The [Iragi] government has ALREADY yielded to the pressure of violence” but we do not have to conclude, and I submit it would be wrong to conclude “further politically targeted violence would yield yet more and BETTER syntheses” when it is more productive to think the violence as a Complex series of inputs shifting the environment such that the tendenz of the environment is moving towards greater congruence with the goals of the guerrillas. (Note: the refusal to play the spin-game.)
When thought of in this manner seemingly minor or a-relevant actions, such as ensuring an adequate water supply, become as important as defeating the guerrillas militarily. And it can be intimated military action may help the guerillas by increasing the input(s) that is(are) moving the environment towards their goal(s).
Using the suggested analytical procedure, I submit, creates the intellectual framework for a wider range of potential and non-exclusive actions holding the hope of increasing the possibility of a ‘successful’ (however defined) outcome.