By Barry Rubin
You want to know what's wrong with the study and analysis of the Middle East in the West in a single sentence? Ok, here it is:
Edward Said is treated like a guru and hero; Fouad Ajami isn't.
Said never took the slightest risk and lived a life of greatest privilege. He was lionized by the intellectual elite. His work was taught in universities and shaped the worldview of a generation of professors and students.
Yet what Said said was disastrous for the Arabs themselves and for Western intellectual life. He told the Arabs that they were innocent victims who didn't need to do anything differently, thus guaranteeing they stayed on the wrong road. He backed the Palestinian cause as perfect (despite some criticisms of Arafat's dictatorial tendencies and corruption) and thus didn't use his influence to turn it toward moderation--away from radicalism, terrorism, and hatred--and a genuine two-state solution.
Equally bad, he undermined Western pragmatism, Enlightenment values, and scholarship by a Stalinist-type campaign to discredit all preceding work on the region and substitute for it propaganda.
I will never forget standing at the door of a Middle East Studies Association (MESA) annual meeting session listening to Said recite with hatred in his voice a list of scholars who he said were "enemies of the Arabs" to what can only be called a howling mob of professors. I had the honor of being on that list.
At that moment, I thought to myself: "I am witnessing the death of scholarship in American universities." If we had been living in a Middle East society, the audience would probably have erupted from the hall to beat up or kill those "enemies of the people."
Many years after his influence gained virtual hegemony, I am not aware of a single book authored by any of his followers that is of lasting value in the study of the modern Middle East. Not one. On the other hand, environmentalists should protest the forest murders to manufacture paper wasted on the ideological junk that is turned out on the region by academics today.
While Said came from an incredibly rich family and was raised from childhood as a Westerner (I personally witnessed him wearing earphones to hear the Arabic translation into English at a Palestine National Council meeting), Fouad Ajami came from a poor Shia Muslim family and grew up in a Lebanese village.
Ajami's brilliance, balance, and genuine adherence to democracy along with his people's welfare has been rewarded in the West with a response ranging from intellectual persecution to mere neglect.
He's also a great guy in person. Only a few days ago, a Lebanese student told me about meeting Ajami, who he didn't know, on a train ride and how friendly and kind Ajami behaved toward him. I also had an extensive conversation with a childhood friend about how Said used to make fun of the Arabs in private in terms that would shock the socks off the Politically Correct gang.
I'm leaving out a lot of detailed anecdotes about both men that demonstrate my thesis.
Pick up book and almost any article by Ajami and you will meet with a truly creative and incisive mind. Arguably, he is the greatest living thinker on the contemporary Middle East. (Lest anyone misread this as a slight toward Bernard Lewis, I would say he is the greatest living Middle East historian.)
If the West and the Arab world listened to Ajami rather than Said they would be both far better off.
All of this is by way of introduction to Ajami's latest article, "The Road to Serfdom and the Arab Revolt," published in the Wall Street Journal. He raises the hitherto neglected economic angle on the Arab world's recent history and opens the door to a fascinating comparison with Western history. Ajami also adds an important point in understanding what went wrong in the Arab world.
Though I already knew the basic points he made, Ajami's article inspired me to see these issues in a different way. I reprint here in its entirety:
"The Road to Serfdom and the Arab Revolt"
By Fouad Ajami
Wall Street Journal, July 8, 2011
The late great Austrian economist F.A. Hayek would have seen the Arab Spring for the economic revolt it was right from the start. For generations the Arab populations had bartered away their political freedom for economic protection. They rose in rebellion when it dawned on them that the bargain had not worked, that the system of subsidies, and the promise of equality held out by the autocrats, had proven a colossal failure.
What Hayek would call the Arab world's "road to serfdom" began when the old order of merchants and landholders was upended in the 1950s and '60s by a political and military class that assumed supreme power. The officers and ideologues who came to rule Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Algeria and Yemen were men contemptuous of the marketplace and of economic freedom.
As a rule, they hailed from the underclass and had no regard for the sanctity of wealth and property. They had come to level the economic order, and they put the merchant classes, and those who were the mainstay of the free market, to flight.
It was in the 1950s that the foreign minorities who had figured prominently in the economic life of Egypt after the cotton boom of the 1860s, and who had drawn that country into the web of the world economy, would be sent packing. The Jews and the Greeks and the Italians would take with them their skills and habits. The military class, and the Fabian socialists around them, distrusted free trade and the marketplace and were determined to rule over them or without them.
