This really pisses me off. Atrios’s wanker of the day, the ole perfesser, apparently finds it amusing to dishonestly claim that Josh Marshall once advocated killing many civilians in Iraq in order to pacify the country. This is nonsense, as Unfogged points out here.
Here’s the thing about Marshall’s argument, which a lot of us made in the run-up to the Iraq war: the glorious paladins of the 101st Keyboarders were dying to play Patton (in their minds, of course) and decided early on that the occupation of Iraq would be exactly as it had been in Germany and Japan after WWII. They were packing up nylons and Hershey bars for months in anticipation of our boys needing some blackmarket currency so Mr Roberts and Phil Silvers could keep the motor pool running — “Maresy-doats and dozy-doats” went to the tops of the wingnut geek charts and stayed there for two years.
People tried to point out that the occupation of Japan and Germany were relatively peaceful affairs because the nations were defeated enemies whose entire infrastructure and systems of government had been destroyed in bloody conflict. Those conditions tend to create a pacific people who willingly accept a new order so that they can resume normal life after many years of horrifying warfare. The terrific generosity of the west, particularly the US, after WWII was a unique historical moment in which the victors treated the vanquished with respect and committed to rebuilding those societies as soon as possible. It wasn’t, of course, because we were good and they were evil — it was because we had learned the lessons of WWI the hard way — and becuase we were building a bulwark against the Soviets.
Any historical parallels between our unprovoked, pre-emptive invasion and occupation of Iraq and post war occupations of Europe and japan existed only in the fevered wet dreams of the keyboard commandos and their neocon comic book heroes — like Condi Rice who characterized WWII as the US “liberating the Germans from Hitler.”
Marshall’s column was another of the many, many warnings that were given back in the beginning of the war that these cakewalk-in-the-sky notions of what is actually required to make a foreign occupation be as successful as the aftermath of WWII were ridiculous. Contrary to Reynolds’ profoundly dishonest characterization, Marshall wasn’t advocating massive violence against the Iraqis, he was saying that because we were rightly unwilling to unleash hell on a civilan population for anything less than existential reasons, the occupation would not work. And he was right, just like all of us who pointed out that this grotesque comparison between WWII and the illegal invasion of Iraq was not only immoral and counterproductive, but doomed to fail on its face because of the sophomoric delusions of those who were dreaming of glory and tribute from the safety of their Barcaloungers.
Meanwhile, these same great global strategists are now truly advocating ultraviolence in the mid-east and calling it “birth pangs.” I don’t think “wanker” is adequate to describe such people.
Encroachment and the Force of Empire (and Oil) by poputonian The mix is a little different today.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, the essential stakes were the abundant natural resources of North America, and the ostensible possessors of it were the Native Americans. The encroachers were the New Americans and their system of competitive trade, which paid premiums to anyone in a dominant position. To become dominant in America required settlement and expansion; to accomplish expansion required land. In 1758, an Ohio Valley Indian said this to an English missionary (source):
“We have great reason to believe you intend to drive us away, and settle the country; or else, why do you come to fight in the land that God has given us?” … “Why don’t you and the French fight in the old country, and on the sea? Why do you come to fight on our land? This makes everybody believe you want to take the land from us by force, and settle it.”
It was true then, that gaining control of the land would require coercion, something best done systematically through the vehicle of trade and in the name of freedom. Writing in the mid-1990s, historian R. Douglas Hurt (source above) tells of the futility in making any resistance to the force of empire:
“White settlers and traders aggressively pushed into that region and prevented accommodation between the British and the Ohio Indians. These “Frontier People” sought not accommodation with the Ohio Indians but rather their removal. Compromise did not enter their thoughts, and magnanimity never governed their actions. Respecting personal freedom more than law and advocating their right to take unused land rather than to await negotiated settlements with trans-Appalachian Indians, these frontier people moved relentlessly into the Ohio Valley. By 1774, approximately fifty thousand whites lived on the trans-Appalachian frontier, and the British army could not control them. By that time, the British no longer remained the principal enemy of the Ohio Indians. Instead it was the relentless westward-moving Americans.
