Reruns of wars...

John the Evangel was an oil industry tout.

Imagine if "wars and rumours of wars," had hit the headlines last week, when light sweet crude hit 135 on speculation that it would reach 150 later. This, to my illiterate eye, looks like self-fulfilling prophecy, or a corrupt enterprise, but that's how markets work. Add to the rumor some dick-waving by the man in charge of Israel's school buses:

Traders also zeroed in on remarks by an Israeli Cabinet minister who was quoted as saying his country will attack Iran if it doesn't abandon its nuclear program. Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz added that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "will disappear before Israel does,"[...]

and we got ourselves a party!

This is why I never get tired of deflating expectations of all-out war in west Asia. There's always some illiterate villager transported into the spotlight, ready to spike oil prices with a phrase.

Mr. Mofaz, of course our friend Mahmoud will be gone before Israel is: Ali Larijani got elected Majlis speaker last week, and has promptly set about persuading the world of Iran's pragmatism. (Also, he's persuading Iranians to develop issues-based politics, rather than the politics of personality. Since it took the French 200 years -- from the Marquis de Lafayette to Charles de Gaulle -- to figure that out, Dark Steer wishes luck to the Iranian Majlis.) Rather than call the IAEA a bunch of little devils, he points to the time and money they're wasting, sounding for all the world like Bob Novak talking about the prosecution of Scooter Libby, viz.:

[...] Fitzgerald's long, expensive investigation found no violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, if only because Plame was not covered by it.

In fact, Larijani and the American Right should come to terms at what I'm now calling the Plame Nexus: external investigations, national sovereignty, and presidential prerogative. Both see obfuscation and stonewalling as legitimate secrecy in the interest of national security; both resent special investigators, call their enemies evil, and rig elections. Both quash challenges to their rule by the backdoor; one by removing from election rolls all progressive politicians, the other by firing insufficiently Bushite Assistant Attorneys General.

The Iranian regime, in effect, is a wet-dream version of the Bush adminstration. Imagine the power to shut down newspapers, imprison journalists, exile agitators! The Patriot Act is for fags...

The main difference between Bushites and the incipient Larijani administration is that only one group sees its influence over Middle Eastern geopolitics as stabilizing. Bushites are content to let havoc reign, begging Israel to pop off at Lebanon again, or Syria, or Iran; ignoring the fatal conflict between our arming Sunnis in Iraq and officially backing a Shiite central government; making sure the shadow-conflict with Iran is still audible amid the continuous din of news in the acutal world. Larijani, on the other hand, remains on some Walter-Sobchak-calmer-than-you-are shit.

So wait for the Speaker to make some comments on oil prices soon. Maybe the administration will finally get the idea, and the next time someone's Minister of Motorboats talks shit, someone else will be there to flip his wig...
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Congratulations, Sahib!!

To recap, sahibs:

Sunni radicals are having a government-sponsored bitchout in advance of a government-sponsored interfaith summit in Mecca.

Mohammed el-Baradei is going to Syria. Syria says that's fine.

Sunnis in Lebanon are being truculent about the compromise government.

The President has said some wack shit about Iran. So has John McCain.

Hezbollah released the remains of (at least) two Israeli soldiers in exchange for one live hezbollahi.

Everywhere around the Middle East are the wriggling vestigial tails of Bush's Iranienkampf. As the second term winds down, the strategy of mollycoddling Sunni governments to check Iran has devolved into watching each state in the region pursue its interests catch-as-catch-can.

Thus is the administration reduced to feebly attempting to sabotage peace when it comes by another's terms; to nudging action through language; to wheedling for more oil; to averting its eyes from repression.

Ehud Olmert, unlike the President, is capable of admitting defeat and moving on. Having seen that Hezbollah can simultaneously frighten his people, snarl his military, win the hearts of hitherto-moderate Lebanese, and win a PR victory, he's decided to sue for peace. Bush's response (or someone's response, because I'm sure he doesn't give a real shit) is to lash out at Iran. Yawn.

Negotiators and technocrats the world over roll their eyes. Syria suggests to Israel, "Hey, while we're at it, let's settle with Lebanon over the Chebaa Farms." Israel: "Aight." Iranian conservatives, for their part, back Ali Larijani for speaker of Parliament, snubbing our old friend Mahmoud. And the Lebanese back off the brink of civil war, form a government, and no one even bats an eye when Bush's boy Fuad Saniora remains prime minister.

