The Unifying Power of Homosexuals

From culturally conservative blacks and white political conservatives in the US to religious leaders in Jerusalem, the power of homophobia to unite people across the globe is just simply heartwarming. Even a handful of people in the world like the Jews but no one loves a gay...

(Post Script: I don't mean to sound culturally insensitive myself, but that Armenian patriarch has got to get some new, non-KKK headgear)

Left to Right

My last post concerned the argument made by some that ‘the left’ is actually conservative while the neo-conservative right has taken the mantle of progress. Last time I wrote about the reading of the neo-conservative right that underlies this view, now I want to talk about this view’s interpretation of the left, or to be more specific, the American left. In my opinion, the American left is fueled by two traditions, the tradition of liberal dissent, and the tradition of republican self-government. I know that many would want to throw in the politics of identity and certain brands of socialism/communism. The former is a particular branch of the tradition of liberal dissent, while the latter has, and has had, very little purchase in the American context. Far more popular amongst American left intellectuals has been the call for ‘participatory’ or ‘direct’ democracy. This, of course, is a radical form of republicanism.

I note all of this because the view that the left is now ‘conservative’ stems from an interpretation of the left which leaves out the republican stand of the American left. In doing so, certain values are looked over, values which important for the left. This value states that the principle of self-determination should apply not only to our society, but also to the direction and development of societies other then our own. This principle has been amended by many such that it can be violated in extreme cases like genocide and ethnic cleansing. But besides such cases, our actions should comport with this principle. This principle can have a ‘leftist’ interpretation and a ‘rightist’. The leftists interpretation says that this principle cannot just apply in the political realm but must also apply in the economic realm. For if a nation does not control its economy, it really is not determining itself. This version of the principle is not ‘isolationist’ as is often charged, because the principle says nothing about helping other nations, or banding together with other nations, or, if necessary, fighting other nations. The fomer two things are in fact promoted by the principle insofar as it holds out the hope that nations can interact in a mostly equitable and reciprocal way (a utopian hope no doubt). The rightist interpretation of the principle ignores the economic issue as well as the latter utopian hope. It is, above all, concerned with the imprudent use of American power, a use which it sees as detrimental to America’s republican institutions.

We can now identify the move that view we are contesting is always making: it assimilates or reduces the leftist version of the principle of republicanism to the rightist version. There are, after all, overlaps, but there are also huge differences. These differences are elided making it seem as if the left embraces ‘isolationism’ and selfishness tout court. By eliding these differences, the view makes it seem as if the only respectable progressive position is one based upon liberal premises. And of course, it is these premises which supposedly underlie the neo-conservative right. Now to be on the left one must actually be on the right.

Stuff

[This was written last Friday but internet problems prevented it being posted until now. Read it with that in mind. Time flies these days.]

I was sniffed at a bit, a few weeks ago, when I suggested that something is in the air when it comes to toppling authoritarian governments. These are tricky things, of course, to prove or disprove. What does it mean that 'something' is in the air? Hard to say. But still, I think something is. Manifestly. The events in Kyrgyzstan the past couple of days are a further aspect of that 'something'.

As Steven Lee Myers puts it in a piece in the NY Times called "Contagion: Popular Risings in Ex-Soviet Zone,"

in the last year and a half, popular uprisings have claimed the sclerotic leadership of three former Soviet republics. In Georgia in November 2003, in Ukraine a year later and now in Kyrgyzstan, simmering discontent accomplished what not long ago seemed improbable: the peaceful overthrow of governments that ceased to represent the will of the people. . . .

"People are tired everywhere," Aleksandr Rondeli, president of the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies, said in a telephone interview from Georgia's capital, Tblisi, referring to the popular discontent. The uprisings in Georgia and Ukraine, he added, showed what was possible. "They saw how easy it looked on TV," he said.

This last point is an interesting one. It resonates with the 'enough' feeling that has begun to animate the calls for change in Egypt and other places in the Middle East. And it recalls the popular uprisings that brought down the authoritarian regimes of Eastern Europe.

The question that is sure to steam people up is whether the Bush Democracy Doctrine gets any credit for these events. In Kyrgyzstan, for instance, there seems to be a certain amount of ambiguity on the matter since the Bush administration was rather hesitant to criticize outgoing president Akayev and seemed to be more interested in the stability of its military base there than in overtly supporting the opposition. On the other hand, it would be difficult to deny that US support of the opposition in Ukraine and Georgia and elsewhere has done anything but continue to tighten things for leaders like Akayev. And there is a rather robust program to support nascent democratic movements throughout the former Soviet republics.

In the bigger picture, the kinds of speeches about global democracy that Bush has been making have, I think rather obviously at this point, helped create a certain mood that does begin to act like a 'contagion'. It is, of course, perfectly true that all real credit goes to the Iraqi people, and the Lebanese people, and the Kyrgyies out in the streets and so forth. But the two things are connected and that is something that ought to be acknowledged, precisely because it is something good and something to be encouraged. This doesn't prevent one from pointing out the places where Bush's words and actions are at odds. But the stubborn refusal to accept that something remarkable has happened to US foreign policy under this rather curious of Georges begins to look like the baby tantrums of ideologists.

Indeed, the Bush administration has been an interesting ride for ideologists and the deep thinkers of interwoven systematicity in general. We continue to be told about the structural coherence of the Right wing agenda to which the bad guys subscribe. I guess. But it is hard for me to see it that way. I find the democracy talk, and some of the actions, of the Bush adminstration exhilirating and I don't give a damn who knows it. I've outed myself. It makes me excited about the world. It creates the same kind of enthusiasm that in other matters makes me an ally to Left Wing causes. I feel, in many ways, that I missed out on the wonders of the collapse of the Soviet empire partly because of my smoldering Marxian resentments. I don't intend to repeat that mistake.

And I don't intend to take it very seriously when I'm told that I can't have my cake and eat it too. Which would be to say that I can't be enthusiastic about the Bush Democracy Doctrine and still keep my critical credentials. Fuck that. That kind of critical stance is so Seventies. I don't want to read fucking Horkheimer anymore, dammit. The shit was boring even when we thought it was basically right. Maybe it was right then. But the world has moved on, as it is wont to do. Things that seemed surely to be the case twenty years ago feel like they are from another century now.

And stop what you're thinking if you're going to misrepresent me. I'm not saying anyone has to throw in the towel and become a neo-con. Many of the ideals and concerns that animate the Left are as germane as ever. But Jesus Christ update yourself. The governing ideologies behind much of the contemporary talk of anti-imperialism are complete historical dead ends. Some of them have become outright reactionary. Stop it. It's OK to be happy.

Realism Anyone

As witnessed by Hitchens' recent apologia for Wolfowitz it is apparent that the work of former leftists who have moved to the neo-conservative right is structured by the question: Is not the left now conservative? After all, does it not ally itself with Nixonian types who worry about ‘instability’ etc.? The implication of this argument is that to be a leftist one must actually be a neo-conservative. (It is interesting that former leftists still feel the need to hold onto the certainty and power which comes from the progressivism that underlaid liberalism and the left). But this argument is bogus. It is bogus because it is based upon the premise that there are only two positions: neo-conservative and ‘realist’. The neo-conservative position has captured universality for itself, while realism upholds the particular (the particular power interests of a nation or nations) against the universal. Because these two positions are exhaustive of the political space, it is clear that if one questions neo-conservativism and its ‘idealism’ then one must be a ‘realist’, QED. But Hitchens and his ilk have never dealt with the obvious objections to this argument: Is it not possible that there is a third position which is not realist or Nixonian but which is not ‘idealist’ either?

If one knows the history of the B-team and of the battles of conservative policymakers in the seventies (cf. ‘The Rise of the Vulcans’ by James Mann) it is clear that the critique of Kissinger undertaken by the circle around Scoop Jackson was not based upon his cynicism or brutality, but on their disgust with Kissinger’s policy of Détente. They hated détente because this policy demonstrated the weakness of the US in the wake of Vietnam. Their position, while it did include some aspects that are identifiably liberal, was based mostly on the idea of augmenting US power in the wake of military defeat. Here we can see the origin of a type of internationalism which is strangely isolationist in intent. In the past, I have called this policy a global Monroe doctrine.