The paragraph below describes the manner in which the said force of empire deals with any attempt to resist it. This comes from another historian, also writing before 9/11, who tells how the British brain trust, along with the New Americans, discerned that they were opposed in North America by an organized conspiracy:
“How else, Amherst and his colleagues wondered, could so many diverse Indian groups have acted in concert against them? The British, trapped within their understanding of the Indians as childlike, violent creatures, could not explain what had happened to them in the west unless they could stipulate a French conspiracy behind it all. They never understood that the evidently synchronized attacks were loosely coordinated local revolts, all responding to the common stimuli of conquest, white encroachment, and Amherst’s Indian policies, all animated by a religious revival with pan-Indian overtones, and all motivated by the desire to restore to North America a sympathetic European power to act as a counterpoise to the British and their numerous, aggressive colonists.“
Hurt also noted that the Indian resistance ” … popularly known as the “conspiracy of Pontiac” … should be more appropriately known as a “Defensive War” or as a war for independence by western Indians.” Everyone knows the rest of this particular story.
Today, the mix is different. It’s oil instead of land, and a different opposing culture instead of Indians. But the alchemy is identical. It’s the American system of unrestrained trade and a society dependent on a natural resource (oil) for its continued dominance; trade dominance, cultural dominance, material dominance, and religious dominance. Whatever brutal force is required to suppress anyone with an impulse to resist has become the de facto foreign policy. It’s a foreign policy that fosters encroachment and builds empire. It’s also a foreign policy that leverages the ambiguous qualities of liberty and freedom to ostensibly justify its violent suppression of any resistance. The President of the United States said so yesterday:
And so we have, we’ve taken a foreign policy that says: On the one hand, we will protect ourselves from further attack in the short run by being aggressive in chasing down the killers and bringing them to justice.
And make no mistake: They’re still out there, and they would like to harm our respective peoples because of what we stand for.
In the long term, to defeat this ideology – and they’re bound by an ideology – you defeat it with a more hopeful ideology called freedom.
And, look, I fully understand some people don’t believe it’s possible for freedom and democracy to overcome this ideology of hatred. I understand that. I just happen to believe it is possible.
And I believe it will happen.
And so what you’re seeing is, you know, a clash of governing styles.
For example, you know, the notion of democracy beginning to emerge scares the ideologues, the totalitarians, those who want to impose their vision. It just frightens them.
And so they respond. They’ve always been violent.
Here’s a rewrite of the bolded phrasing that historian Anderson used above:
The British Bush, trapped within their in his understanding of the Indians Arabs as childlike, violent creatures, could not explain what had happened to them in the west America on 9/11 unless they he could stipulate a French an ideological conspiracy behind it all.
Encroachment and empire? Not understood here at home. Oil. Huh? This is Bush’s foreign policy of submit or die. It’s happened before with great success.
Well, great success for those in the dominant position.
What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn’t kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn’t the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?
In other words, as Kurtz memorably wrote, “Exterminate all the brutes.” And then Podhoretz asks:
If you can’t imagine George W. Bush issuing such an order, is there any American leader you could imagine doing so?
Why yes, John, I can. Commander Jeff Schoep, the leader of the National Socialist Movement would be more than happy to issue such an order. He writes:
It is of tantamount [sic] importance, that each and every one of us as White Patriots be of steel will and determination! I will refer to a quote by a great American NS martyr, Capt. Joseph Tommassi “We must prepare to seize the day”. Our Aryan peoples have triumphed throughout history!
A few examples: in Germany we had Adolf Hitler who fought Communism and Jewry (one and the same), in Romania the great Vlad Dracul (who drove the Turks out of his land), in Serbia the great Prince Lazar who repelled the mongrel invaders out of Kosovo, etc.
We are of the Race that drove Genghis Khan and the Huns from Europe, the Race that claimed America, and nearly rid it of the pestilence of the American Indians, the Race that drove the mongrel Mexicans out during the Mexican-American war, and many other glorious accomplishments throughout history!
