| Bush said in a speech on Thursday that he hopes Iraq will be like Israel, a democracy that faces terrorist violence but manages to retain its democratic character: 'In Israel, Bush said, "terrorists have taken innocent human life for years in suicide attacks. The difference is that Israel is a functioning democracy and it's not prevented from carrying out its responsibilities. And that's a good indicator of success that we're looking for in Iraq. ' These words may be the stupidest ones ever uttered by a US president. Given their likely impact on the US war effort in the Middle East, they are downright criminal. |
There is a lot more of Don Juan's bellow -- computers and word processing have many crimes against literature to answer for, among them the abolition of brevity -- and we'll get to part of it or all, but the casus bellow is already sufficiently indicated. Everybody instructed knows the general background, so let us begin with a personal word about the bellower.
The jihád careerists and zealots for Zion have been leaving JC alone recently, presumably satisfied to have kept uncongenial Middle Western expertise from contaminating the state of Connecticut and the seminary of Y*l*, but loud noise like this will probably remind them he exists. Not impossibly, it was partially intended to do so: JC is evidently among those who require to be reviled and persecuted for righteousness' sake in order to feel confident that it is indeed Righteousness that makes them do it, not merely a lust for being on TV or some such low motive. JC is not just what US journalists call a "liberal," he's also what they call an "idealist." (Could it be those doom-laden initials?) Well, de gustibus non disputandum and "It's still a free country, ain't it?"
That's enough gossip, let us move on to analyze the Ann Arbor analysis. By way of swift transition we may notice that nobody sane would accuse Prof. Cole of impartial analysis when he makes Palestine the political qibla and commands all other area studies to circumambulate with reverence. That plan is liberal and idealistic insofar as it is not crudely Juan Cole's own friends and narrow sectarian interests that are centralized, but these merits do not constitute impartiality. The jihád carreerists (&c. &c.) account it no merit at all to be vicariously indignant, and plainly they do not even begin to understand any sort of liberalism or idealism that is not out for itself alone the same way neorightism is. Their accounts of why somebody like Prof. Cole should want to smash Western Civilization and go over to evil barbarians like THEM are a constant source of mirth to those who are more aware. It's like listening to the Hottentot theory of physics and chemistry to hear the neocomrades go on, the very starting-point is invisible to them.
Nevertheless, vicarious indignation, though meritorious, is not impartial. The moral dangers of this fact may be passed over for the moment in order to stress the policy dangers, beginning with the danger of getting out of synchronization with those who are selfishly indignant, or vicariously indignant in a different manner from one's own. Specifically, are the inhabitants of the former Iraq, or of Gentile Palestine, or Arabs and Muslims more generally, as upset about George XLIII's verbal stupidity and downright criminality as JC is?
Far be it from me to speak for such persons either, and especially not in the course of scrutinizing vicariousness, yet it seems likely enough that the appointment of the intolerable Tony Blair as Quartet missionary to the heathen might be rather more offensive. It is not, after all, as if the heathen don't know about Mr. Bush's Panglossian notions of the Tel Aviv statelet already. Whereas Mr. Blair is a fresh slap in the face.
If they remember Little Brother's lapse when he referred to his Party's Kiddie Krusade, or so-called GWOT, as a "crusade," and I am quite sure that many of them remember very well, they might reasonably file this latest boo-boo as a second Freudian slip of the same type, an inadvertant dropping of the mask that reveals only what the heathen were quite sure was underneath the mask all along. OF COURSE when Little Brother speaks of "democracy" in the Middle East, he means all the other heathen becoming more like the Israeli heathen; OF COURSE when Little Brother sallies forth against "terrorism" or "extremism," he considers himself divinely commissioned to carry the Cross and try to do down the Crescent as best Big Management can. Amongst THEM, "everybody" "knows" about these things, and they've all known for at least sixty years now. What they all know out there is not entirely accurate, in my judgment, but far more certainly than that, it is not news even in the slightest. If Ann Arbor wants to be suddenly shocked, Ann Arbor may be slightly out of step. Possibly. Perhaps. God knows best.
| The US political elite just doesn't get it. Israel is not popular in the Middle East, and it isn't because Middle Easterners are bigots. It is because Israel is coded as the last European colonial presence in the region, an heir to French Algeria, British Egypt, and Dutch Indonesia-- and because the Israelis pugnaciously continue to try to colonize neighboring bits of territory. (This enmity is not inevitable or eternal; in 2002 the Arab League offered full recognition of Israel in return for its going back to 1967 borders, but the Israeli government turned down the offer.) But for the purposes of this analysis it does not really matter why Israel is unpopular. Let us just stipulate that it is. Why would you associate American Iraq with such an unpopular project, if you were trying to do public diplomacy in the region? Bush had just announced a new push to get the American message out to the Muslim world, the day before. |
Assuming the final question is real rather than rhetorical, the answer is probably "Because you're a Yalie klutz."