What we're learning, slowly, is the absolute limit of American influence in the Middle East. Israel humored our request for an airstrike in Syria, found nothing, and has had it with our slam-dunk intelligence services; they're negotiating for peace. Egypt is working with Hamas to stabilize Gaza. Hezbollah is going to have a plurality of power in Lebanon; Moqtada al-Sadr is going to have a share in Iraq. The things everyone from the Weekly Standard to the Atlantic thought were portents of the end of time will all happen.

A hush will fall on west Asia, and we will pay 5 dollars a gallon for gas. Certain men will make noise about the catastrophe to befall the US in the region if we let X or Y happen. Other men will bruit about the benefits of sticking it out, as if the House of Saud were populated by leprechauns with a cache of black gold. In short, we will be irritated.

But everyone else will be cool.

So in the next few years, when some retro-Bushite lets out a war whoop, or some imam talks about the Devilish Occupier, and you want to scream for the region to calm down, think instead of the Dude and Walter, and imagine the placid faces of Khalid Meshaal, Ali Larijani and Bashar al-Assad all saying in unison:

"Calmer than you are."
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Save your pencil lead...

The Jerusalem Post turned a quick profit Tuesday on that weird Bush appeasement speech. And the White House denial meant an even quicker follow-up story!

According to JPost, the Israeli Army heard it from a senior Israeli, who heard it from a senior American official that Bush and Cheney would "really really like to bomb Iran, but Gates and Rice won't let them." Why now? Hezbollah!

Bush, the official reportedly said, considered Hizbullah's show of strength to constitute evidence of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's growing influence. In Bush's view, the official said, "the disease must be treated - not its symptoms."

Dude, Hezbollah is the last thing on Bush's brain right now. The consensus over here is that sooner or later, for good or ill, the Saniora government will fall, hezbollahis in parliament will get a better slice of the pie, and the world will not end. The Beirut street fighting doesn't even merit page 3.

What's really up is the bimensual banging of war gongs, or, as my neighbor Manav once said, "Dude, this is just dick-waving." Mahmoud calls Israel a stinking corpse; Bush calls Mahmoud Hitler. The Israeli Army, knowing that the President has no intention of living up to his rhetoric (maybe they read this Fred Kaplan piece in Slate?), calls Bush's bluff.

Nuhs is mad itchy with the trigger finger! Calm down...Like Slavin says, for various reasons, no one will start a shooting war. The whole point of seeking and exercising influence in politics is to conserve resources. When pragmatic Iranian conservatives say "We will not stretch our legs beyond our carpet," believe it! Much to the Jerusalem Post's chagrin, both the US and Iran realize that expending resources to gain influence is a losing proposition. (Cf. Budapest 1956, Prague 1968, etc.) And, as usual, dick-waving writers have no say in the matter...

"If Yeats had saved his pencil lead
would 'certain men' have stayed in bed?

For history's a twisted root
with art its small, translucent fruit

and never the other way round.
The roots by which we were once bound

are severed here, in any case,
and we are all now dispossessed…"

-- Paul Muldoon, "7 Midagh Street"

Take er easy, dude

McCain's anger: a strategy! -- Kaus. Clearly, we Americans are reaping the whirlwind. Back in your youtube clip, when McCain was a reasonable man, willing to acknowledge facts on the ground, he also had no shot at landing the nomination. We like him more the crazier he gets! His Obama=Hamas slur got him an invite to speak to the NRA, which hates him, so...
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McCain forgetting how the hostage release went is conventional wisdom. It's a little bit crazy to talk about it so fast, though! Old Man McCain seems to be taking shit for shinola here, suggesting that the 1979 hostages were released for weapons, then backtracking to explain that Carter and Christopher (not Carter and Brzeszinski?) got them released. The hostages relased for arms came later and were captured by Hezbollah or affiliated groups in Lebanon. Phew! Isn't the conventional wisdom so much easier! Also, dude, I edited that Iran-Contra wiki page a little bit. It's not a good resource. It goes like this: "These guys did bad things. Then they lied about it. Fawn Hall. Imperialism. Oliver North is a fag." for like 7 meg of text...no timeline, no clear causation.