We have a lot to live up to, as today’s White Racial Patriots! …
Thinking back to what I wrote about being timid, when duty calls. I am not trying to dwell on the issue, I just do not understand the rational [sic]. The will to protect and defend one’s own, should be a natural instinct! …
Whether Movement veteran, or fresh new enlistments, we all must put the collective Racial, and National whole, above self.
An assault on one of us, must be viewed as an assault on all, regardless of Rank, position, group affiliation, etc.
They also have some very groovy desktops John can download for his computer.
Of course, we’d have to persuade Commander Jeff to exterminate young Arabs. He is, after all, a proud anti-Semite but I think that once it’s explained to him that Arabs are also not Aryan – and, in fact, Semites – he’ll get with the program.
Hat tip to Anonymous in comments, who finds Podhoretz, I’m not kidding here, “insightful.”
[UPDATE: Seymour Paine in comments notes that “anti-Semite” was coined specifically to refer to Jews, not *all* folks who speak a Semitic language. He also says that Nazis and Arabs have, historically, been quite friendly. Irregardless and notwithstanding,* once we explain to Commander Jeff why he shouldn’t discriminate among kinds of Semites, John Podhoretz will have precisely the kind of American leader he so desperately craves.
Dear Liberal Hawks and other fence sitters from 2002/2003 (you know who you are),
Don’t even think about a “thoughtful, measured response” to this bullshit.
President Bush proudly declared that American foreign policy no longer seeks to “manage calm,” and derided policies that let anger and resentment lie “beneath the surface.” Bush said that the violence in the Middle East was evidence of a more effective foreign policy that addresses “root causes.”
This is sheer, abject lunacy of the sort that imagined the invasion of Iraq would lead to city squares in Iraq named after George W. Bush and the invasion would pay for itself out of oil revenues. The only appropriate reaction is to very loudly proclaim this is the reasoning of madmen. No rational human being thinks like this.
Your credibility has been ruined already by falling for the preposterous lies and rationalizations prior to the Iraq invasion. If you take this seriously, your immortal soul is majorly on the line. While I’m enjoying an eternity of Mozart, Bach, and Howling Wolf, you will be suffering the unbearable agony of exposure to Kenny G, 24/7. Forever. You don’t want to risk that, trust me.
Repeat: there are no serious issues to be “engaged” in Bush’s latest drooling remarks. The people who came up with an American foreign policy based on addressing “root causes” and no longer managing calm need straitjackets. Neither they, nor you, nor the rest of the world will benefit by opportunities to discuss these sick delusions. Under no circumstances should you try to do so.
I hope I’ve made myself clear.
Love,
tristero
[UPDATE: Here’s Ilana Mercer of The American Spectator telling us about the sheer hypocrisy of the search for “root causes:”
The paradox at the heart of the root-causes fraud is that causal theoretical explanations are invoked only after bad deeds have been committed. Good deeds have no need of mitigating circumstances…
Bush’s press conference with Blair today was even more frightening in its arrogant incoherence than usual:
QUESTION: Mr. President, Mr. Prime Minister, with support apparently growing among the Arab population, both Shiite and Sunni, for Hezbollah, by bounds, is there a risk that every day that goes by without a cease-fire will tip this conflict into a wider war?
And, Mr. President, when Secretary Rice goes back to the region, would she have any new instructions, such as meeting with Syrians?
BUSH: Her instructions are to work with Israel and Lebanon to get a — to come up with an acceptable U.N. Security Council resolution that we can table next week.
And, secondly, it’s really important for people to understand that the terrorists are trying to stop the advance of freedom. And, therefore, it’s essential that we do what’s right — not necessarily what appears to be immediately popular.
There’s a lot of suffering in Lebanon because Hezbollah attacked Israel. There’s a lot of suffering in the Palestinian territory because militant Hamas is trying to stop the advance of democracy. There is suffering in Iraq because terrorists are trying to spread sectarian violence and stop the spread of democracy.
And now is the time for the free world to work to create the conditions so that people everywhere can have hope. And those are the stakes. That’s what we face right now. We’ve got a plan to deal with this immediate crisis.