The Egyptian way would help tilt the balance against the private sector in other Arab lands as well. In Iraq, the Jews of the country, on its soil for well over two millennia, were dispossessed and banished in 1950-51. They had mastered the retail trade and were the most active community in the commerce of Baghdad. Some Shiite merchants stepped into their role, but this was short-lived. Military officers and ideologues of the Baath Party from the "Sunni triangle"—men with little going for them save their lust for wealth and power—came into possession of the country and its oil wealth. They, like their counterparts in Egypt, were believers in central planning and "social equality." By the 1980s, Saddam Hussein, a Sunni thug born from crushing poverty, would come to think of the wealth of the country as his own.
In Libya, a deranged Moammar Gadhafi did Saddam one better. After his 1969 military coup, he demolished the private sector in 1973 and established what he called "Islamic Socialism." Gadhafi's so-called popular democracy basically nationalized the entire economy, rendering the Libyan people superfluous by denying them the skills and the social capital necessary for a viable life.
In his 1944 masterpiece, "The Road to Serfdom," Hayek wrote that in freedom-crushing totalitarian societies "the worst get on top." In words that described the Europe of his time but also capture the contemporary Arab condition, he wrote: "To be a useful assistant in the running of a totalitarian state, it is not enough that a man should be prepared to accept specious justification of vile deeds; he must himself be prepared actively to break every moral rule he
has ever known if this seems necessary to achieve the end set for him. Since it is the supreme leader who alone determines the ends, his instruments must have no moral convictions of their own."
This well describes the decades-long brutal dictatorship of Syria's Hafez al-Assad, and now his son Bashar's rule. It is said that Hafez began his dynasty with little more than a modest officer's salary. His dominion would beget a family of enormous wealth: The Makhloufs, the in-laws of the House of Assad, came to control crucial sectors of the Syrian economy.
The Alawites, the religious sect to which the Assad clan belongs, had been poor peasants and sharecroppers, but political and military power raised them to new heights. The merchants of Damascus and Aleppo, and the landholders in Homs and Hama, were forced to submit to the new order. They could make their peace with the economy of extortion, cut Alawite officers into long-established businesses, or be swept aside.
But a decade or so ago this ruling bargain—subsidies and economic redistribution in return for popular quiescence—began to unravel. The populations in Arab lands had swelled and it had become virtually impossible to guarantee jobs for the young and poorly educated. Economic nationalism, and the war on the marketplace, had betrayed the Arabs. They had the highest unemployment levels among developing nations, the highest jobless rate among the young, and the lowest rates of economic participation among women. The Arab political order was living on borrowed time, and on fear of official terror.
Attempts at "reform" were made. But in the arc of the Arab economies, the public sector of one regime became the private sector of the next. Sons, sons-in-law and nephews of the rulers made a seamless transition into the rigged marketplace when "privatization" was forced onto stagnant enterprises. Of course, this bore no resemblance to market-driven economics in a transparent system. This was crony capitalism of the worst kind, and it was recognized as such by Arab populations.
Indeed, this economic plunder was what finally severed the bond between Hosni Mubarak and an Egyptian population known for its timeless patience and stoicism.
The sad truth of Arab social and economic development is that the free-market reforms and economic liberalization that remade East Asia and Latin America bypassed the Arab world. This is the great challenge of the Arab Spring and of the forces that brought it about. The marketplace has had few, if any, Arab defenders. If the tremendous upheaval at play in Arab lands is driven by a desire to capture state power—and the economic prerogatives that come with political power—the revolution will reproduce the failures of the past.
In Yemen, a schoolteacher named Amani Ali, worn out by the poverty and anarchy of that poorest of Arab states, recently gave voice to a sentiment that has been the autocrats' prop: "We don't want change," he said. "We don't want freedom. We want food and safety." True wisdom, and an end to their road to serfdom, will only come when the Arab people make the connection between economic and political liberty.
Mr. Ajami, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is co-chairman of Hoover's Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.
Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Showing posts with label Lessons of the Past. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lessons of the Past. Show all posts
Friday, July 22, 2011
Thursday, July 21, 2011
The "Freedom-Loving Rebels" Become Reactionary Oppressors
By Barry Rubin
One of the best ways to understand our current mess in intellectual life is through what I call the three option situation. In the past, something has been unfair (position one). What should be done according to democracy and Enlightenment values is to correct it by fairness (position two). But instead the dominant ideology wants to make it unfair in the opposite direction (position three). Thus, the situation remains arguably just as bad instead of being made better. The dominant idea of justice is merely to switch victims rather than try to make nobody a victim....