In recognizing a third position outside of Hitchens’ logic which more accurately captures the neo-conservative position, it is possible to question his reading of today’s events. While it is true that neo-conservatives are interested in overturning the status-quo in many areas of the geo-political system, one cannot just take for granted that this is automatically ‘progressive’. This assumption is also based upon the idea that there are only two positions: neo-conservative idealism and realism. Since realism wants to maintain the status-quo, it is clear that the neo-conservative policy has to be idealist (again QED). If we step out of this logic, this automatic assumption becomes questionable. The point is not to stand pat with the status-quo or overturn it, but rather to question where and when one should do either of these two things. The point is not to accept that US actions are automatically progressive (except for some fall back moments like Abu Ghraib) or automatically retrogressive, but rather to see that such actions are over-determined (to use a good Althussarian term) in their intentions and their effects. An action can at one and the same time be ‘progressive’ and the expression of the US’s interest in making the Middle East more amenable for its aims and projects. One can say at the same time both that Syria, for example, is a horrible regime and that it is not proper for the United States to follow certain policies of hegemonic augmentation. None of this can even so much as appear on Hitchens’ radar because of his antecedent decision to structure intellectual space dichotomously into progressive idealism and retrogressive realism. The crucial question is: progressive for the sake of what or retrogressive for the sake of what? Any other position is an expression of, as Lenin put it, infantile leftism.

Hichens is right that many on the American left fall back into realist tropes. This must be resisted even when realist tropes are handy as arguments in political combat. But here we must make a distinction. There is the realism that comes from trying to achieve a quasi-objective view of reality and a policy position based upon national power considerations. Very often people like Hicthens collapse the one into the other. They do so because in their zeal they have jettisoned the value of taking a realistic view of things, taking on board the whole apparatus of right-wing myth making. (For Hitchens this started with his idiotic - not too strong a word - book on Clinton, a book that could not separate out Clinton's deep and significant failings from wingnut propaganda. Now, as AK has pointed out, Hitchens has cozied up to the charlatan Laurie Mylroie and the AEI crew.) One could take a realistic view of things and still be a leftist or for that matter a neo-conservative. But it is in Hitchens’ interest to collapse these two things because he is now in essence a neo-conservative ideologue who does not wish to separate out the aspects of neo-conservativism that are amenable to the left and those that are not. Sometimes friends become enemies.

I Don't Know Much About Kyrgyzstan

Not that many people do, I reckon. However, it is becoming clear that with Georgia and Ukraine doing some interesting things of late, the broader Central Asian region is something to watch, and perhaps an area to get more familiar with. Here, from the Guardian, are a few notes on the Kyrgy opposition figures. I hope that the Guardian does a better job thinking about events in Kyrgyzstan than they did about the Orange Revolution.

- Felix Kulov, a former vice president under longtime President Askar Akayev, a former mayor of Bishkek, the capital, and a general in the Soviet army, was freed from prison Thursday. He had announced a bid for the presidency in 2000 but was arrested and sentenced to prison on corruption charges he says were politically motivated.

- Ishenbai Kadyrbekov, a communist lawmaker on the outs with Akayev, was chosen as interim president Thursday by the upper house of parliament. He had been disqualified from running in the disputed elections that fueled the protests.

- Kurmanbek Bakiyev, a former prime minister, later became one of Akayev's most ardent critics. He was forced to resign in 2002 after police killed six peaceful protesters. His base of support is in the southern town of Jalal-Abad. Named prime minister early Friday by the lower house of parliament.

- Roza Otunbayeva, who served two stints as foreign minister, also has been ambassador to the United States and Britain as well as United Nations' envoy to Georgia. Her base of support is in Kyrgyzstan's second-largest city, Osh.

Theocratic Basra

George Packer's rather frightening article in the New Yorker alerted the editors at OTR to the rising menace of Shiite fundamentalism in the southern Iraqi city of Basra. Now we have this lovely vignette from the Times UK of college students being beaten and shot to death by armed thugs loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr for the anti-Islamic crime of playing "immoral" music in a park. There is little doubt of the guilty party:

Far from disavowing the attack, senior al-Sadr loyalists said that they had a duty to stop the students’ “dancing, sexy dress and corruption”. “We beat them because we are authorised by Allah to do so and that is our duty,” Sheik Ahmed al-Basri said after the attack. “It is we who should deal with such disobedience and not the police.”

When one of the survivors of this sickening attack, Ali, attempted to rally protestors at the University, the students were informed :

When the students tried to organise demonstrations, they were broken up by the Mehdi Army. Later the university was surrounded by militiamen, who distributed leaflets threatening to mortar the campus if they did not call off the protests.
When the militia began to set up checkpoints and arrest students, Ali fled to Baghdad.

Sweet Christ! Mortar the campus! Sometime soon the Iraqi commandos who are successfully cleaning out insurgents north of Bagdhad need to spin south to flush out these theocratic bastards.

Sistani's Iraq

Does every major political event in Iraq have to have Ayatollah Sistani behind it? The man is the power center in Iraq, pure and simple; his might is awesome and his instincts sharp. It was Sistani who killed Proconsul Paul Bremer’s rigged caucus notion for Iraq by bringing 100,000 Shiites out to the city streets to demand democracy; Sistani who chilled the rebellion of Moqtada al-Sadr (though the rain of death let loose by American AC-130s on Sadr city didn’t hurt -- it was Sistani who curbed the younger man’s influence before having him kowtow to his rank); Sistani whose objections undermined the Transition Administrative Law created by the former Iraqi Governing Council; Sistani who lent his name to the triumphant United Iraqi Alliance and now, finally, Sistani who is rapping recalcitrant heads to form a coalition between feuding Shiites and Kurds. If there is a viable nation of Iraq in ten years Sistani will certainly be seen as one of its primary patriarchs:

Even though he has no constituency in the mostly Sunni Kurdish territory, the ayatollah has proved to be the most influential authority in the new Iraq. He brought together the largest and most successful Shiite bloc in the elections, and he has been able to call up huge street protests and get voters to the polls.

A leading Shiite politician, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, told reporters that the ayatollah felt "discontent" over the delay and was calling for speed in forming a government "on the basis of maintaining equality for everyone." Mr. Hakim made his remarks in Najaf after meeting there Sunday evening with Ayatollah Sistani.

Iraq Government

I've been urging some patience with the forming of the new government in Iraq as, well, it's a founding moment and such things are never quick or smooth. Still, it is starting to feel like the right time for at least a few tentative steps forward. Legitimacy abhors a vacuum or something like that. Anyway, it looks as though some of the deadlock is beginning to give way.
From the Daily Star:

Iraq's winning Shiite and Kurdish political blocs allocated ministries on Tuesday in the first elected post-Saddam Hussein government, while Iraqi police announced the arrest of 30 men implicated in dozens of murders, beheadings and rapes. . . .

Talks could finish on Wednesday and a session of Parliament to reveal the government lineup could convene as soon as Thursday or Saturday, the Shiite side said.

Kurdish sources gave near-matching accounts of the next government's shape, although they suggested Parliament might not convene until next week.

The Cabinet lineup will solidify the Shiite grip on power nearly two months after some eight million Iraqis voted in national elections. . . .

Both the Shiites and Kurds are keen to ensure the participation of the Sunnis, who have largely powered the insurgency.

Al-Mutumar, the newspaper of secular Shiite politician Ahmed Chalabi, said outgoing Sunni President Ghazi al-Yawar would be the Parliament's new speaker and fellow Sunni politician Hajem al-Hassani would serve as vice president.

Christopher Hitchens Right-Wing Obscurantist

Back in October of 1991, a younger, more radical Christopher Hitchens wrote a superb essay entitled “A State within a State” for Harper’s magazine plumbing some of the then recent filthy deeds and unconstitutional crimes committed by the CIA. Hitchens favorably mentioned in passing the crusading work of Senator John Kerry, who unearthed both financial links between corrupt Saudis, South American drug smugglers and the CIA (in the notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI)). Kerry also took a lead in investigating the many connections between narcotics and the Nicaraguan Contras. But that was a more daring and far different Senator Kerry from the one that ran for President this past November, and alas, we have a far different and much diminished Hitchens to contend with as well. Hitchens version ‘91 noted that the CIA’s shadowy imperio in imperium is ultimately the domain of the President, which interestingly enough, molded the figure of the senior Bush through the dark arts and black ops he commissioned as former director:

“No ‘new’ CIA, will be formulated from within the agency itself. Nor will pressure for such come from anywhere in the executive branch. Lest we forget. It was the CIA which molded the plastic figure of George Bush [the elder] and laid the trail of calamities and cover-ups that helped him along the road to the presidency.”