It’s one of the reasons the prime minister came, to talk about that plan. But the stakes are larger than just Lebanon.
Isn’t it interesting that when Prime Minister Olmert starts to reach out to President Abbas to develop a Palestinian state, militant Hamas creates the conditions so that, you know, there’s a crisis, and then Hezbollah follows up?
Isn’t it interesting, as a democracy takes hold in Iraq, that Al Qaeda steps up its efforts to murder and bomb in order to stop the democracy?
And so one of the things that the people in the Middle East must understand is that we’re working to create the conditions of hope and opportunity for all of them. And we’ll continue to do that. This is the challenge of the 21st century
I remember as a child a strange little neighbor girl who was found in her backyard swinging her cat by the tail against the sidewalk screaming “you’re gonna love me!”
I’m pretty sure it didn’t work.
Update: Oh. My. Dear. God.
Q: Mr. President, both of you, I’d like to ask you about the big picture that you’re discussing.
Mr. President, three years ago, you argued that an invasion of Iraq would create a new stage of Arab-Israeli peace. And yet today there is an Iraqi prime minister who has been sharply critical of Israel.
Arab governments, despite your arguments, who first criticized Hezbollah, have now changed their tune. Now they’re sharply critical of Israel.
And despite from both of you warnings to Syria and Iran to back off support from Hezbollah, effectively, Mr. President, your words are being ignored.
So what has happened to America’s clout in this region that you’ve committed yourself to transform?
Bush: David, it’s an interesting period because, instead of having foreign policies based upon trying to create a sense of stability, we have a foreign policy that addresses the root causes of violence and instability.
For a while, American foreign policy was just, Let’s hope everything is calm – kind of, managed calm. But beneath the surface brewed a lot of resentment and anger that was manifested on September the 11th.
And so we have, we’ve taken a foreign policy that says: On the one hand, we will protect ourselves from further attack in the short run by being aggressive in chasing down the killers and bringing them to justice.
And make no mistake: They’re still out there, and they would like to harm our respective peoples because of what we stand for.
In the long term, to defeat this ideology – and they’re bound by an ideology – you defeat it with a more hopeful ideology called freedom.
And, look, I fully understand some people don’t believe it’s possible for freedom and democracy to overcome this ideology of hatred. I understand that. I just happen to believe it is possible.
And I believe it will happen.
And so what you’re seeing is, you know, a clash of governing styles.
For example, you know, the notion of democracy beginning to emerge scares the ideologues, the totalitarians, those who want to impose their vision. It just frightens them.
And so they respond. They’ve always been violent.
You know, I hear this amazing kind of editorial thought that says, all of a sudden, Hezbollah’s become violent because we’re promoting democracy. They have been violent for a long period of time. Or Hamas?
One reason why the Palestinians still suffer is because there are militants who refuse to accept a Palestinian state based upon democratic principles.
And so what the world is seeing is a desire by this country and our allies to defeat the ideology of hate with an ideology that has worked and that brings hope.
And one of the challenges, of course, is to convince people that Muslims would like to be free, you know, that there’s other people other than people in Britain and America that would like to be free in the world.
There’s this kind of almost – you know, kind of a weird kind of elitism that says well maybe – maybe certain people in certain parts of the world shouldn’t be free; maybe it’s best just to let them sit in these tyrannical societies.
And our foreign policy rejects that concept. We don’t accept it. And so we’re working.
I’ve long speculated that one of the biggest miscalculations of the war in Iraq was exploding the American mystique of military and intelligence superiority. It’s like that old saying “It is better to remain quiet and thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.” It’s better to hold your fire and be thought weak than attack for no good reason and remove all doubt.
But at least America had decades of post war success to draw upon and diplomatic and economic clout to employ even as it degraded its reputation in all those areas. Israel, on the other hand, is entirely dependent upon its military superiority and this ill-fated overreation in Lebanon is exploding that image:
The bottom line: Hizbullah is winning. That’s the hideous truth about the direction this war is taking, not in spite of the way the Israelis have waged their counterattack, but precisely because of it. As my source Mr. Frankly put it, “Hizbullah is eating their lunch.”
