Oh, What a Little Moonlight Will Do!

Full moons are traditionally associated with temporal insomnia, insanity (hence the terms lunacy and lunatic) and various magical phenomena such as lycanthropy – at least that’s what you’ll find in Wikipedia.  And they mention the December 23, 2000 issue of the British Medical Journal – two studies on dog bite admission to hospitals in England and Australia. The study of the Bradford Royal Infirmary found that dog bites were twice as common during a full moon, but the study conducted by the public hospitals in Australia found that they were less likely.  Yes, correlation and causation are two different things, even if that never mattered to Hollywood in all the werewolf films from the twenties to now.  Still the tables show the full moon is on August 28 – and maybe something is up with that.  You never know.  People are getting testy.

 

When the Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman and the junior senator from New York call for the prime minister of Iraq to step aside, and the former Republican National Committee chairman and current governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour, is working for the man who wants to replace him – see Allawi Hires Republican Lobbyist Powerhouse (Governor Haley Barbour is already hard at work; on August 17, the firm purchased the domain name Allawi-For-Iraq.com) – something is up.  The Iraqi parliament was duly elected, and they elected Nuri al-Maliki as Iraqi Prime Minister.  Our president just told us all that Maliki is “a good guy” – but some seem upset that Maliki runs a government that cannot govern much of anything, and we have to fight and die for it.  But we’re sticking with the guy – for now.  It’s all talk at the moment – no big deal.

 

It must be the almost full moon, but Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, on Sunday, August 26, let it get to him –

 

There are American officials who consider Iraq as if it were one of their villages, for example Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin. They should come to their senses.

 

He seems touchy, and that twenty-eight day physical cycle that mirrors the lunar cycle doesn’t even apply to him.

 

Gregory Djerejian has a few things to say about that –

 

Oh my. When Haley Barbour and Hillary Clinton are singing from the same song-sheet, one cannot help but grow ever more concerned the Washington-Baghdad honeymoon is coming to an inglorious end (by Baghdad, I mean the Iraqi leaders cloistered in the Green Zone, of course). Why, soon we might be treating Maliki’s “freely elected” Government like others in the region that have come to power of late via the ballot-box, but were deemed undesirable and shunned (though not just yet, as the President recently declared Maliki a “good guy”, a moniker not quite as affectionate as ‘Turd Blossom’, but still…)

 

And who is this Gregory Djerejian?  At the site here you find Djerejian is “currently based in New York City as Senior Vice-President and General Counsel of a financial services company that specializes in commercial real estate projects, hotel and resort developments, alternative investments, and company acquisitions.”  And he knows a few things –

 

He is fluent in French and conversant in Spanish and Russian. Djerejian was admitted as a term member to the Council on Foreign Relations and is a member of the New York State Bar. He serves as a director of a global macro hedge fund based in New York as well as a non-profit credit company disbursing development loans to SMEs in the Caucasus. He attended secondary school at Phillips Academy and subsequently received a BSFS from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in 1994 where he majored in European History and Diplomacy. He later received a J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center in 1999, attending law school at night while working in various foreign policy positions during the day.

 

Yeah, he knows this foreign policy stuff inside out, and when the super-Shi’a Maliki says stuff like this (that we should wipe out the damned Sunnis and not pick on his side), Djerejian see problems.

 

Maliki – “Concerning American raids on Shula and Sadr City, there were big mistakes committed in these operations. The terrorist himself should be targeted not his family.”

 

Djerejian –

 

The Shi’a of Iraq increasingly view us, no longer as liberators, but as occupiers. Yes, there was brief euphoria among many Shi’a after Saddam was toppled, given the parade of horribles the savage dictator had visited on them for decades. This good will mostly evaporated, however, amidst the fiasco of the Rumsfeldian “stuff happens” chapter, as the anarchic chaos unleashed left millions of Iraqis fearing desperately for their security (”freedom is messy”!).

 

Now, fast forward a couple more years, as we try to hold Shi’a ‘crude majoritarianism’ at bay, and increasingly cozy up with Sunni tribal elements. We can guess how this is going to end, can’t we? Matters are almost certain to get much nastier between U.S. forces and the majority Shi’a of Iraq. And that, putting it gently, can’t be good news for the U.S. I mean, just ask the IDF how it felt patrolling Gaza back in the day? They were hated, and the occupied wished for one thing and one thing only: for the occupier to leave. The same will increasingly apply to U.S. GI’s in places like Sadr City, as it has already to the British in Basra.

 

Could we end up like the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza?  Think of Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671) – where the overly muscled big brute, blind and shorn of what gave him his strength, is described as “eyeless in Gaza.”  Okay – don’t think of that.  No one reads Milton.  But the image fits – the mighty warrior stumbling around, blind and powerless.