Hitchens piles scorn on how George H. W. Bush, as Director of the CIA, circumvented the conventional wisdom of the intelligence community on the relative strength of the Soviet threat with hyperbolic secondary opinions culled from a high powered crew of ideological hawks:

“It was also Director Bush who used the agency to tighten the ratchet of 1970s anti-Commie paranoia by appointing ‘Team B’ to second-guess the annual intelligence estimates. ‘Team B’, made up of Paul Nitze Richard Pipes. Lieutenant General Dan Graham and others of a similar stamp, is perhaps best remembered for its belief in the unfalsifiable superstition that Moscow sought and could obtain strategic superiority. Out of this smoke came the atmospherics of Reganism.”

Ah yes! How bizarre and utterly sad then, that the Hitchens who castigated the “unfalsifiable superstition” and the “smoke” and “atmospherics of Reganism” that inflated Soviet superiority, could years later so eagerly subscribe to the cloudy atmospherics of Bushism, blown to bellicosity on the “smoke” and “unfalsifiable superstition” of Iraqi WMD. The depth of his declension is evident in that one of the “others of a similar stamp” working under Nitze, Pipes et al in the nefarious Team B was a younger Paul Wolfowitz -- according to James Mann in his “Rise of the Vulcans” (p. 74) -- who Hitchens now reveres to the point of fawning over.

So too does Hitchens now dally with neoconspiracy theorist Laurie Mylroie, a favorite sibyl of influential neocons such as Richard Perle, James Woolsey and “Scooter” Libby, who proudly proclaims that Saddam Hussein was the prime instigator not only of the 9/11 attack, but also the World Trade Center bombing of ’93 and the Oklahoma City bombing. This is so far beyond the paranoid that even Bush himself concedes that there is no known link between Iraq and 9/11. As Peter Bergen, a journalist and professor at the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, writes of Laurie Mylroie:

“Mylroie became enamored of her theory that Saddam was the mastermind of a vast anti-U.S. terrorist conspiracy in the face of virtually all evidence and expert opinion to the contrary. In what amounts to the discovery of a unified field theory of terrorism, Mylroie believes that Saddam was not only behind the '93 Trade Center attack, but also every anti-American terrorist incident of the past decade, from the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania to the leveling of the federal building in Oklahoma City to September 11 itself. She is, in short, a crackpot, which would not be significant if she were merely advising say, Lyndon LaRouche. But her neocon friends who went on to run the war in Iraq believed her theories, bringing her on as a consultant at the Pentagon, and they seem to continue to entertain her eccentric belief that Saddam is the fount of the entire shadow war against America."

Bergen, by the way, was part of the CNN team that interviewed Osama bin Laden in 1997, and in his dissection of Mylroie she appears batty, hysteric . . . . and well connected. It is unsurprising then, that for her “The War Against America,” which asserts her many “crackpot” theses, Mylroie sports a prominent frontcover blurb by former Team B member Paul Wolfowitz:

“Provocative and disturbing . . . argues powerfully that the shadowy mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing . . . was in fact an agent of Iraqi intelligence.”

Her next novel has no less a personage than former radical Christopher Hitchens who says on the backcover of her “Bush Versus the Beltway” (You can view these blurbs on Amazon.com):

“In the face of the glibly repeated slogan that America is ‘in search of enemies,’ Mylroie shows that many in our intelligence establishment are fatally unable to recognize an enemy even when they meet one. A caustic and spirited statement of the original case for regime change.”

Hitchens' nervous clinging to discredited neoconspiracy theory and the deflated WMD cassus belli can still be witnessed in his latest column on Slate.com. When the New York Times recently reported on the mass looting of Iraqi weapons sites,

The kinds of machinery at the various sites included equipment that could be used to make missile parts, chemical weapons or centrifuges essential for enriching uranium for atom bombs.

Hitchens somehow reached the following question:

My first question is this: How can it be that, on every page of every other edition for months now, the New York Times has been stating categorically that Iraq harbored no weapons of mass destruction? And there can hardly be a comedy-club third-rater or MoveOn.org activist in the entire country who hasn't stated with sarcastic certainty that the whole WMD fuss was a way of lying the American people into war. So now what? Maybe we should have taken Saddam's propaganda seriously, when his newspaper proudly described Iraq's physicists as "our nuclear mujahideen."

OK then, so where are they? What of WMD inspector David Kay’s assertion, after months of fruitless searching that utilized the best intelligence the government could provide, that “We were almost all wrong”? What Hitchens only begins to painfully hint at is that the complete absence of WMDs in Iraq is actually the better option for proponents of the War. The worse option is that Saddam Hussein actually maintained or recreated some manner of WMD and that they have been left free floating or unsecure for two years in anarchic present day Iraq; a vicious combat zone with various active insurgencies including a well organized Al-Qaeda affiliated campaign against the population and coalition troops. In that latter scenario, it’s hard to argue that the invasion made Iraq or the world safer from the threat of WMD. That “Saddam Hussein had WMD but now we don’t know we they are” is just about the worst argument imaginable in defense of a hollow cassus belli.

Hitchens can’t bother to countenance widely reported stories about the intelligence culled from lengthy interviews with Saddam Hussein and his top lieutenants in which the decaying Baathist regime is portrayed as a place “where members of Mr. Hussein's inner circle routinely lied to him and each other about Iraqi military capacities.” Nor does Hitchens consider that “nuclear mujahideen” might be so much trash talk, but he prefers to ignore alternate, more plausible explanations in his strained effort to jump from “machinery . . . . that could be used” to must have had. Capacity is not possession, especially when capacity itself is questionable. The ability to manufacture missile parts is of a different order of industrial expertise from that of building and maintaining nuclear biological or chemical weapons. As a recent article in Popular Science on “Can Terrorists Build the Bomb” explains:

Enriching uranium is a vastly complicated and expensive process well beyond a terrorist group’s reach. It requires the use of expensive centrifuges whose production and export is closely monitored and which require sophisticated expertise to operate. Iraq tried in vain for years to enrich uranium, and Iran is approaching success only after decades of effort. “Iran has poured hundreds of millions—some would say billions—into their program, and as far as we know, they’re not there yet,” says Charles Ferguson, a science and technology fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Well that allows me to click my safety back on. A caveat here, some manner of WMD might still, one day, be found in the vast deserts of Iraq. It’s a remote possibility and I’m far too cautious to dismiss it outright. However, the argument for pre-emptive invasion was to deprive and secure such stockpiles and as I’ve argued above, if WMD were present when the US invaded, American forces and investigators certainly can’t find them now and far too many heinous militants are running loose with the potential to unearth or use them to make that even a remote victory. Let’s hope that David Kay is right and Hitchens is simply a dupe for Team B.


Christopher Hitchens Left Wing Conspiracy Theorist

Where as the right-hand smacketh down the left hand raises up. Allow me, in this contrarian instance to extend to Hitchens the fraternal paw. I don’t know what went down in Ohio and I’m not going to jump to any theories but Hitchens makes a convincing case here that the strange tilt of occurrences, the deeply odd alignment of coincidences, at least merits an investigation. Fat chance of that though . . . probably as likely as the US handing Henry Kissinger over to the International Criminal Court for war crimes. Hmmm, Ohio conspiracy theories, Kissingerian war crimes, it all makes me wonder just what Hitchens and David Horowitz will talk about together on their London vacation.

Again with Lebanon and Israel!

By the by, Sharon's call for the complete withdrawal of Syrian troops in Lebanon is not so "complete" unless it includes the Iranian Guard. Who are they?

http://lebanonwire.com/0503/05030602HZ.asp

More on Lebanon, Democracy and Terrorism

Of course we know that the Syrian troops will, little by little and with increasing international pressure, be withdrawn from Lebanon. The greater issue at hand is how or if an organization like Hezbollah can be brought into mainstream politics.