Bringing me to a point of departure for a future screed: can we at this late date foreswear Wikipedia?
***
McCain at the NRA:

This is a unique style to say the least. JB starts with a patronly/patronizing soft-pedal voice, like the old folks in the Medicare part D ads, mentions Israel, and suddenly hits the chorus, like in "Say a Little Prayer for You!", screams, stumbles, blood-pressure recedes, and he's back in premature catatonia. Clearly, the strain of being an enlightened elder and a cranky elder at once is exhausting. We here at Dark Steer wish the Senator the best of health for the coming election. Which is six months away.
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Two things this week give us hope here at Dark Steer: one is the third Democrat victory in a special election to the House this year. Two is the passage of a passel of war bills. The former augurs ill for the opposition party this November; the MS-1 district was like a R+10 PVI. There are 25 seats up in November with a R+10 PVI or lower; those are landslide numbers. The war bills' passing, however, is mindbending. Republicans in Congress have finally grown weary of stonewalling every single Congressional attempt to attach some reins to the president's wehrmacht; the plan now is clearly of the "give 'em enough rope" variety. And if a case could be made for indefinitely-funded, indefinitely-long war in Iraq, well, maybe then the Democrats' "abort the troops" policy would become an issue in November. Except one: the GOP can't even get all its members in line for something as simple as abstention; two: solid majorities have wanted the war over within a year since summer 2005.
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Recent visits to Israel by Rice and Bush bode well for my Peace-By-June prediction, right? Even the President's bizarre ranting about "appeasers" backs me up! How, you ask? The only reason to say something that far off the irrelevance chart, something that the speaker has no intention of backing up, is to flak for the opposite position ! Short: Bush's tough talk is cover for the back-channel negotiations with Syria. Paradoxathon! The harder he talks, the closer the negotiations are to peace! It's like Kissinger-Nixon's mad-bomber strategy: in theory, when a nuclear power bout to act the fool, everyone else calms down.

One more time: by the end of the first week of June, Israel will return large portions of the Golan Heights to Syria in exchange for a non-aggression pact. Only the President can screw this up now, by you know, asking for some extra goodies, like disarming Hezbollah, or paving the Anbar desert...

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...the Kaiser'd stolen our word for twenty...

Walnuts' spiral into a very public, very ugly dementia continues. Again, if the media quits treating him with the kid gloves, this man's dead in the water. His whole campaign could be one long and painful Stockdale impersonation. We could have five, six months of "Who am I? What am I doing here?" The latest screw-up?

“Yes, there have been appeasers in the past, and the president is exactly right, and one of them is Neville Chamberlain,'’ Mr. McCain told reporters on his campaign bus after a speech in Columbus, Ohio. “I believe that it’s not an accident that our hostages came home from Iran when President Reagan was president of the United States. He didn’t sit down in a negotiation with the religious extremists in Iran, he made it very clear that those hostages were coming home.'’

Now, leaving aside the idiocy of comparing a desire to talk to our enemies to appeasing them, if only for just a second, Walnuts seems to be forgetting a little thing we here at Dark Steer like to call... um... what do we call that again? Tip of my tongue. Something to do with... Contras? Maybe something about "I Ran"? Oh well, must not have been too important.

Dead in the water, dude. The Republicans have to know this, too. Once the Democratic Clusterfuck slouches toward Denver to finally die, the spotlight falls squarely on the two nominees. That's when Walnuts starts to look plain old 'Nuts. I'm seeing two main problems:

1. A shaky grasp on reality, as evidenced by Sunni-Shia confusion, Reagan "negotiations", and the innumerable other slips of mind waiting in the wings.
2. An inability to civilly deal with anyone challenging the aforementioned shakily grasped reality.

He's going to look like an old man. A very old man. I've got the feeling the party put its weight behind him and gave him the nod because they know what's coming in the fall. They've lost three special elections in a row in solid Bush counties. The camel's falling to its knees and more knives are drawn. So you give it to the old curmudgeon, see what he can do. If he wins it, he owes you big for not giving his campaign the Schiavo plugpull. If he loses, ah hell, you were gonna buckle down anyway.

Which makes his veep choice very interesting. Romney's biding his time and waiting for '12, when he can emerge as true conservative come forth to battle after Walnuts' valiant but failed showing. (nb, this would've been Hillary's strategy if she really thought BarryHussein would lose. Instead, she's on the Huckabee "hope for a miracle" plan. natch.)

Continuance later, now for some playoff highlights...

-K

"Now my story begins in Nineteen-dickety-two. We had to say "dickety" because the Kaiser had stolen the wold "twenty". I chased that rascal to get it back, but gave up after dickety-six miles."
-Grandpa Simpson