 

Djerejian suggests we’re there –

 

The Iraq project, alas, looks increasingly unsalvageable, whatever short-term, localized security improvements arguably achieved by the much ballyhooed “surge.” We’ve unleashed historical forces beyond our control, and of which we know little, ultimately. The national security team at the helm is mediocre, at best… We’ve been unable to adopt a serious regional approach a la Baker-Hamilton, and within Iraq, we are floundering trying to balance myriad Iraqi factions on the political side, who have little appetite to drop their maximalist demands at this (relatively early, at least vis-a-vis Iraq time) juncture. In my view, therefore, it is time to draw-down our involvement in this terribly costly adventure, flawed from its very conception by the false WMD pretenses, executed in criminally negligent fashion and with course corrections coming far too late, with some of them regardless of dubious merit (for instance, arming all-Sunni militias).

 

So the idea is that it really is time to start coming home, “not in a wild panic, but with purposeful deliberativeness” –

 

After all, we have other tools in our quiver, apart from bleeding American lives in seeming perpetuity in Iraq, to prevent a full-scale genocide there, or the emergence of a significant al-Qaeda sanctuary, or the regionalization of the conflict. Indeed, cogent arguments can be made that having troops “over the horizon” or located near the borders might act as better prophylactic to prevent the conflict spreading to neighboring countries, while still affording requisite forces in the neighborhood to pressure al-Qaeda as necessary (indeed, freeing up some forces for Afghanistan). As for preventing a genocide, we’ve done rather shabbily protecting innocent Iraqi life to date, and it is very likely that population transfers born of ‘ethnic cleansing’ fears will continue to take place whether we stay or leave. For instance, the rate of internally displaced hasn’t slowed since the surge began, indeed reports indicate the contrary. These movements are occurring because Iraqis feel compelled to flee towards areas controlled by sectarian kin. They know, sooner or later, that we will leave, and so are planning for that day. It is high time we start doing the same.

 

We will not do that, and even a visiting congresswoman saw that on her trip to Iraq –

 

But the military presentations left her stunned. Schakowsky said she jotted down Petraeus’ words in a small white notebook she had brought along to record her impressions. Her neat, looping handwriting filled page after page, and she flipped through to find the Petraeus section. “‘We will be in Iraq in some way for nine to 10 years,’” Schakowsky read carefully. She had added her own translation: “Keep the train running for a few months, and then stretch it out. Just enough progress to justify more time.”

 

“I felt that was a stretch and really part of a PR strategy – just like the PR strategy that initially led up to the war in the first place,” Schakowsky said. Petraeus, she said, “acknowledged that if the policymakers decide that we need to withdraw, that, you know, that’s what he would have to do. But he felt that in order to win, we’d have to be there nine or ten years.”

 

See Matthew Yglesias –

It really is striking how un-optimistic the more optimistic views of Iraq are when you get down to it. Michael O’Hanlon thinks our strategy “probably can’t succeed” unless the political situation in Iraq magically alters. General Petraeus thinks he’s making so much progress that the war will need to continue twice as long again as it’s already gone on. More to the point, once you’re looking at that kind of time frame, all forecasts are nonsensical. We could leave tomorrow and ten years might be plenty of time for Iraq to descend deeper into civil war, for the civil war to end, and then for stability to emerge. There’s just no telling. Petraeus is saying that there’s no light at the end of the tunnel.

 

And he adds an analogy –

 

I want to just reiterate how crazy the idea that we’re ten years from victory in Iraq by briefly recollecting America’s attempted intervention in Lebanon’s 1980s-vintage civil war. We went in, you’ll recall, in 1982, about six years into the fighting, and really expanded our mandate in 1983. This led to the bombing of the Marine barracks later in ‘83, and US forces were withdrawn in early 1984.

 

Some people think the Reagan administration made the right call by withdrawing; others think it did the wrong thing. Nobody, however, regard the intervention as a great success. Nevertheless, the civil war ended just five years later with the 1989 Taif Agreement. To say that our current policy is working and needs just ten more years to stabilize Iraq is lunacy – just leaving stands a perfectly good chance of working just as quickly at radically lower cost.

 

Yes, I know that the total duration of the Lebanese Civil War was longer than that. The point is to put the ten years time horizon into some perspective. Even an effort to stabilize a country that everyone agrees was a failure, like America’s 1983 peacekeeping efforts in Lebanon, can come fewer than ten years away from the dawn of stability. By a similar token, the American Civil War ended fewer than ten years after James Buchanan’s blunders. Ten years isn’t just longer than America has political will to sustain, it’s genuinely too long. Policies that work accomplish their goals faster than that, something that’s supposed to unfold at the speed Petraeus is talking about isn’t working at all.