Both Israel and the US have officially claimed in the past weeks that they still consider Hezbollah a terrorist organization. By kicking out Syrian troops in the name of respect for Lebanese sovereignty, they are also hoping for an emasculated Hezbollah. "The purpose is to act to get Syrian troops out of Lebanon, include Hezbollah on the list of terror organizations, dismantle their terror infrastructure," Silvan Shalom, the Israeli foreign minister recently said.

This is a bit like having one’s cake an eating it too, but I have been nagged by a further issue in this whole discussion of Lebanon: what exactly does withdrawal of Syria from Lebanon mean for the future of a Palestinian state?

By taking a stand for Lebanese “independence”, the Israeli government can simultaneously put on a face that is sympathetic to the cause of democracy for its Middle Eastern neighbors, while undermining not just Hezbollah but Hamas and any claims to legitimacy that the latter organization (in particular, I think) may try to assert in a newly established Palestine. It is a scary thought that what most of the world considers a freedom struggle in Lebanon might actually undermine that same struggle for the Palestinians. By calling Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist organizations—which they certainly are though in a more complicated way than, say, Al-Qaeda—the Israelis can continue to bolster their revulsion for the existence of a Palestinian state. Because, like it or not, both Hamas and Hezbollah will have to be brought into any future political changes in their respective governments. Hezbollah already has “several MPs in parliament, an influential television station and a network of welfare and charitable organisations” (BBC) And while I am no fan of either group, the price of isolating them will be far greater than incorporating them gradually into a legitimate democracies. I too would like to see Hezbollah and Hamas disarmed and disappeared, but neither is going anywhere any time soon. Sharon and Israelis alike will have to continue to making hard choices about what will be most beneficial to their existence and their safety—a democratic and free Middle East that is armed and incorporated yet subject to the will of the world or one in constant chaos which is still, and perhaps more frightfully so, armed.

Jumblatt Again

Jumblatt's rather audacious comments some weeks ago to Ignatius at the Washington Post stirred up something of a firestorm within the small world of people who give a shit about such things. His proposal that regime change in Iraq was beginning to have a ripple effect throughout the Middle East was taken as too good to be completely true by some, too good to bother considering whether it's true by others, and utterly preposterous to many as well. The punditry went back and forth, as it is wont to do, and something of an uneasy acceptance that Jumblatt is a crucial, ambiguous, shady, fascinating, self-serving, crafty, mercurial, nasty, pragmatic, influential leader emerged from the dust.

Michael Young, the opinion editor at the Daily Star in Lebanon, had something to do with hashing out that view. He has an interesting encounter with Jumblatt in today's NY Times Magazine. Here's Young's basic characterization of Jumblatt:

Jumblatt is a paradox wrapped in contradictions, but he is not an enigma. Since inheriting the Druse mantle from his father, he has consistently focused on preserving his 200,000-strong minority and his authority over it. The Druse, who are spread between Lebanon, Syria and Israel, are the 11th-century offshoot of the Fatimid Ismaili sect of Egypt, itself an offshoot of the Sevener branch of Shiite Islam. The Druse are a ''closed'' community: no one can convert to their esoteric religion, and in theory at least, no one can leave it either. In Lebanon, they are mostly concentrated in mountain districts east and southeast of Beirut. Jumblatt has virtual complete control over them, as well as sway over Syria's estimated 300,000 Druse. He is also not without influence over Israel's community. (He toes the Arab line on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but he also insists that bridges must be built toward Israeli liberals. ''Not all Jews are Sharonists,'' he recently told an interviewer.)

Here are some things he has done:

Jumblatt has often preserved his community's freedom vis-a-vis Syria by knowing when to bend. During Lebanon's conflict, he also imposed his freedom in more disturbing ways. In September 1983, Jumblatt presided over the brutal sectarian cleansing of Christians from the mountains, a result of months of tension between his forces and the Christian militia. Thousands were killed, some 150,000 were displaced and dozens of villages were razed. Jumblatt now accepts blame for that dark time, and in a characteristically Lebanese compromise, once the conflict ended in 1990, he was given the task of returning the Christians to their villages. In August 2001, he and the Maronite Christian patriarch sealed a historic reconciliation, even if Druse and Maronites rarely mingle. Most Christians vote for politicians affiliated with Jumblatt, and he knows his staying power means not alienating those voters.

Here are more glimmers of the Ignatius interview:

A case in which Jumblatt admitted to me that he was wrong involved Paul Wolfowitz, the United States deputy secretary of defense. In October 2003, he publicly regretted that Wolfowitz had not been killed in a rocket attack while in Baghdad, referring to him as a ''virus.'' This led to a revocation of Jumblatt's U.S. visa. Recently, however, Jumblatt told the Washington Post columnist David Ignatius that the success of the Iraqi elections represented ''the start of a new Arab world.'' When I asked whether he was ready to apologize to Wolfowitz, Jumblatt answered, laughing, ''Yes; I already have.'' American officials, well aware of the Druse leader's mercurial nature, never severed contacts with him, and Wolfowitz himself recently saluted Jumblatt's ''courage'' on Lebanese television. For Jumblatt, extremism in the service of self-interest is no vice.

And finally, here's more about what a simply enigmatic figure he is:

Jumblatt is a strange mix of ruthlessness and sentiment, political calculation and loyalty, hardness and bookishness, radicalism and conservatism. His office mirrors a mind in counterpoint. A pistol rests on his desk near copies of The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. On the walls are a banner with Lenin's effigy and a painting showing a World War II battle scene, a gift from the former Soviet Union (Jumblatt had strong ties with Moscow and leads Lebanon's Progressive Socialist Party). These signs of nostalgia for the U.S.S.R. are offset by a model motorcycle, reminiscent of Jumblatt's youth as a playboy, autographed photos of the supermodel Claudia Schiffer and the rousing account he gives of the time he had to sit through the torment of a four-hour speech by Leonid Brezhnev ''to hear just one line about the Middle East.''

Ibrahim Parlak

I saw a story on one of the TV News Magazines a few weeks ago about the Parlak case and have been thinking about it ever since. It is this side of the War on Terror that is so endlessly furstrating. I, for one, am willing to face any danger in order to keep US society open. To put it in an extreme formulation, I'd rather risk another 9/11 than another Ibrahim Parmalak. Here's more about the case from the NY Times Magazine.

This is a story about the trickery of time. Sometimes the world changes on a dime, as it did on Sept. 11, and with the transformation of the present, the past, too, can suddenly take on a different hue. This, it seems, is what happened to Ibrahim Parlak. Indeed, it's tough to choose the tense in which to tell his story. He runs -- or ran -- a Middle Eastern restaurant. It's in Harbert, Mich., a small summer resort town, an hour and a half by car from Chicago, along the Lake Michigan shoreline. Parlak is a Kurd from Turkey and had been in this country for 13 years when, on the morning of July 29 last year, he was arrested by officers with the Department of Homeland Security and taken into custody. He was charged with crimes relating to his time in Turkey, when he had been involved with a Kurdish separatist group. . . .

Shortly after the decision, I spoke with Parlak's neighbors. I thought that given the forcefulness of the judge's decision, some of them might now think differently about their friend. Goldrick conceded to me that he had been worried that maybe the government had something on Parlak that would suggest he was engaged in villainous activity here. "I thought, I'll kill you if you haven't been honest with us," he told me. But in the end it was as he had known it to be. "You better go and round up all those people who fought the apartheid government in South Africa," he told me, sounding even more agitated than when I'd spoken to him a couple of months earlier. He's in Florida for the winter, and told me that when he returns to Michigan, he intends to continue lobbying his local politicians.

Hariri's meeting with Assad

The New York Times fleshes out the repressive political context that led to the assassination of Rafik Hariri with this infuriationg article. Bashar Assad, often depicted as an accidental autocrat whose more liberal impulses are hemmed in by his father’s thug cabal, comes off here as every bit the true tyrant:

Mr. Hariri - wearing an expensive blue suit and a white shirt, his tie
loosened - lumbered over mutely and flung himself onto one of a dozen white plastic chairs, his head lolling back and his arms dangling over the edges.

After a few moments, he leaned forward and described how the Syrian leader had threatened him, curtly ordering him to amend Lebanon's Constitution to give President Émile Lahoud, the man Syria used to block Mr. Hariri's every move, another three years in office.

"Bashar told him, 'Lahoud is me,' " Mr. Jumblatt recalled in an interview. "Bashar told Hariri: 'If you and Chirac want me out of Lebanon, I will break Lebanon.' " He was referring to the French president, Jacques Chirac.