Read more
One of the best ways to understand our current mess in intellectual life is through what I call the three option situation. In the past, something has been unfair (position one). What should be done according to democracy and Enlightenment values is to correct it by fairness (position two). But instead the dominant ideology wants to make it unfair in the opposite direction (position three). Thus, the situation remains arguably just as bad instead of being made better. The dominant idea of justice is merely to switch victims rather than try to make nobody a victim....
Read more
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
The Federal Bureaucracy Is A White Elephant, Not A Sacred Cow
By Barry Rubin
As a native-born Washingtonian (Columbia Hospital for Women) whose family arrived in the city when President Theodore Roosevelt was in office, I note an omission in all the budget/economic debate that amazes me.
It is scarcely a secret in Washington that Federal government employees generally don't work real hard. Sure, that's what people will say when they're interviewed in the mass media or the propaganda coming from the Federal employees unions. But people in the nation's capital know that isn't true. There is massive over-staffing, make-work, and totally unnecessary spending. People justify themselves because they run "projects" and enforce regulations. But most of these projects don't actually achieve anything while many of the
regulations either bring no change for the better or actually make things worse.
Read more
As a native-born Washingtonian (Columbia Hospital for Women) whose family arrived in the city when President Theodore Roosevelt was in office, I note an omission in all the budget/economic debate that amazes me.
It is scarcely a secret in Washington that Federal government employees generally don't work real hard. Sure, that's what people will say when they're interviewed in the mass media or the propaganda coming from the Federal employees unions. But people in the nation's capital know that isn't true. There is massive over-staffing, make-work, and totally unnecessary spending. People justify themselves because they run "projects" and enforce regulations. But most of these projects don't actually achieve anything while many of the
regulations either bring no change for the better or actually make things worse.
Read more
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Obama Era Updates Famous Charles Atlas, “97 Pound Weakling” Ad
By Barry Rubin
How would the famous Charles Atlas, 97-pound weakling ad be rewritten in the Obama era as a foreign policy statement?
One of my favorite satirical pieces that I've ever written.
Read
How would the famous Charles Atlas, 97-pound weakling ad be rewritten in the Obama era as a foreign policy statement?
One of my favorite satirical pieces that I've ever written.
Read
Friday, July 8, 2011
The Flytilla Farce And The International Campaign For Repressive Dictatorship and Against Israel
By Barry Rubin
After the failure of the Gaza flotilla, Western leftists and their Arab, often Islamist, allies took up a new way to harass Israel, dubbed the “flytilla.” Hundreds of protestors sought to fly were to fly into Israel’s sole international airport and demonstrate along with radical Israeli supporters.
An analysis and the breaking story straight from Ben-Gurion Airport
read more
After the failure of the Gaza flotilla, Western leftists and their Arab, often Islamist, allies took up a new way to harass Israel, dubbed the “flytilla.” Hundreds of protestors sought to fly were to fly into Israel’s sole international airport and demonstrate along with radical Israeli supporters.
An analysis and the breaking story straight from Ben-Gurion Airport
read more
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Gallup Poll Spinning; In Fact Jewish Democrats Are Far More Disaffected From Obama As All Democrats
By Barry Rubin
Yid with a Lid is one of the best bloggers around and in this article he shows it. Briefly, Lid took a Gallup poll claiming that Jewish support for Obama was comparable to that of all Americans--and still quite high--to show how the figures were completely misleading. In fact, Jewish Democrats are far more likely than other Democrats to have turned away from Obama. It is reasonable to think that this is largely a result of his policy toward Israel.
Yid with a Lid is one of the best bloggers around and in this article he shows it. Briefly, Lid took a Gallup poll claiming that Jewish support for Obama was comparable to that of all Americans--and still quite high--to show how the figures were completely misleading. In fact, Jewish Democrats are far more likely than other Democrats to have turned away from Obama. It is reasonable to think that this is largely a result of his policy toward Israel.
Sunday, July 3, 2011
How I Won the Civil War, Or At Least A Small Part of It
By Barry Rubin
“Saddle up,” said the colonel. For those with horses that was a literal order but for my Third U.S. Regiment, we marched across the Gettysburg hills. It’s July 3, 2011, but feels like July 3, 1863.