 

On the other hand, late on Sunday, August 26, Reuters reported this – Iraq’s Leaders Agree On Key U.S. Benchmarks – “Iraq’s top Shi’ite, Sunni Arab and Kurdish leaders announced on Sunday they had reached consensus on some key laws that Washington views as vital to fostering national reconciliation.”  It must be the full moon.  Skepticism is universal.  It smells of PR window-dressing.

 

At the same time the Associated Press reported this – Troops Cheer Call For Iraq Withdrawal  (”Governor’s Call For U.S. Withdrawal From Iraq Greeted With Standing Ovation At National Guard Conference”).  Ah, but you see it was Puerto Rico’s governor, so maybe it doesn’t count.  Puerto Rico is a self-governing unincorporated territory of the United States with Commonwealth status – all people born in Puerto Rico are statutory US citizens, but they’re not like Rush Limbaugh Americans or anything.  Still the guardsman were from the “real” America, and they stood and cheered.  It must be the full moon on the way.

 

How else would you explain what UPI writers John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt write here?  They’ve got this Hemingway thing going –

 

The civil war that is the most fitting historical reference point to Iraq today is the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). That war revolved around two main sides: one pro-democracy, the other pro-fascist. Neither side was particularly cohesive or well-organized. Both consisted of fractious coalitions of diverse organizations and agendas, many based on personality. It often looked more like a war of fragmented tribes and clans than modern organizations.

 

As the Spanish Civil War ground on, a culture of death took hold. More than 1 million people died, perhaps half of them innocent non-combatants. Atrocities were committed on all sides, often in the name of God (or opposition to the Church). Civilians, even clerics and schoolteachers, were deliberately targeted. Each side yearned to slaughter the other.

 

Propaganda played a keen role. Some battles were mounted more for their psychological than their military effects. Rousing cultural tropes about dignity, pride, honor, respect and glory, along with revenge and retribution, figured in speeches and pamphlets on all sides.

 

That’s pretty thin, but these two press on –

 

The Spanish Civil War became an arena for great-power competition; only two (America and Japan) remained aloof. Outside governments maneuvered overtly and covertly to reshape the dynamics within each side, including through infiltration and betrayal.

 

States were not the only outsiders to join the fray in Spain. Loose groups of foreign fighters volunteered to assist the pro-democracy side, often with irregular partisan warfare tactics. All told, the Spanish Civil War still ranks as one of the most globalized internal conflicts in world history.

 

Better, but everyone is doing this moon-mad analogy business.  As our president does here –

 

In 1955, long before the United States had entered the war, Graham Greene wrote a novel called, “The Quiet American.” It was set in Saigon, and the main character was a young government agent named Alden Pyle. He was a symbol of American purpose and patriotism – and dangerous naiveté. Another character describes Alden this way: “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.”

 

After America entered the Vietnam War, the Graham Greene argument gathered some steam. As a matter of fact, many argued that if we pulled out there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people.

 

… The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be.”

 

What?  Hilary Bok comments –

 

For Bush to compare opponents of the wars in Vietnam and Iraq to Alden Pyle is like King Leopold of Belgium countering criticism of his genocidal policies in the Congo, which resulted in the deaths of millions, by comparing his critics to Captain Kurtz from Heart of Darkness; or like a pedophile defending himself by comparing his critics to Humbert Humbert. It’s downright surreal.

 

It must be the full moon.

 

John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt do offer caveats –

 

The parallels to Iraq are imprecise. This time the United States has intervened in favor of democracy, while the foreign volunteers have rallied to the dictatorial cause of forming a new caliphate. Furthermore, this historical case does not lead to clear lessons for deciding whether to extend or curtail U.S. involvement in Iraq – the main concern of most Americans.

 

But imprecision is the case with all the historical models that have figured in discussions about Iraq. So long as such analogs are going to keep coming up, the Spanish Civil War is as relevant and instructive as any other.

 

That would be not very relevant and instructive.  Be that as it may, the Vietnam business did give us Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American.” 

What did the Spanish Civil war give us?  These –

 

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (1938)

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (1940)

L’espoir by Andre Malraux

Spain in my Hearth (España en el corazón) by Pablo Neruda

The Wall, the book and a short story by Jean-Paul Sartre

 

Oh yeah, add the 2006 Guillermo del Toro nightmare movie “Pan’s Labyrinth” (El Laberinto del Fauno) – as it is moonlit surreal scary stuff.  Just like all of this.