We’re talking about a militia—a small guerrilla army of a few thousand fighters, in fact—that plays all the dirty games that guerrillas always play. It blends in with the local population. It draws fire against innocents. But it’s also fighting like hell against an Israeli military machine that is supposed to be world class. And despite the onslaught of the much-vaunted Tsahal, Hizbullah continues to pepper Israel itself with hundreds of rockets a day.
The United States, following Israel’s lead, does not want an immediate ceasefire precisely because that would hand Hizbullah a classic guerrilla-style victory: it started this fight against a much greater military force—and it’s still standing. In the context of a region where vast Arab armies have been defeated in days, for a militia to hold out one week, two weeks and more, is seen as heroic. Hizbullah is the aggressor, the underdog and the noble survivor, all at once. “It’s that deadly combination of the expectation game, which Hizbullah have won, and the victim game, which they’ve also won,” as my straight-talking friend put it.
[…]
When I heard Condi talking in pitiless academic pieties today about “strong and robust” mandates and “dedicated and urgent action,” I actually felt sorry for her, for our government, and for Israel. As in Iraq three years ago, the administration has been blinded to the political realities by shock-and-awe military firepower. Clinging to its faith in precision-guided munitions and cluster bombs, it has decided to let Lebanon bleed, as if that’s the way to build the future for peace and democracy.
I’m not sure I really get why the US and Israel haven’t yet come to terms with the fact that this fourth generation war cannot be won with classic military action. I suspect it is the neocon influence which, throughout many decades, never gave a passing thought to terrorism or assymetrical warfare. They have been stuck in a cold war mindset (a mindset that was wrong about the cold war too) and have consistently seen the world through the prism of rogue totalitarian states. This is why, in spite of the fact that everything is going to hell in a handbasket in a hundred different ways, they persist in focusing on Iran (formerly Iraq) and ignoring all the moving parts that make their aggressive plans to “confront” these regimes simpleminded and doomed to failure.
For Israel and the US it couldn’t be worse. They have systematically chipped away at any moral authority they had while demonstrating that their military, diplomatic and economic power are paper tigers. What an excellent strategy for all concerned. Oh, and too bad about all the dead bodies that have been produced to create that sad outcome.
“But if you want to help somebody, people can go to McDonald’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken and give them a meal.” … The city, Mr. Reese added, had just spent $1.7 million in landscaping … Las Vegas, whose homeless population has doubled in the past decade to about 12,000 people … adopted … ordinances … to discourage homeless people from … ruining efforts to beautify … “
In case you missed this little tid-bit earlier, Tom Tomorrow deftly took down Andrew Sullivan’s lame attempt to proclaim that Joe Lieberman is actually quite popular in Connecticut. Among other things, he pointed out this little factoid I hadn’t seen before:
One last thing: you hear a lot from lazy media types about how very popular Joe is here in Connecticut. Well, here’s a small reality check: in the 2004 Super Tuesday presidential primary in Connecticut, John Kerry got 58% of the vote. John Edwards came in second with a respectable 24%.
Joe Lieberman, meanwhile, came in third with five percent of the vote, here in the state in which he is so very popular.
Was there anyone who did that badly in his home state? It’s true that he wasn’t running any longer, but Dean actually won his primary that day and he’d already suspended his campaign. Kucinich got 9% in Ohio. Usually a favorite son will at least get a respectable loyalty vote from members of his local machine.
Joementum’s problems became manifest in that campaign and it’s why he’s in trouble now. His Republican talking points, particularly on the war, were the last straw for a lot of grassroots Democrats — many of them, apparently, in his own state.
In a preview at Arthur’s of an upcoming post about Alan Dershowitz’s suggestion that we civilized westerners develop a new way of defining collective punishment so as to be able to kill civilians with impunity, I noted this quote from an Israeli official:
Mr Ramon – a close confidant of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert – said “everyone understands that a victory for Hezbollah is a victory for world terror”.