A Union army uniform, dark blue heavy wool jacket, light blue wool pants, forage cap, and heavy Springfield musket, is not the best garb for a humid 90 degree heat, especially accompanied by heavy shoes, cartridge bag, full canteen (in my case, ice tea), huge bayonet, and haversack for personal possessions, .
The artillery opened up on both sides with a deafening roar and pre-placed explosions blew up as “shells” hit. Thousands of spectators watched from the grandstands. Up to our detail rode a captain with orders to join dismounted cavalry skirmishers between the lines, hold off the Confederates as long as possible, then fall back to the reserves. If the Confederates broke through, we’d charge and push them back.
Read more
“Saddle up,” said the colonel. For those with horses that was a literal order but for my Third U.S. Regiment, we marched across the Gettysburg hills. It’s July 3, 2011, but feels like July 3, 1863.
A Union army uniform, dark blue heavy wool jacket, light blue wool pants, forage cap, and heavy Springfield musket, is not the best garb for a humid 90 degree heat, especially accompanied by heavy shoes, cartridge bag, full canteen (in my case, ice tea), huge bayonet, and haversack for personal possessions, .
The artillery opened up on both sides with a deafening roar and pre-placed explosions blew up as “shells” hit. Thousands of spectators watched from the grandstands. Up to our detail rode a captain with orders to join dismounted cavalry skirmishers between the lines, hold off the Confederates as long as possible, then fall back to the reserves. If the Confederates broke through, we’d charge and push them back.
Read more
Friday, June 24, 2011
The Scene of the Crime: I Accidentally Stumble Into A Hotbed of Educational Indoctrination
By Barry Rubin
My son took a computer design course in a summer camp that was held in an Anglican private high school in the wealthiest Washington suburb. Today was the last day, when students demonstrated the games they’d designed. So I went for the presentations by the kids. As I sat in the classroom, usually used by the school for teaching history, I was shocked but not surprised.
Remember, this was a completely random classroom in a random private school that I saw simply because a computer class was being held there during the summer. So what did I see?
You can't make this stuff up. Indeed, it was like something the Washington Post would insist that Ann Coulter made up probably a few minutes from where its editors are living! Don't miss this inventory of what's in a private school history classroom.
Read more
My son took a computer design course in a summer camp that was held in an Anglican private high school in the wealthiest Washington suburb. Today was the last day, when students demonstrated the games they’d designed. So I went for the presentations by the kids. As I sat in the classroom, usually used by the school for teaching history, I was shocked but not surprised.
Remember, this was a completely random classroom in a random private school that I saw simply because a computer class was being held there during the summer. So what did I see?
You can't make this stuff up. Indeed, it was like something the Washington Post would insist that Ann Coulter made up probably a few minutes from where its editors are living! Don't miss this inventory of what's in a private school history classroom.
Read more
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Melanie Phillips: The Best Presentation I've Seen on the Current Mess in Intellectual Life
By Barry Rubin
I cannot possibly praise Melanie Phillips highly enough. She presents the basic problems of the Western debate and its rampant insanity with brilliance and clarity. I urge you to watch this brief lecture of hers and promise that you will learn a great deal and understand a great deal better.
I cannot possibly praise Melanie Phillips highly enough. She presents the basic problems of the Western debate and its rampant insanity with brilliance and clarity. I urge you to watch this brief lecture of hers and promise that you will learn a great deal and understand a great deal better.
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
What I Have Learned In My Long Visit to America
This article is published on PajamasMedia. I have added some additional material.
By Barry Rubin
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand...."
--Yeats, "The Second Coming"
What's most scary in America today may be the financial deficit and it may be government policies, but for me the scariest thing is the way that traditional American pragmatism, an open-minded search for truth, the reliability of the media and of academia, has virtually disappeared in many cases.
While this certainly doesn't apply to all schools, the indoctrination that I've seen in one elementary school shocked me. If you really hear what eleven-year-olds are saying to each other you'd be amazed: accusing each other of being racists at the drop of a hat; thinking man-made global warming is the world's biggest problem, viewing America as evil.
If that happens in an educational system--especially in universities--indoctrination means that the more "educated" someone is, the more "stupid" they become. The decline of professional ethics--journalists are supposed to be accurate and fair despite their personal views; professors should seek truth wherever that leads them, be open-minded, and represent accurately sources and evidence--is staggering.
