Iraqi Protocol
I thought I'd follow up on my last post, as there is an aspect of this whole political dispute thing I did not comment on quite as much but deserves some attention. This is a dispute within the Iraqi political factions respecting who will be responsible for opening, managing, hosting, and the like, the upcoming Arab League summit to be held in Baghdad. Should it be the President of the Republic (Jalal Talabani, a Kurd), the Prime Minister (Nouri Al-Maliki, a Shi'i), or the Speaker of the House (Osama Nujaifi, a Sunni) and what are the roles of the others regardless of who is chosen? Should the meeting be hosted ceremonially by one, and then managed by another? Who represents the Iraq delegation beyond its Foreign Affairs people, and will it include a legislative contingent? One can read articles ad infinitum about this, it's all pretty silly. After its temporary relevance in Libya (mainly by offering regional justification for the NATO campaign), the Arab League has settled back into its familiar complete irrelevance in Syria, failing even to make its human rights monitors particularly effective, and this hosting thing is about as far from important in terms of power sharing as one can imagine.
Still, it seems divisive. One reason for that, of course, is that the major identitarian groups are already divided and this is merely just a manifestation of a different set of fights. But there is another aspect as well, which is the rather obsessive Iraqi attention to protocol. Part of the reason it's so important is because it actually matters to the leaders who "hosts" the conference. The President of the Republic is the symbol of the state, surely, the Kurds argue, it must be him, and to fail to do this is to breach some sacred rule of protocol which causes the Protocol Jinns to rise up and smack you with a broomstick, maybe. Or something, given the rather extreme attention devoted to such matters among all groups (it's just the poor Kurds raising it the most in this instance). I spent 45 minutes once mediating a debate between bodyguards of rather senior Iraqi political figures invited to a conference I was helping organize on the rule of law. The issue was which set of bodyguards got to eat first, the dispute being centered on which one of them represented the political figure of higher rank. That some guarded judicial officials, others executive and others legislative made no difference, separation of powers cannot hold so much as an atom's weight in this confounding system of protocol. Each one of these guys has a rank on the totem pole, so figure out what it is, Hamoudi, or there might be shooting.
And this happens well beyond areas where it could be dismissed as misguided political division. Say you want to get a student out of class for a week to attend a moot court competition in DC. The President of the University must sign off. Except you can't go to the president, you don't even know him, so you talk to the professor you are working with. But he cannot go to the president either, remember the Protocol Jinns and what they might do to you. So you go to the professor, and he writes up something for the Dean, and you take it together to the Dean. Then he takes it and writes it up for the President and then you go to the President and get the President to sign off. And then if you need to change a date later on? Rinse, lather, repeat the process all over again. Which is better than if you need to, say, build a moot courtroom on campus. Because then you have one more step, to the Ministry of Higher Education. And do what you will, plead how you will, you do so much as change the length of the curtains, neither you, nor the professor, nor the Dean, will agree to inform the Minister of the change and leave it at that. They aren't allowed, not protocol. The info to the Minister comes from the President, who hears from the Dean, who hears from the professor, who hears from you.
Sounds like a diatribe? Fine, but extend that view across an entire administrative apparatus known as a socialist nation state, and you get a sense of the scale of the task of reforming it.
HAH
Still, it seems divisive. One reason for that, of course, is that the major identitarian groups are already divided and this is merely just a manifestation of a different set of fights. But there is another aspect as well, which is the rather obsessive Iraqi attention to protocol. Part of the reason it's so important is because it actually matters to the leaders who "hosts" the conference. The President of the Republic is the symbol of the state, surely, the Kurds argue, it must be him, and to fail to do this is to breach some sacred rule of protocol which causes the Protocol Jinns to rise up and smack you with a broomstick, maybe. Or something, given the rather extreme attention devoted to such matters among all groups (it's just the poor Kurds raising it the most in this instance). I spent 45 minutes once mediating a debate between bodyguards of rather senior Iraqi political figures invited to a conference I was helping organize on the rule of law. The issue was which set of bodyguards got to eat first, the dispute being centered on which one of them represented the political figure of higher rank. That some guarded judicial officials, others executive and others legislative made no difference, separation of powers cannot hold so much as an atom's weight in this confounding system of protocol. Each one of these guys has a rank on the totem pole, so figure out what it is, Hamoudi, or there might be shooting.
And this happens well beyond areas where it could be dismissed as misguided political division. Say you want to get a student out of class for a week to attend a moot court competition in DC. The President of the University must sign off. Except you can't go to the president, you don't even know him, so you talk to the professor you are working with. But he cannot go to the president either, remember the Protocol Jinns and what they might do to you. So you go to the professor, and he writes up something for the Dean, and you take it together to the Dean. Then he takes it and writes it up for the President and then you go to the President and get the President to sign off. And then if you need to change a date later on? Rinse, lather, repeat the process all over again. Which is better than if you need to, say, build a moot courtroom on campus. Because then you have one more step, to the Ministry of Higher Education. And do what you will, plead how you will, you do so much as change the length of the curtains, neither you, nor the professor, nor the Dean, will agree to inform the Minister of the change and leave it at that. They aren't allowed, not protocol. The info to the Minister comes from the President, who hears from the Dean, who hears from the professor, who hears from you.
Sounds like a diatribe? Fine, but extend that view across an entire administrative apparatus known as a socialist nation state, and you get a sense of the scale of the task of reforming it.
HAH
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