The horrid aspect, is that in the short term, Hariri’s assassination deprived a broad-based coalition of his leadership and there are few viable candidates to replace him, bringing his fears for his country perilously close:

Interviews with a dozen Lebanese involved, including the three other men at the garden and some of Mr. Hariri's closest aides, indicate that in the final six months of his life he was tormented by the predicament that Lebanon now faces - how to end Syria's headlock without reigniting the civil war that tore this country apart a generation ago.

In reading this article I came away thinking that, if true, if Bashar did whack Hariri, then the Syrian dictator has gotten off far too lightly. A partial Syrian withdrawal is not enough for this heinous crime. Since Lebanon itself seems currently incapable of uncovering the truth, an international investigation, as called for by the French and Hariri’s family, should be supported and enforced, perhaps with an International Criminal Court indictment.

Help Soldiers Call Home

I realize this is an old story, but since we've still got 100,000+ troops in Iraq, one of the best ways you can support them, whatever your political views, is by buying them phone cards. The details are here from the Pentagon - the system is incredibly simple and you can do everything online. It's good to talk.

More Wondering

It has been a few days since I've been able to get a rise from my fellow Chroniclers about the Bush Doctrine and the Middle East. Perhaps the following from Youssef Ibrahim at the Washington Post will set them a'twitter.

From Casablanca to Kuwait City, the writings of newspaper columnists and the chatter of pundits on Arabic language satellite television suggest a change in climate for advocates of human rights, constitutional reforms, business transparency, women's rights and limits on power. And while developments differ vastly from country to country, their common feature is a lifting -- albeit a tentative one -- of the fear that has for decades constricted the Arab mind.

Regardless of Bush's intentions -- which many Arabs and Muslims still view with suspicion -- the U.S. president and his neoconservative crowd are helping to spawn a spirit of reform and a new vigor to confront dynastic dictatorships and other assorted ills. It's enough for someone like me, who has felt that Bush's attitude toward the Mideast has been all wrong, to wonder whether his idea of setting the Muslim house in order is right.

Wolf

Along with the Bolton appointment, the nomination of Wolfowitz for the head of the World Bank has stirred up the pundit's nest. Unlike the Bolton situation, however, it is less obvious that this is a bad idea. Fred Kaplan, not exactly a right winger, writes at Slate that Wolfie is a good choice.

Wolfowitz is a sort of optimistic globalist who believes in the World Bank's essential tenet: that the developed world can improve the troubled, less-developed world with the aid of rational principles. Another intriguing sign: In a conversation with Eric Alterman at a Manhattan book party last week (duly summarized on Alterman's blog), Wolfowitz suggested that he'd pushed for more aid to Liberia and Sudan than the administration at first had been willing to dispense.

Some who know Wolfowitz tell me that he wanted to fill the impending vacancy at the bank. He may be, in this sense, a latter-day Robert McNamara—a war-weary Pentagon master seeking refuge to wring the blood from his hands. McNamara suffered something close to a public breakdown when he moved from secretary of defense to president of the World Bank in 1967, as the Vietnam War spiraled out of control. Lyndon Johnson had been complaining to aides for months that McNamara had "gone dovish" on him. It's unlikely that Wolfowitz has exactly turned tail on George W. Bush or Donald Rumsfeld. Still, Wolfowitz is a smart guy, smart enough to know that Iraq has not gone at all as he thought it would, and perhaps he sees McNamara's personal exit strategy as a model to emulate.

I would say that Kaplan is slightly off his rocker to think that Wolfowitz feels he has to check out because Iraq didn't turn out as he thought but the general point holds. There is an interesting set of connections between Wolfowtiz and McNamara that someone with more energy than I will explore further.

I Would Have Preferred Michael Bolton

Everything that is to be opposed in the Bush adminstration and everything that is wrong with the American Exceptionalism that animates part of the discourse of conservatism is wrapped up in a little ball and simmering somewhere deep inside the black soul of John Bolton.

What a despicably horrible choice for Ambassador to the UN. He makes us pine for the days of John Negroponte. Samantha Power has this to say:

“I’m pro-American,” Bolton says, as if that required him to be anti-world. He dismisses the U.N.’s tools for promoting peace and security. International law? “It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so—because, over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrict the United States.” (Never mind that such laws might have “constricted” the torture of detainees.) Humanitarian intervention? It’s “a right of intervention that is just a gleam in one beholder’s eye but looks like flat-out aggression to somebody else.” Negotiation as a way of dealing with rogue states? “I don’t do carrots,” Bolton says.

It is easy to catalogue the things that John Bolton doesn’t “do”—encourage payment of U.N. dues, support the International Criminal Court, strengthen international disarmament treaties. What he does do is less obvious. As Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, he has rightly been given credit for the Proliferation Security Initiative, which attempts to interdict shipments of fissile material and which is supported by sixty nations, including France and Germany. But on his watch North Korea, the chief target of his ire, reprocessed enough plutonium to make six new nuclear weapons. Bolton boasts of “taking a big bottle of Wite-Out” to President Clinton’s signature on the statute for the International Criminal Court (“a product of fuzzy-minded romanticism” that is “not just naïve but dangerous”). Yet the Administration’s assault on the I.C.C. has, in fact, bolstered the court’s legitimacy internationally. Powerful middle-tier countries (like Germany) have helped make up the loss of American funds and personnel, and the court is now deep into investigations of mass slaughter in Congo and Uganda. . . .

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will have a lot to contemplate when the ever-quotable Bolton arrives for confirmation. At the U.N. last week, the most discussed Boltonism was the claim that if the U.N. building “lost ten stories it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.” One staffer sighed and said, “He didn’t say which ten floors he would like to see disappear. Perhaps that leaves us some room for influence.”

Admittedly, the songs of Michael Bolton are on the sappy side. Actually, they're awful. But at least they're about love and shit. 'How Can We Be Lovers If We Can't Be Friends?' and so forth. Is it really so far from such a thought to a genuine committment to nation building. I say we switch Boltons.

Jordan and Reform

It has not made the newspapers in the US, but there is an important political struggle going on in Jordan at the moment. Abu Aardvark has been following the story closely. the recent trip to the US by King Abdullah would have been a good time for Bush to keep up his pressure on our illiberal allies. But instead he took a pass. From Aardvark here is the relevant passage:

Bush: His Majesty leads a great country in the midst of a part of the world that is changing, changing for the better. And I want to thank His Majesty for his leadership, his understanding about the need for reform, his strong alliance, his clear vision that the world needs to jointly fight terror.

QUESTION: ... (OFF-MIKE) which will also be articulated in the coming (OFF-MIKE). What will be the role of the United States in the coming (OFF-MIKE)? And when it comes to reform, how would the United States help the Arab world and Jordan, in particular, in the peace process? [sic. Personally, I love how the question about reform becomes a question about the peace process. Perfect.]

BUSH: Well, I appreciate that question. First, let's start with Jordan. One of the things we've done is enter into trade negotiations with Jordan so that commerce between our countries can flow better. It's much easier to reform when there's prosperity, when people are able to see His Majesty's vision about a prosperous future. And the other way to encourage reform is to herald examples of reformers, people who are willing to put mechanisms in place that respond to the voice of the people. And His Majesty has done that. We look forward to hearing the results of the conference in Algeria. The foreign minister briefed us on His Majesty's plans and the Jordanian government's plans to have accountability measures in place so as to help measure as to whether or not reforms are going forward.

Interview with Talabani

With the relative dearth of news about Iraq's all important political process, Spencer Ackerman's Iraq'd is a God send. Here is an excerpt from an interview with Kurdish leader Qubad Talabani.


IRAQ'D: To what extent do you feel the United Iraqi Alliance is in line or not in line with your positions on religious freedom, federalism and Kirkuk?

QT: It's not a matter of in line or not in line. It comes back to how specific we're going to get in these agreements. At the moment our partners in the United Iraqi Alliance are talking in vague and in general terms. But I think at this point in time we need to hammer out details.

IRAQ'D: What details need to be hammered out? Take Kirkuk first, which is going to be the most important issue perhaps in Iraq's entire political discussion.