There are hundreds of examples of how this works and I see it every day.
The fact that Israel's public opinion and expert opinion can be totally misrepresented by the mass media from being anti-Obama, pro-Bibi to being pro-Obama, anti-Bibi is frightening.
The fact that during months of massive discussion of the Muslim Brotherhood it has been virtually impossible to find in the public debate on the big media, in academia, etc. that this is a radical Islamist anti-American group that favors violence is terrifying.
I'm sure you could all add examples from domestic issues and other international stories.
Consider California, the traditional land of optimism and creativity (if also fantasy). In travelling there I found despair. The massive deficit is just being ignored, as is the way in which excessive regulation is driving people and enterprises out. A new governor is elected who typifies everything that's wrong.
It's as if America--the country that was always the most ready to face facts and treasure an open, fair discussion--has lost its grip on reality.
I realize, of course that there are many people, perhaps half of the population, who aren't like that. They've found other sources of information and hold to their views. Among the elite, however, the people certain in their superiority and who genuinely are possessing more power, the situation is proportionately worse.
Increasingly a debate over facts and evidence has turned into a slander fest over the personal identity and supposed opinion of the speaker. Once someone has been identified as "conservative" or not thinking that Obama is great; once someone can be libelled as "racist" (i.e., if they criticize Obama in many cases); Islamophobic, etc., that person's views are discounted completely. And, of course, that means that anyone who disagrees with those views has a great incentive to use this technique to "win" any argument. It works.
Before one talk in a certain institution, one of the sponsors asked my host in horror and fear whether I might be a "conservative," which apparently was a disqualification for being allowed to lecture. He told the man to wait and see. Afterward, the man said that he couldn't tell from my talk what my views were.
Yes, that's precisely what I try to do when talking about the Middle East. My personal preferences are not important. What is important are the facts and trying to read them accurately. When I was in graduate school (among the last to study before the contemporary order took hold?) almost everyone took that for granted. Two of my teachers were passionately hostile to Israel (one actively supported a Palestinian terrorist group), yet they would never have dreamed of systematically indoctrinating students or grading based on the student's political views.
Yet that kind of approach is out of fashion today.
Recently, I have been involved in a number of exchanges in which I presented facts only to be told they are biased opinions. Interlocutors cited no evidence or even gave any specific examples of how what was said wasn't accurate. They don't have to do so any more since feeling has become truth and identity has become proof. To get them to understand that to make an argument one must have evidence, not just a personal feeling or can put a label on the person making the statement, is difficult.
When I appeared--for the first (and possibly only) time--on Fox, my warnings about the Egyptian revolution turning into something very bad was discussed twice in media organs. In one case, the only point was to try to ridicule me for underestimating the size of the anti-Mubarak demonstrations (I was trying to explain that only a small segment of Egypt's population had participated in a movement largely confined to a sector of the Cairo population) and in the other case (a Jewish press agency no less) I was attacked for being an Israeli daring to remark on an upheaval taking place in a country about 60 miles from my home.
That's it. Nobody in the mass media took into consideration anything said or written in Arabic by the Muslim Brotherhood leadership; nobody investigated the April 6 Youth Movement, which worked with the Brotherhood and had a clearly radical background; and so on. In other words, nobody in the U.S. mass media even discussed these issues. There was no debate, only a political line.
Even being proven right by events doesn't help. In April, many admitted that what people like myself were saying about the Egyptian revolution was true. Yet this prompted no reconsideration of basic beliefs or of the relative credibility of various "experts."
Here's the bottom line: No matter how bad the economic situation, leadership, or policies might be, a country can recover if the people and elite are able to define the real problems and the real solutions. If the connection with reality is lost, all hope is gone. That, in a sense, is the Middle East's problem. Increasingly, it seems to be Europe and America's problem.
The way cults work is to isolate people from reality and bombard them with a single viewpoint. The victim is cut off from other influences by being told that they are evil and thus to be disregarded. In some ways, that is what's been happening to America in recent years.
One weakness of this structure is that the arguments it makes and the claims puts forward are so ridiculous that if exposed to articulate and reasoned responses--often, even for a mere sixty-second period--it quickly collapses logically. Its strength is that it has such strong defenses against such exposure.
Another weakness is that the use of institutions for politically motivated exploitation must remain invisible. If someone understands that universities, mass media, and other trusted institutions have been distorted out of their historical, democratic, and American norms then that's the beginning of seeing through deception.