“World terror” huh? How convenient for all of us then that the Israelis are fightin’ ’em over there so we don’t have to fight ’em over here. No wonder we rushed in those delayed missiles. We can’t let “world terror” win fergawdsake!
It’s in such nonsensical talk that we see the logic of the GWOT brought home in all its magnificent horror. People are fighting “world terror” everywhere — except where they aren’t.
Michael Hirsh has written an article in Newsweek about this topic and examines why this conflation of the threat of al Qaeda with a Global War on Terror first created the insurgency in Iraq and now threatens to set the entire mid-east on fire:
What’s sad is that the “war on terror” began as a fairly straightforward affair. Al Qaeda hit us. Then we went after Al Qaeda. The enemy was clear, and the evidence against Al Qaeda was solid: there was a decade’s worth of fatwas, of declarations of war, monitored conversations and bin Laden’s own monstrous bragging, on videotape, about how the World Trade Center collapse had far exceeded his expectations. We had a lot of support around the world in pursuit of our mission to hunt these men down, kill them or capture them and do with them as we pleased.
But inexorably, month by month, the Bush administration broadened the war on terror to include ever more peoples and countries, especially Saddam’s Iraq, relying on thinner and thinner evidence to do so. And what began as a hunt for a relatively contained group of self-declared murderers like bin Laden became a feckless dragnet of tens of thousands of hapless Arab victims like the sons of the hostel owner in Samarra, the vast majority of whom had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or terror, just as Saddam had little to do with Al Qaeda, just as the Iraqi insurgency had little to do with Al Qaeda (at least at the start), just as Hizbullah has nothing to do with Al Qaeda. And as the war broadened beyond reason, and the world questioned the legitimacy of the enterprise, our friends dropped away. Worse, we have found ourselves making enemies in the Islamic world faster than we could round them up or kill them.
Yes, the war against Al Qaeda called for a stretching and changing of the rules. We had to be ruthless with the maniacs who struck us on 9/11. But for that very reason, it required that we be very precise in identifying the enemy. Just the opposite occurred. “You can’t distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror,” President Bush declared on Sept. 25, 2002, as he made the case for the Iraq invasion. This was the kind of thing Bush often repeated as he sought to wheel the nation 90 degrees, in the middle of the fight against Al Qaeda, toward Iraq. The truth was quite the contrary: not only could you distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam, it was imperative that you do so, that you wage this fight with precision analysis as much as precision weaponry. We could not afford to let our soldiers see all military-age men as potential enemies.
Today, more from the muddled strategic thinking of the Bush administration than the actual threat from Al Qaeda, the “war on terror” has become an Orwellian nightmare: an ill-defined war without prospect of end. We are now nearly five years into a war against a group that was said to contain no more then 500 to 1,000 terrorists at the start (in case anyone’s counting, 1,776 days have now passed since 9/11; that is more than a full year longer than the time between Pearl Harbor and the surrender of Japan, which was 1,347 days). The war just grows and grows. And now Lebanon, too, is part of it.
This is the Bush Doctrine at work. He said it explicitly:
We’ve sent a message that is understood throughout the world: if you harbor a terrorist, if you support a terrorist, if you feed a terrorist, you’re just as guilty as the terrorists.
It didn’t take much to extrapolate from that that anyone who lived near a “terrorist” or worked along side a “terrorist” or who even looked like a “terrorist” was just as guilty as a terrorist. Alan Dershowitz has recently expanded on that notion by saying that those who do not fight against the terrorists in their midst, or flee their homes if terrorists are among them, must also share the blame for these terrorists’ actions.
The only thing that was left out of all this was a definition of terrorism.**
Hirsh points out in his article how this played out during the first years of the occupation of Iraq, a country we were ostensibly liberating from — you guessed it — terror:
Reading “Fiasco,” Thomas Ricks’s devastating new book about the Iraq war, brought back memories for me. Memories of going on night raids in Samarra in January 2004, in the heart of the Sunni Triangle, with the Fourth Infantry Division units that Ricks describes. During these raids, confused young Americans would burst into Iraqi homes, overturn beds, dump out drawers, and summarily arrest all military-age men—actions that made them unwitting recruits for the insurgency.