QT: Right. Kirkuk is a symbol of our tragedy. Kirkuk requires a plan to rectify decades of injustice. People always claim that our devotion is about it's oil. It's not true. Oil is actually the curse of Kirkuk. What is important to us in Kirkuk is human rights. It's justice. While we're trying Saddam on one side for crimes committed against supposedly his own people, how can we leave his handiwork intact? What we're seeking for Kirkuk is a legal process that rectifies decades of ethnic cleansing. He forcibly evicted Kurds and Turkmen and brought in Arabs from the center and south of the country. He changed the demography of Kirkuk. He changed the geography of Kirkuk. He annexed major portions of Kirkuk to other governorates, thus making Kirkuk smaller and reducing the Kurdish and Turkomen populations of Kirkuk. These things have to be reversed.

Lots of Truth...

...but reconcilitation seems further and further away for Rwanda, especially in light of numbers like these. From today's Guardian:

761,000 accused in Rwanda

Associated Press in Kigali
Tuesday March 15, 2005
The Guardian

The secretary general of the Rwandan justice ministry said yesterday that at least 761,000 people should stand trial for their role in the country's 1994 genocide.

General Johnston Busingye claimed that nearly a 10th of the 8.2 million population had been identified as having a role in the 100 days of violence in which more than 500,000 minority Tutsis and Hutu moderates died.

Some 63,000 genocide suspects are being held after an inquiry by community-based courts in which people identified victims of the genocide in their districts and named those suspected of involvement.

Three MPs and at least 50 local government officials resigned after they were charged at the traditional courts, which began hearing cases last week in an effort to speed up a 10-year-old judicial inquiry.

Bush makes the NRO puke

The conservatives over at the National Review have responded to the Bush administration’s shift on Hezbollah the way I thought they might: they puked. While support for democratic movements throughout the Mid-East is laudable and necessary to destroy the U.S. supported tyrannies that have kept the region in stagnation, the quick revolutionary upheaval that Bush now seems to be advocating will not, at least in the short term, lead to more stability or an end to terrorism. Democracy is not a panacea for all ills, especially those that are contained within colonial borders that may not be viable democratic nations. I wish to support those democratic movements in the region that share my secular humanist goals, but I’ve no illusions about the resilience of democracy or the popular weight of those movements that I find troublesome or repellent. How will conservatives and hard-line hegemons within the Bush administration respond to the official recognition of mass movements and parties that undermine stability and U.S. strategic interest? Here are a few highlights from the National Review’s Barbara Newman that could well be indicative:

National Review Online: I did a double take when I saw that Kofi Annan was encouraging serious people to accept Hezbollah. But then the New York Times reported that people in the U.S. administration are thinking similarly. Can they really be serious? Can Hezbollah ever be a legitimate political movement anywhere?

Barbara Newman: I almost lost my breakfast Thursday, which luckily I hadn't eaten yet, when I saw the New York Times page-one report today that Kofi Annan is encouraging the acceptance of Hezbollah as the preponderant power in Lebanon and the United States is thinking of yielding to this and France's pressure to do just that.
. . .

Newman: Those who advocate the position that Hezbollah can be brought into a moderate role by dealing with it politically, have never heard the speeches of its charismatic chief, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah when he calls for death to America. It's like Chamberlain when he went to Munich and had never read Mein Kampf. These people mean what they say.

. . .
NRO: Now, in Lebanon: If Syria gets out, does Hezbollah take over? How can Hezbollah’s power be squashed by the Cedar Revolution — does people power have that kind of power?

Newman: I believe that if Syria pulls out of Lebanon now, which — by the way I don't think will happen — because the Bashar Assad regime would collapse — Hezbollah would be the most powerful entity in Lebanon. It could easily smash the Lebanese army. The tragedy of all this is that the Cedar Revolution, the confluence of such previously vicious enemies, the Christians, the Sunnis, and the Druze, is occurring in a power vacuum. The Taif agreement, which ended the Lebanese civil war, forced all militias to disarm with the exception of Hezbollah. In the last ten years it has grown into a behemoth and we have done nothing about it.
How can we forget the fact that in 1983 a Hezbollah suicide driver crashed a one-thousand-pound bomb into the Marine Barracks in Beirut and killed 241 of our best and brightest? What about the hostages they took and tortured? What about the CIA Beirut station chief William Buckley who they kidnapped and slowly drowned to death by forcing a pipe down his throat and flooding him with water? They made tapes of his agony and sent it to the CIA. I'm told that former CIA Director William Casey almost went crazy when he heard them, and this propelled him to Iran-Contra, to try to free the hostages.

. . .

NRO: Is Hezbollah more of a threat to Americans than al Qaeda at this point?

Newman: A lot of intelligence officers I have spoken to regard Hezbollah as more a threat to Americans than al Qaeda. One FBI station chief I know very well said he's worried about Hezbollah, he's worried about the Hezbollah cells in the United States, and he's worried about Hezbollah members so secretly ensconced here that even operating cells don't know about them.

The False Standard

Dan Senor was a spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq back when his boss, Proconsul Paul Bremer, hubristically attempted to maintain American control over Iraq through a caucus plan so jury-rigged and complicated that not even the CPA could explain it. This terrible idea was crushed in mass Iraqi demonstrations in mid-January 2003 called by Ayatollah Sistani that brought over 100,000 Shi’a into the streets:

American helicopters buzzed overhead as an announcer on the ground with a bullhorn urged the marchers onward. "Say yes, yes to elections and no, no to appointing the people in any way other than elections," he called.

"Enough with America!" people yelled from the street.

Dan Senor was there. Today, however, he can write the following in The Weekly Standard:

This time, however, the same Iraqi friends ignored me and instead participated in a protest: the first Iraqi-organized mass public protest, some 2,000 strong, in the 23 months since the fall of Saddam's regime. "The Americans" were no longer an address for frustration or salvation. Welcome to postelection Iraq.

“ . . . . the first Iraqi-organized mass public protest . . . . since the fall of Saddam’s regime?" How absolutely nuts is it to assert that? Perhaps Senor would argue that Sistani is, by birth, an Iranian, but it’s a bit of a cheap distinction. Perhaps Senor is embarrassed, and still stung, from being on the wrong side of a mass Iraqi democratic movement that finally triumphed with the elections of this January. It was in response to Sistani’s display of popular strength and outrage, after all, that the Bush administration summoned Bremer back to Washington and caved in to holding elections a year later; an inconvenient fact for today’s right-wing exponents of democratic globalism. Regardless, it is beyond bizarre for Senor to assert, with any degree of seriousness, that only today in January 2005 are we witnessing first Iraqi mass-protest since the fall of Saddam. Here’s is just one example to the contrary and it isn’t pretty for Senor. His astounding ignorance and/or re-editing of established history says as much about the acuity and vision of Bremer’s CPA as it does of the fact checkers over at the Weekly Standard.

The New Conservatives

Fred Kaplan has a thoughtful piece at Slate about how recent events in the Middle East should not be looked at as a contemporary falling of the Berlin Wall. It concludes thusly:

Bush may have grasped a larger picture than many of us realized when he spoke about the appeal of freedom and the imperative to promote it. But he has only vaguely defined the term. He sees it as not merely a political right but a God-given trait, humanity's default mode, which gushes forth like a geyser once a tyrant is blown from his throne. History shows us there's hot lava in this geyser, a volcano of energy, which can be creative, destructive, or both. Which way it flows is a matter of gravity, chance, the contours of landscape, or human engineering. To translate the metaphor to today's political geyser, it's a matter of indigenous culture, sheer luck, shrewd diplomacy, or brute force. Which way it goes will depend on some mix of all four. No outcome is inevitable. History is molded, not fated. Euphoria, for the moment, is beside the point.

Kaplan is perfectly correct. History does show us that hot lava exists in such geysers and so forth. There is much to be worried about, there is much that may go wrong. And euphoria, for the moment and probably forever, is definitely beside the point. Still, it is remarkable how much conservatism exists in these kinds of thoughts. We've discussed the Niebuhrian caution that has long been part of various leftish agendas on these pages before. It is not as if the Left is bereft of prudence and it is not as if the more prudent leftists haven't learned some good lessons from the foolish revolutionary dreams (and even more depressing realities) that the past century has provided.