Basically, there are three ways that this system can be broken:
First, the power of ideas,which is why many perspectives are banned from campuses and mass media; distorted; and the places where they do appear discredited. Alternative ideas must have a way of reaching those who don't already accept them.
Second, the power of experience, in which events show dominant ideas and policies don't accurately interpret the situation and don't work. Experience can bypass media and schools and other institutions but may also be mediated by them.
Third, elections, in which the number of people who think each way is actually counted, rather than merely "spun" by institutions controlled by the dominant ideology that is generated by a minority.
Having lived outside the United States for most of the time during the last twenty years, and soon to leave again, I have seen America from near and far. To have seen it so transformed close up without having watched the daily "fundamental transformation" bewilders me. Yet people who have lived through every minute of this process also don't seem to be able to explain it, or at least each explains what went wrong in a different way.
Many think nothing has changed; many more believe all the changes have been for the better.
It's too early to count America out. The reality of its exceptionalism--yes, viewing America from outside makes that reality more evident--and its people's strengths might well pull it out of this swamp.
Yet in thinking about the future I feel like the British military attache in Istanbul, whose letter home I once found in the archives. It was spring 1941, 70 years ago almost to the exact day. Nazi Germany was dominant in Europe and steadily marching forward.
The city was deceptively serene and beautiful, he wrote:
"Every garden has a red Judas tree in it, and it's a wonderful sight: even across the Bosphorus the Asiatic side is a blaze of red silhouetted against the black cypress trees of the vast cemeteries." He had just hosted a successful cocktail party with every delicacy of food and plenty to drink. Anyone would think life was perfect.
Yet he thought this idyll would not last. Once the Germans rested a bit, he predicted:
"A smashing attack will be staged.... I think we have at least a month....I listened to Churchill's broadcast last night, which didn't hold out much comfort. I don't mean that I have the slightest doubt about the ultimate end, but it does look a hell of a way off."
I, too, have no doubt about the ultimate end. But, yes, it seems too far off.
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Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal, and a featured columnist at PajamasMedia http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/ His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is http://www.gloria-center.org. His PajamaMedia columns are mirrored and other articles available at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/.
By Barry Rubin
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand...."
--Yeats, "The Second Coming"
What's most scary in America today may be the financial deficit and it may be government policies, but for me the scariest thing is the way that traditional American pragmatism, an open-minded search for truth, the reliability of the media and of academia, has virtually disappeared in many cases.
While this certainly doesn't apply to all schools, the indoctrination that I've seen in one elementary school shocked me. If you really hear what eleven-year-olds are saying to each other you'd be amazed: accusing each other of being racists at the drop of a hat; thinking man-made global warming is the world's biggest problem, viewing America as evil.
If that happens in an educational system--especially in universities--indoctrination means that the more "educated" someone is, the more "stupid" they become. The decline of professional ethics--journalists are supposed to be accurate and fair despite their personal views; professors should seek truth wherever that leads them, be open-minded, and represent accurately sources and evidence--is staggering.
There are hundreds of examples of how this works and I see it every day.
The fact that Israel's public opinion and expert opinion can be totally misrepresented by the mass media from being anti-Obama, pro-Bibi to being pro-Obama, anti-Bibi is frightening.
The fact that during months of massive discussion of the Muslim Brotherhood it has been virtually impossible to find in the public debate on the big media, in academia, etc. that this is a radical Islamist anti-American group that favors violence is terrifying.
I'm sure you could all add examples from domestic issues and other international stories.
Consider California, the traditional land of optimism and creativity (if also fantasy). In travelling there I found despair. The massive deficit is just being ignored, as is the way in which excessive regulation is driving people and enterprises out. A new governor is elected who typifies everything that's wrong.
It's as if America--the country that was always the most ready to face facts and treasure an open, fair discussion--has lost its grip on reality.
I realize, of course that there are many people, perhaps half of the population, who aren't like that. They've found other sources of information and hold to their views. Among the elite, however, the people certain in their superiority and who genuinely are possessing more power, the situation is proportionately worse.
Increasingly a debate over facts and evidence has turned into a slander fest over the personal identity and supposed opinion of the speaker. Once someone has been identified as "conservative" or not thinking that Obama is great; once someone can be libelled as "racist" (i.e., if they criticize Obama in many cases); Islamophobic, etc., that person's views are discounted completely. And, of course, that means that anyone who disagrees with those views has a great incentive to use this technique to "win" any argument. It works.
