An Iraq Parable: Bags of Euros, German SUVs & Italian Designer Sunglasses
The straw currently being grasped at by George Bush and the stay-the-course crowd is that U.S. forces have made big inroads among the Sunni tribes in Anbar Province, who instead of fighting among themselves are being bribed . . . er, financed to fight Al Qaeda. And this success can be replicated elsewhere in Iraq, which will lead to peace, an American troop drawdown and Hollywood ending.
That’s all well and good, and I’ll take good news wherever it rears its head, but let’s put this development in context.
Close your eyes for a moment. (No peeking!)
Consider that Iraq is the U.S. and the U.S. has been awash in sectarian violence, say, between Protestants and Catholics. This second American civil war has taken many thousands of lives as the result of an invasion by the European Union that toppled a despotic non-sectarian president who was threatening the world’s paté de foie gras supply, but was followed by a horribly botched occupation.
The EU installed a handpicked Protestant in the despot’s place, but he is widely seen as almost as big a loser
Protestants and Catholics used to get alone pretty well. Their kids would go to school together, root for the same “American Idol” contestants and play on the same Little League teams. They even intermarried. But those EU occupiers played them for fools and before long barely buried historic enmities flared into the open and Protestants and Catholics were at each others’ throats. And the throats of their occupiers, as well.
The EU news media called this a civil war, but this was vigorously denied by the EU bigs even after big Protestant churches and Catholic cathedrals started being blown up with bombmaking materials stolen right out from under the EU occupiers’ noses. Then that holiest of holy shrines — Cinderella’s Castle at Disney World — went kaboom, blown to smithereens by martyrs who wished to join the 72 Virginians in heaven.
The folks back on the Continent, especially those damned French, have run out of patience as one strategy and deadline after another come and go and are demanding that their troops be brought home.
In a desperate effort to try to begin to put an end to the civil war, the EU forces have been bribing the good burghers of the Pacific Northwest, who are all Catholics, to stop fighting among themselves, and make nice. And most important of all, to oust the Latin Mass hardliners who hate just about everybody but insist on stirring things up among their less parochial brethren who have been doing stuff like using birth control and eating fish on Fridays.
Even though the Catholics in the Pacific Northwest hate the EU occupiers, too, the pacification plan has been working pretty well as long as bags full of Euros, as well as German SUVs and Italian designer sunglasses, have kept coming.
The big question now is whether the Pacific Northwest model can be “exported” to the rest of the U.S.
This is going to be a bitch and a half because once you’re outside of the Pacific Northwest, the rest of the Lower 48 is majority Protestant but has a sizeable Catholic minority, and both are in way too foul a mood to be bribed with EU lucre.
(If you must know, Alaska and Hawaii are entirely Jewish. They’ve been humming along quite nicely and doing a bang-up job of minding their own business since the invasion.)
The big Protestant cities outside the Pacific Northwest will be especially difficult to pacify. This is because efforts by the EU troops to get the Protestants and Catholics to stop blowing each other up have been undermined by the Protestant government and its sectarian police forces, which keep locking horns with the Catholic posses. The only thing that has worked is building walls, which has played havoc with the Little League season and “American Idol,†which has been forced to go to reruns.
Okay, you can open your eyes. All the way now.
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7 Responses to “An Iraq Parable: Bags of Euros, German SUVs & Italian Designer Sunglasses”
hmmmm ++grumbles++ OK, it’s good, but I still like my Japan example, and I made it up as I went along too!
Meanwhile, neighbor Mexico is siding with the Catholics and smuggling arms into the country, along with sympathetic fighters through the porous borders almost impossible to control in part because much of it is desert wasteland. The EU keeps warning about “consequences” to this action and Mexico responds with a generalized “I double dog dare you” as it knows that the EU is perfectly aware that if it can barely control Washington DC, there’s no way they can handle Mexico DF as well.
Shaun – it is good to see you are still in form. There is no good news about Iraq that you cannot twist into bad news.
AustinRoth:
A round peg that has been jimmied into a round hole that is Anbar, an all-Sunni region that represents but a small fraction of the Iraqi population, is not on its face going to fit into the square hole that is the rest of Iraq.
As I said, I’ll take good news where I can. Perhaps Bushco can defy the laws of nature and get that round peg into the square hole. He has a very short time to do so.
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I often find people turn to inapt analogies and comparisons when they lack an actual defendable argument.
Anbar, no matter what you’d like to believe, is important. It’s important because Anbar is where the civil war started. It was SVIED’s and various other insurgents that sortied from places like Falluja and bombed the UN, the Samarrah Mosque (last year) and conducted a genocidal campaign against any shiite they ran across and many Sunni’s for that matter (SVIED’s tend not to discriminate). The people who did this were all part of an umbrella group lead by AQI. These attacks were what lead several shiite groups to say, “f&*k this” and conduct an ethnic cleansing campaign of their own in Baghdad. Now, that Anbar umbrella group (at the time called the Mujahideen Shura Council, or just “Shura”) is dismantled and the local tribal leaders have reasserted their historic authority. Those tribal leaders were able to do this, because we protected them from Shura – who murdered those that did not actively help them. IOW, we are not “bribing”
tribal leaders per se (although culturally, bribery is acceptable and expected in Iraq), but the real reason is that we kept AQI from murdering them and their family. To understand the Anbar tribes and tribal systems in general, I suggest you read this. As a result of this effort, AQI is on the run and the Anbar “locals” are on our side. The remaining elements fled to – surprise, Diyala, where they now call themselves the “Islamic State of Iraq” and are in the process of getting their ass handed to them there through a similar strategy as what was practiced in Anbar.
Perhaps these successes are meaningless and too much water has passed under the bridge, but to say the removal the cancer in Anbar that begat the civil war we’re now experiencing was a meaningless enterprise is to really expose one’s fundamental ignorance of the complexities of this conflict.
Entropy:
You are quite right that Anbar is where the civil war started lo those many years ago, and it’s reassuring that striff there does indeed seems to have been tamped down for the moment. But the fact is that the civil war has spread far beyond Anbar and rages on.
Once again, I’ll take good news where I can find it, and the work that the Marine (and to an extent the Army) has done in Anbar is magnificent, but the round peg and square hole analogy doesn’t change.
Iraq a disaster, Bush bad; Iraq a disaster, Bush bad; Iraq a disaster, Bush bad — Shaun, you’d do better to spend time training a real parrot.
I like the picture you chose. Is that how you view the US military or were you trying to be funny? Too many view the military as a joke or something more sinister and deserving of hatred (and of being robbed to pay for social programs).
Lynx:
A good partial description of Iran, but also a true possibility someday in our Southwest, with some on the far left (not limited to Reconquista-Aztlan activists) cheering it.
I’d like to progress more with this analogy and say that readers should consider partition. Oh, we know about the hatred expressed for the South — but some talked of seceding (only joking, but probably feeling good about the idea nevertheless) each time Bush was elected.
Be pragmatic, Bluesies, and just join Canada. That means New England (whose liberal politics are alien to this country; they are practically anti-matter to the USA), some Rust Belt Great Lakes states, and the Pacific Northwest (the core of “Cascadia”).
Of course, you’ll have to make some big territorial concessions (the states themselves may be partitioned if they are seceding), you’ll have to assume most of the current federal debt, and may owe the USA more, but if you do all you must, and you behave yourselves — well, it would be an interesting change to the map.
(Actually, this continent could easily and sensibly exist as a number of separate nations, 4-6 or so.)