But there is a difference between prudence in the prudish sense and phronesis, that good old faculty of practical wisdom that can distinguish an opportunity from a fantasy. I've been attacked in the past for saying that something can be smelled in the air. Something is afoot. Well, OK, I'm still saying it. There is something going on here toward which Left-Conservatism seems a less than adequate response. There are other people out there who are so much better at being conservative than we are. It is a difficult proposition to imagine that liberals have any common cause with the Bush administration at all. Perhaps it is better simply to play the eternal skeptic from the sideline. But to do so would also be to opt out of some of the most exciting political transformations of our time. That's a lot to ask.

Going Positive

The attitude that TNR projects on most liberals sounds nice to me. If that is the kind of liberal we can be, I'm happy to sign on in some form or another.

Give liberals credit. Rather than churlishly dismiss signs that the White House may have jump-started Middle Eastern democratization, most liberals have taken the responsible course and applauded recent developments in Lebanon, Egypt, and Iraq. "The Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share of the credit for many of these advances," wrote the granddaddy of liberal opinion, The New York Times editorial page. Ted Kennedy seconded that sentiment on ABC's "This Week": "What's taken place in a number of those countries is enormously constructive. It's a reflection the president has been involved." Hardly the peevish response many conservatives privately expected.

But, if liberals aren't blinded by partisanship when assessing the dramatic events of these last few weeks, their response does have a certain grudging quality (reflective perhaps not only of discomfort with George W. Bush, but also regret that Bill Clinton did not make democratization in the Middle East his obsession). One detects this reluctance especially in the tendency to dwell far more on potential setbacks than opportunities, and to focus on advances in parts of the world where the administration can't plausibly claim credit. Take, for example, the preeminent liberal blog, Daily Kos, which spent thousands upon thousands of words chewing over Ukraine's Orange Revolution. So far, it has featured only two short posts on Lebanon's equally stirring Cedar Revolution--and both were notable mostly for their pessimism.

I don't think I'm being unfair to suggest that some of our own liberals here at OTR need to decide whether they want to continue to be blinded by partisanship, grudging in their qualities, or something else. And importantly, the TNR editorial goes on to note that:

In fact, given the administration's global reputation, it is hard to imagine its democratization efforts succeeding without domestic support from liberals. The United States, after all, comes to the project with dirty hands, having shown disdain for democracy in the twentieth century by toppling popularly elected leaders and supporting authoritarian governments when it served our narrow interests. The administration has, in many cases, only worsened these perceptions, most obviously at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, which had a devastating impact on world public opinion. American liberals, who have denounced these developments, will be central to persuading the world of the sincerity of U.S. intentions.

Finally, it concludes with a few thoughts that I can only nod my head in agreement with.

More immediately, liberals must realize that they have to be willing to support the Bush administration in the Middle East if they want to have anything to say about democracy elsewhere in the world. Liberals rightly accuse the White House of talking up its democratic successes in the region while downplaying backsliding in places like Russia. But the same logic applies to the left. How can liberals be outspokenly in favor of democratization in Russia but only tepidly endorse it in Lebanon, just because an administration they detest might get credit for it? The answer is that they can't. When it comes to democracy-building, there's enough credit--and enough work--to go around.

Amarji--Ammar Abdulhamid

Ammar Abdulhamid is a pretty interesting fellow. A Syrian dissident still living in Syria he seems, according to his blog, to be packing up shop and getting the hell out. A bittersweet affair one can imagine. Anyway, his blog, Amarji, is well worth reading and one should also take a look at Tharwa Project, a venture in the promotion of Middle Eastern civil society he has been involved with.

Here are some thoughts from a recent post:

Meanwhile, today, our brethren the Lebanese had a freak show of their own. It was the Nasrallah Hizbollah Show, where thousands of adoring appreciative fans sang the praises of the Syrian President and Benefactor, or rather the son of the Benefactor, or, to be even more specific, the second eldest son of the Benefactor, the first having mysteriously and prematurely died in an unfortunate car accident – he was driving his car like a maniac on the way to the airport. Everyone is always in a such rush to leave this country, even the Benefactor’s sons. I wonder why.

The real song and dance though, was about power, as usually is the case around here, in the land of oil and saber-rattling, milk and sour grapes. Nasrallah has it, and he is flaunting it, but a bit too conspicuously, I am afraid. He needs simply to hedge his bets with the Opposition, not get out of the game, an always dangerous game, especially for the Nasrallahs of the world. It is indeed understandable that he should attempt to sweeten his pot, but he should simultaneously avoid setting the Opposition’s teeth on edge. Milk and sour grapes are a particularly sensitive combination, you know.

My Insane but Delightful Interlocutors

With the whiny-ass hand-wringing posts of my dear friends Steven and Dr. Emile of late you'd almost think that they were capable of self-criticism. Alas, that seems not to be the case. I'll put my violin back in its case I suppose.

Less cattily, I can understand the difficulties of the position and the annoyance that one is put into such an either/or. Ironically, of course, it seems to me that, structurally, this either/or is not radically different from the one the anti-war Left dumped upon the more hawkish among us. To whit, any suggestion that the miltary follies of the Bush administration might actually serve the purposes of anti-fascism and reform in the Middle East was taken to be outright lap-doggism and idealistic naivete to boot. You didn't give us much wiggle room then, so why should we extend it now? I piss in your sandbox and so forth.

But, of course, such wriggle room should be extended. I am perfectly glad that there was a cadre of principled anti-war folk among us and would be terrified by the prospects of a situation in which those voices were not raised. If recent events in the Middle East do represent a kind of breath of change and democracy it shouldn't be used as a post facto whipping tool. And if such breath gets stuck in the lungs the opposite shouldn't be the case either.

Which brings me to AK's post. AK, shrewd, analytically savvy apocalyptic type that he is, is in the difficult position where he pretty much has to button his lips when anything is going well and then crow like a seer when things fall apart, as he continually prophesizes they must. Woe to the unfortunate fellow who hears the cackle of AK, it foretells evil tidings. Fair enough. His newest point of pride is that Hezbollah's recent showing once again gives a proto-Niebuhrian scolding to the stupid idealists from left to right.

But not so fast. Two points. One, no one claimed that Hezbollah had no support in Lebanon and everyone agrees that truly free elections in Lebanon will mean potential political power for Hezbollah. Probably it is a good thing that the Bush administration, however grudgingly, is willing to take that chance. But, two, the recent demonstrations in Lebanon were not check mate, as weren't the earlier anti-Syrian get togethers.

Impressive as the showing was, it may have also hemmed Hezbollah into a rather unpalatable corner. In an op-ed in today's NY Times, Michael Young of the Daily Star points out the key problems.

At Syria's request, Lebanon's Hezbollah organized a huge demonstration in downtown Beirut yesterday, as a counterweight to weeks of anti-Syrian protests. The numbers notwithstanding, and despite the party's claim that the rally was not directed against the Lebanese opposition, Hezbollah will come to regret this moment, which has placed the party squarely athwart much of Lebanese society on the question of Syrian hegemony. . . .

In short, Hezbollah faces a dilemma: to defend its regional ambitions, it must preserve a Syrian-dominated Lebanese order (and Syria is working to impose one before its troops depart), even if doing so alienates the clear majority of Lebanese who believe Syria must go; or it can side with that majority, which means abandoning Syria and its own regional objectives.

The party can undeniably bring out many supporters, as it did yesterday, but it has also discredited itself by so effectively defending Syrian hegemony over Lebanon. Now Hezbollah can straddle the fence no longer. It must decide whether to take its chances as a national party in a Lebanon free of Syrian domination, or risk losing all that it has built up by becoming Syria's unwelcome enforcer.

Hezbollah Takes The Stage

Hezbollah’s massive turnout has changed the political situation quite a bit in the past 48 hours. With the re-appointment of their quisling in Lebanon, in part due to an absurd legislative rule that his position be filled by a Sunni, Syria has (temporarily?) regained the initiative. Wretchard, the right-wing blogger over at the Belmont Club gives a grim interpretation that the “Cedar Revolution” is over. But even more astounding is the Bush administration’s realization and acknowledgement that Hezbollah now has a vital role to play in Lebanon:

"The new posture of the administration was described by its officials, who asked not to be identified because of longstanding American antipathy toward Hezbollah.

"Hezbollah has American blood on its hands," an administration official said, referring to such events as the truck bombing that killed more than 200 American marines in Beirut in 1983. "They are in the same category as Al Qaeda. The administration has an absolute aversion to admitting that Hezbollah has a role to play in Lebanon, but that is the path we're going down."