For American soldiers battling the resistance throughout Iraq, the unspoken rule was that all Iraqis were guilty until proven innocent. Arrests, beatings and sometimes killings were arbitrary, often based on the flimsiest intelligence, and Iraqis had no recourse whatever to justice. Imagine the sense of helpless rage that emerges from this sort of treatment. Apply three years of it and you have one furious, traumatized population. And a country out of control.
“Over here, everybody is the army,” one soldier said. “Everybody is Hezbollah. There’s no kids, women, nothing.”
Another soldier put it plainly: “We’re going to shoot anything we see.”
And so another front in the GWOT is opened.
Hirsh continues:
In strategic terms, the U.S. endorsement of Israel’s retaliation against Hizbullah had some merit at the start, within limits: a Lebanon with an armed Hizbullah in its midst was never going to graduate to real democracy. The Israeli action is also, in a way, a proxy war against Iran and its nuclear program. Reducing Iran’s influence in the region by degrading the power of its principal means of terror (and therefore of retaliation) is in America’s interest, as well. This is the unspoken logic both of the fierce Israeli assault and Bush’s fierce defense of it: “In the back of everyone’s head is Iran looming as a threat over the region,” says one Israeli official.”In the back of everyone’s head is Iran looming as a threat over the region,” says one Israeli official.
But with each errant bomb that kills more Lebanese children, the U.S. position becomes less defensible. By walking in lockstep with the Israelis, we Americans make it impossible for Muslims not to see us as an enemy. And every Muslim official knows, even if Bush does not, that Hizbullah is not identical with Iran but is a client of it, in a relationship not unlike that of the United States and Israel. By making Israel’s war our own we ensure that the Lebanese group and the Tehran mullahs will be even closer allies in the future. We place the Muslims whom we desperately need as allies, like Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, in an impossible position. Maliki, a Shiite, can no longer stand with Bush, as he showed during his tense visit to Washington this week.
I suspect one reason Newt Gingrich and his fellow nutballs are working overtime to get this WWIII business playing in people’s heads is because to Americans the GWOT remains vague and ill-defined. They have yet to sign on to this existential struggle against well — everybody, or at least a bunch of people they don’t even know, forever. Are the French terrorists? They must be because we are supposed to hate them. How about the Mexicans who are invading our borders? Newt keeps bringing up Venezuela as part of our epic struggle against terrorism. And North Korea is a charter member of the Axis ‘o Evil, so we know they are terrorists.
Who are we fighting again?
I suspect that many Americans are now so confused they simply think “they’re all a bunch of terrorists” and wish a pox on all their houses. And with the logic of the GWOT they are all a bunch of terrorists. But then with the logic of the GWOT, we are the biggest terrorists of all.
*** I should add that the idea of creating a legal definiton of “terrorism” was advanced from early days after 9/11 by Wes Clark and others who noted that this elastic definition was a recipe for trouble. It even became an agenda item at the UN Millenium Summit — which was tabled immediately upon John Bolton’s appointment. In keeping with the overall philosophy of the Bush administration, they obviously recognized that the less they are required to conform to recognized legal norms the more they can wage war against “World Terror.”
One comment. Billmon writes about the disgusting “exterminate all the brutes” mindset, and behavior, of the Israeli army:
This all might be considered normal military behavior for, oh say, a Bosnian Serb militia captain, circa 1991, but when the political and military leaders of an allegedly civilized state start talking this way, something big is going on, and going wrong.
Yes, indeed, something big is going on. It’s the opening skirmishes of a Middle East – wide war, brought to you by the losers who gave the world Iraq 2006.
And brother, is it ever going wrong.
Can an enormous, dreadful, and pointless war be averted? Yes, but it will require an American opposition to Bush willing to speak truth loudly, not a party so terrified of upsetting Americans’ beautiful minds it doesn’t have the courage to put the Iraq war and Bush’s mad behavior front and center.