But seriously, has Dr. Cole so completely specialized in study of Area L that he knows nothing at all about Area A? "The US policy elite" have their faults, heaven knows, but it seems unlikely they simply haven't noticed how the Arab heathen feel about the Zionist heathen. "Seems unlikely," my foot! It's just plain wrong, and rather a dumb thing to say. Probably what really works JC up into paroxysms is that the CFR/ISG gentry know about the dislike well enough, but nevertheless don't take it very seriously and of course don't stop liking the Tel Aviv heathendom better themselves. Yet despite that, they have consistently behaved in such a way as to make "even-handed" an insult in the mouth of the chauvinists and faith-crazies, almost as vicious an epithet as "State Department Arabist." When Don Juan writes about the US on an amateur basis, he ought to show people like that a little preliminary respect before disagreeing with them civilly. Instead, he not only makes them out total ignoramuses, he lumps them together with the militant extremism of the Kennebunkport-Crawford Dynasty, as if everybody at the Council on Foreign Relations and Brookings and Foggy Bottom had broken out in cheers upon learning what Little Brother has to say about Zion The Model.
Then comes "Let's take the analogy seriously for a moment," and although there is no doubt that JC thinks he is being serious with complete subjective sincerity, othere have excellent grounds for disagreeing. The objective unseriousness culminates like this,
| So who would play the Palestinians in Bush's analogy? Obviously, it would be the Sunni Arabs, who apparently are meant to be cordoned off from the rest of Iraqis and put behind massive walls and barbed wire, and deprived of political power. That is not a desirable outcome and is not politically or militarily tenable in the long run. |
If George XLIII (plus CFR and Brookings and the State Department, the whole US political elite!) ever consciously entertained those thoughts, you may address me as Marie of Roumania. Back in the real world, Crawford's occupation policy threatens to converge with Ann Arbor's altogether, both taking the line that gigantic dollops of affirmative action for the Sunni Arab TwentyPercenters are bound to do the pacification trick somehow. I don't believe there exists any such "somehow," but the important thing is that both Juan Cole and the Petraeus-Cocker braniac twosome suppose that it does exist, and that they'll locate it any day now.
The only thing that makes the Colean caricature even faintly plausible is that the ever-immortal Surge of '07™ has to some extent run off the rails. Pretty clearly the stumblebums originally intended to clobber Muqtadá and his juvenile delinquents in tandem with their clobberin' of the insurgents / guerrilas / terrorists / resistance. This has not happened, and the result is indeed picturesque: the occupationmongers find themselves fightin' against, and even buildin' walls at al-’A‘zamiyya around, basically the same folks that they propose to pander to with affirmative action schemes. Nothing very good is likely to come of this schizophrenia, but the badness to come will not at all resemble the various badnesses that afflict Gentile Palestine. Even the intramural disunity between the Hamás and the Fatáh only very distantly resembles how the Arab Sunni theocommunity in the former Iraq has been fragmented in a hundred directions.
Such comparison as the Yalie bozo actually intended might even be considered mildly encouraging: to save the face of militant Republicanism and vindicate the dogma of Preëmptive Retaliation , it is (apparently) not necessary to put down the insurrection / resistance / terrorism / guerilla in Peaceful Freedumbia altogether, it will suffice if it can be reduced to a containable level -- by narrow analogy, to a Gentile Palestinian sort of level. At any rate, that would be encouraging news, if only there were some sign that the Big Management Party has a clue how to effect the proposed reduction.
It is nearly meaningless that Little Brother refers to the Middle East heathen that he likes best as "democracies." For many decades that label has meant little more in such contexts than sugar and spice and everything politically nice for any reason at all, often quite without reference to the structure of whatever régime or neorégime the label is pasted onto.[1] As an academic exercise, there is no harm in demonstrating that Jewish Statism is not quite altogether democratic, but how much practical pain relief does that demonstration afford anybody?
Perhaps a little bit: a few newcomers to the Palestine Puzzle may be attracted to even-handedness, and maybe even State Department Arabism!, by having it distinctly brought to their attention that to give the Tel Aviv statelet every green light it asks for because it is "democratic" and nobody else in the Levant is "democratic" amounts to being taken in by a confidence racket. Yet this is a very limited and marginal benefit, and for that matter, that one magic label is not absolutely necessary for the con to function. It would work just as well to inform the mark with equal or greater plausibility that the Jewish State alone stands for "Western Civilisation" amidst a sea of oriental barbarism -- without supplying any very clear specification of what its westernity consists in, exactly. Or its civilisation either.
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[1] Notice that a Bloomian strong reader could take George XLIII to be proclaiming, in the passage cited against him, that "democracy" signifies a State that cannot be prevented from carrying out its responsibilities.
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