Every Knee Shall B – Buh . . .
Gracious visitor Abdul Aziz al-Hakim of Iran Iraq says everything would be great in Iraq if America’s government and military didn’t, like, suck so much:
Hakim denied that majority Shi’ites were stoking sectarian violence and put the onus on Washington to take tougher action against insurgents.
“The strikes they are getting from the multinational forces are not hard enough to put an end to their acts,” he said.
“Eliminating the danger of civil war in Iraq could only be achieved through directing decisive strikes against Baathist terrorists (and other Islamists) in Iraq.”
“Otherwise we’ll continue to witness massacres,” he said in a speech.
Gotcha. With the lofty disinterest appropriate to his office, the Badr Brigade commander counsels the United States to visit more destructive fury on his enemies.
Is there really someone in official Washington dumb enough to think that if we only “make a deal” with Hakim at the expense of his various rivals that the Administration will finally have found the guy who can make it all work out for us? “The guy” does not exist.
Hakim is the latest in a long line of backup quarterbacks in a town with a losing football tradition. Nobody knows much about him, but they figure he can’t be worse than the shlump who’s starting. All anyone knows about him comes from a fragmentary passage in a scouting guide from the other year, but a beat reporter said some coach, or maybe it was a player, said the guy has shown flashes in practice and maybe he’d give the team a spark. As long as he’s not playing he’s the most popular guy in town.
Cripes, it’s worse than even I thought: our government is like the callers to a sports talk radio station.
Comment by the talking dog —
December 5, 2006 @ 12:30 am
I’m not so sure that “the guy” doesn’t exist. (Sure, a process we just orchestrated has sentenced “the guy” to hang… but I think maybe we can make a little arrangement… if we cared, that is.)
We don’t of course, because “the game” is keeping Iraqi oil in the sand, and not sloshing around tankers driving Saudi crude prices down. What goes on in Iraq over the sand… is more akin to the half-time show, or perhaps the flashy things on the scoreboard. Which explains why the organization is giving it the level of attention it is getting.
Comment by Leonard —
December 5, 2006 @ 1:56 am
It’s not like Saddam “made things work” for us, either. Maybe sorta you could argue that of the 80s, but not the 90s or aughts. He made things work for himself, and his tribe.
The problem here is political legitimacy. Any Iraqi who might be “the guy” is, among many other things, anti-American. Nobody else can possibly rule Iraq. In fact, I’d suggest there’s a certain “only Nixon can go to China” aspect at work here; if we really want to find the next ruler of Iraq we should be looking at the most ugly haters; the hardest core Islamists; the most virulent anti-Americans in Iraq, whoever they are. Because those are the guys who can, eventually, cut some sort of deal with us without losing their legitimacy, basically because everyone knows how much they hate us.
Comment by Jackmormon —
December 5, 2006 @ 2:36 am
I suspect that the thinking is that al-Hakim is like al-Sadr, but not al-Sadr. Al-Sadr has the right profile for an eighty-percent-solution savior, but he’s too high-profile, independant, and, well, convicted in abstentia for the administration to deal with.
Comment by Eric Martin —
December 5, 2006 @ 10:05 am
In other words, Sadr satisfies too many of Leonard’s criteria. Hence the conundrum.
Comment by David —
December 5, 2006 @ 11:49 am
Here I had all my faith that Hakim was going to be the Tony Romo of the Iraq Fantasy League. Anyone wanna make a trade?
With the current crop of official Washington, the answer is Yes.
Comment by Kevin J. Maroney —
December 5, 2006 @ 12:00 pm
Cripes, it’s worse than even I thought: our government is like the callers to a sports talk radio station.
It’s worse even than that. The callers to sports talk radio have usually devoted much of their lives to caring about the matters they’re talking about and at least understand the rules of the sports. And there’s often an actually informed person in the discussion.
Comment by jlw —
December 5, 2006 @ 12:59 pm
Well, in a very real, non-metaphorical sense, he’d be better than Rex Grossman. Is it too late in the season for my Bears to sign him?
Comment by Dave L —
December 5, 2006 @ 3:09 pm
Wait, wait… I’ve got a name for you!
Nguyen Khanh.
Gutty little fighter, and a real nationalist, too.
And if that doesn’t work out, I’ve got another Nguyen in reserve:
Nguyen Xuan Oanh.
Tough as nails, has the respect of the Army.
Don’t like him, either?
How about Nguyen Cao Ky? Or, say, Nguyen Van Loc?
And I’ve got more, believe me – that was just the Nguyens!
See, this is why the Vietnam War took so much longer to lose. They had a much deeper bench.