Damn! Read that last paragraph one more time for effect. This pragmatic shift hurt the Bushies so badly that the administration’s “officials” delivering the bad news couldn’t stand to be named. The logic and impact of their grudging admissions are hard to get one’s head around . . . . in the “same category as Al Qaeda” yet with democratic legitimacy, at least enough to be an acknowledged participant in Lebanese politics? There are profound political reverberations from this statement, this hard truth, both for America’s continuing democratic crusade and the “war on terror” (excluding now Hezbollah). Whatever happened to not negotiating with terrorists, especially ones on par with Al Qaeda?
The article continues with another harsh lesson in what our coeditor Morgan derisively labels “Euro-Conservatism”:

"Only a few weeks ago, the United States was tangling with France over Hezbollah's status, as France blocked an effort by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to have Europe formally label Hezbollah a terrorist group, restricting its fund-raising.

Now the United States has basically accepted the French view, echoed by others in Europe, that with Hezbollah emerging as such a force in very fractured Lebanon, it is dangerous to antagonize it right now and wiser to encourage the party to run candidates in Lebanese elections."

Ouch. Schooled on sucking up to terrorists by no less a cynically wimpy nation than France! But wait, here’s another dose of bracing realpolitik:

"The emerging position of Washington on Hezbollah has put it in an unaccustomed position of being at odds with Israel and its supporters, especially those who say Hezbollah is the single biggest threat to the fragile peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

Israeli officials declined to comment on the latest development, noting only that Israel has not changed its belief that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization that must be disarmed."

Aha. This explains why Ariel Sharon’s national security advisor cautioned late last year that a Syrian pullout from Lebanon would not be in Israel’s interest:

"Its pronouncements notwithstanding, Israel may not be all that eager to push Syria out of Lebanon. Last December, Gen. Giora Eiland, head of the Israeli National Security Council, submitted a memorandum to Sharon arguing that a Syrian pullout would be counter to Israel’s interests. Eiland contended that Syria’s departure could leave a vacuum and give Hezbollah much greater operational freedom to escalate its conflict with Israel."

Given the deep unhappines at having to legitimize Hezbollah and cross Israel, some manner of realist/pro-Israel counter-offensive within the Bush administration would not be unexpected at this point. As the prominent and prolific neoconservative Victor Davis Hanson recently confided to Mark Follman:

"Hanson added that a number of conservative colleagues with whom he's recently
spoken think that Bush has “flipped his lid” on foreign policy, that the president is “drunk on Wilsonian idealism."

The foundation of the new Bush doctrine of democratic globalism is that America's ideals are in line with its interest. So what happens when Bush's idealism conflicts with America's hegemonic interest? To date he really hasn't had to face such a reality, but with Hezbollah he might be getting just a small taste.

The Critic's Bind

If we may step back for a moment (my favorite thing to do) I think we can characterize the present ideological moment amongst US foreign policy makers as a potent mixture of liberal progressivism, imperialism, leavened with a good dose of Jacksonian nationalism. This mixture, which at first sight seems contradictory, is actually quite common in American history. What the neo-conservatives saw in the seventies is that this position could be re-forged within the Republican Party out of the ashes of Cold War liberal internationalism. Of course, in coming after the Cold War, this mixture is placed on a new footing insofar as America, in the mean time, had become a civilizational empire whose policies project globally instead of regionally.

This mixture is very powerful because in tying imperialism to liberal progressivism it makes the critic of this position seem like a critic of liberalism tout court. But what the critic is trying to point out that we should attempt to untangle these aspects of our policy. Here, however, the negativity of the concept butts up against the positivity of reality. For the proponent of this position is always going to say: look we’re in the Middle East already, surely you don’t want to be on Syria’s side? Surely, you want to support democracy and Freedom? And then the critic is going to say: right, I support the position on Syria, I support freedom, I support the troops, really I do! But once that is said the real argument is over, for now we have already committed ourselves to a directly imperialistic position in the region, even if a liberal imperialism.

This dialectic accounts for the fact that the proponent of the policy is always sniffing out acts of ‘bad faith’ on the part of the critic: you don’t really support Middle Eastern democracy, you don’t really love freedom! And of course there is some bad faith because the critic questions whether the whole policy is valid. Insofar as they question the whole policy they can be taken to question the particulars of the policy. This inference is actually false to the logic of political argumentation, but the fact that it can be made demonstrates the bind that the critic is in.

Norman Geras

I posted Norman Geras' interesting piece in Dissent a few weeks ago. He also has a highly readable and useful blog here.

In a recent post he gets into a long discussion about issues around the Iraq war and current events. Many of his thoughts mirror my own. Many are quite relevant to my debates with others of the OTR Chronicles crew.

A late echo

There has been in recent weeks, since the January 30 election in Iraq, a kind of after-echo of this anti-war disinclination to face the fact of what opposition to the war in practice meant. I'm referring to all those voices which have responded to the success of the Iraqi election with something along the lines that, yes, they did oppose the war, but they have always favoured democracy and elections for Iraq, whether always as in forever, just by virtue of being democrats, or always as in since shortly after the fall of the Baathist regime - and unlike some (obviously dubious) people on the pro-war side who apparently haven't been so staunch. Now, there's an unobjectionable and indeed welcome form of something like this response. It is the response of hoping for, being happy about, supporting, all genuine progress in Iraq despite one's own opposition to the war that cleared the way for it. It is a kind of moving on.

What is rather less welcome is the willingness to take credit for results which could not have come about without the course of action you opposed, while simultaneously denying credit to those who actually pursued and implemented that course of action - above all George Bush and Tony Blair - as well as anyone who supported it. This is a kind of costless, take-responsibility-for-nothing attitudinizing, a gesture politics impressive only by its moral weightlessness. It is rather like the following: I oppose taking an extended holiday in New York, because I am terrified of flying, the only practical option in the circumstances (for whatever reason); and even though I know that I would enjoy it once I was there. Then, having been bullied by my holiday companion into going, and suffering unspeakable torments in transit for which I do not stop blaming her, I profess that I have never been opposed to the holiday and I feel thoroughly vindicated by it. She, on the other hand (I also maintain) has had little or nothing to do with the success of the holiday, though she sure as hell is responsible for my frightening journey.

Some of those same voices blandly willing to 'shoulder' any of the good things coming out of the Iraq war - the fall of Saddam and his regime, such progress as has followed from it - while protesting their own lack of responsibility for everything which has gone wrong, or been done wrong or been done worse than wrong (for did they not, after all, oppose the war?), are also the most clamorous in insisting that those who prosecuted or supported the war are answerable for every last cost of it, as computed, naturally, by themselves.

Finally, as our own Steven has posted a thoughtful and honest attempt to think through some of these issues, and especially the Jewish Modus Tollens of 'if not this, what?' it would be remiss not to throw Geras' own conclusion into the mix.

Conclusion

Since this post has been about alternative regime change scenarios, here finally is another one. It may look fanciful but it is no more so than those already considered, and indeed it grows out of one of them. As the US and its allies in late 2002 and early 2003 move towards a military intervention in Iraq, tens and hundreds of thousands of people all over the world mobilize, march, articulate their views through the media available to them. They do this to secure UN backing for the war, so that it will not be 'unilateral' or illegal or just George Bush's and Tony Blair's war; so that it will be our war; so that it will be a war supported by all democratic peoples to put an end to a political monstrosity that has survived into the new century; and a war to be held to our democratic norms and standards; and - now supported by the UN and France, and liberal editors and their progressive readers - a war in which universal opprobrium is directed against those doing everything they can to wreck the prospects of democratic transformation (opprobrium rather than a tut-tutting kind of 'understanding'), and not against those trying to bring this about, and in the aftermath of which men and women and money and expertise and materials pour into Iraq from every corner of the globe where there are the resources to offer something, in order to help rebuild the country and invest in its future. Yes indeed, friends, comrades and citizens, what would such a war and its aftermath have looked like? Well, maybe it is merely fanciful. But unlike the other alternative scenarios canvassed here, this one was at least in the power of the not-in-our-namers to try by their own efforts to bring about.

Extraordinary Rendition

The more we learn, the more we're appalled. The New Yorker has a concise interview with Jane Meyer, who also wrote an article abo