Before one talk in a certain institution, one of the sponsors asked my host in horror and fear whether I might be a "conservative," which apparently was a disqualification for being allowed to lecture. He told the man to wait and see. Afterward, the man said that he couldn't tell from my talk what my views were.
Yes, that's precisely what I try to do when talking about the Middle East. My personal preferences are not important. What is important are the facts and trying to read them accurately. When I was in graduate school (among the last to study before the contemporary order took hold?) almost everyone took that for granted. Two of my teachers were passionately hostile to Israel (one actively supported a Palestinian terrorist group), yet they would never have dreamed of systematically indoctrinating students or grading based on the student's political views.
Yet that kind of approach is out of fashion today.
Recently, I have been involved in a number of exchanges in which I presented facts only to be told they are biased opinions. Interlocutors cited no evidence or even gave any specific examples of how what was said wasn't accurate. They don't have to do so any more since feeling has become truth and identity has become proof. To get them to understand that to make an argument one must have evidence, not just a personal feeling or can put a label on the person making the statement, is difficult.
When I appeared--for the first (and possibly only) time--on Fox, my warnings about the Egyptian revolution turning into something very bad was discussed twice in media organs. In one case, the only point was to try to ridicule me for underestimating the size of the anti-Mubarak demonstrations (I was trying to explain that only a small segment of Egypt's population had participated in a movement largely confined to a sector of the Cairo population) and in the other case (a Jewish press agency no less) I was attacked for being an Israeli daring to remark on an upheaval taking place in a country about 60 miles from my home.
That's it. Nobody in the mass media took into consideration anything said or written in Arabic by the Muslim Brotherhood leadership; nobody investigated the April 6 Youth Movement, which worked with the Brotherhood and had a clearly radical background; and so on. In other words, nobody in the U.S. mass media even discussed these issues. There was no debate, only a political line.
Even being proven right by events doesn't help. In April, many admitted that what people like myself were saying about the Egyptian revolution was true. Yet this prompted no reconsideration of basic beliefs or of the relative credibility of various "experts."
Here's the bottom line: No matter how bad the economic situation, leadership, or policies might be, a country can recover if the people and elite are able to define the real problems and the real solutions. If the connection with reality is lost, all hope is gone. That, in a sense, is the Middle East's problem. Increasingly, it seems to be Europe and America's problem.
The way cults work is to isolate people from reality and bombard them with a single viewpoint. The victim is cut off from other influences by being told that they are evil and thus to be disregarded. In some ways, that is what's been happening to America in recent years.
One weakness of this structure is that the arguments it makes and the claims puts forward are so ridiculous that if exposed to articulate and reasoned responses--often, even for a mere sixty-second period--it quickly collapses logically. Its strength is that it has such strong defenses against such exposure.
Another weakness is that the use of institutions for politically motivated exploitation must remain invisible. If someone understands that universities, mass media, and other trusted institutions have been distorted out of their historical, democratic, and American norms then that's the beginning of seeing through deception.
Basically, there are three ways that this system can be broken:
First, the power of ideas,which is why many perspectives are banned from campuses and mass media; distorted; and the places where they do appear discredited. Alternative ideas must have a way of reaching those who don't already accept them.
Second, the power of experience, in which events show dominant ideas and policies don't accurately interpret the situation and don't work. Experience can bypass media and schools and other institutions but may also be mediated by them.
Third, elections, in which the number of people who think each way is actually counted, rather than merely "spun" by institutions controlled by the dominant ideology that is generated by a minority.
Having lived outside the United States for most of the time during the last twenty years, and soon to leave again, I have seen America from near and far. To have seen it so transformed close up without having watched the daily "fundamental transformation" bewilders me. Yet people who have lived through every minute of this process also don't seem to be able to explain it, or at least each explains what went wrong in a different way.
Many think nothing has changed; many more believe all the changes have been for the better.
It's too early to count America out. The reality of its exceptionalism--yes, viewing America from outside makes that reality more evident--and its people's strengths might well pull it out of this swamp.
Yet in thinking about the future I feel like the British military attache in Istanbul, whose letter home I once found in the archives. It was spring 1941, 70 years ago almost to the exact day. Nazi Germany was dominant in Europe and steadily marching forward.
The city was deceptively serene and beautiful, he wrote:
"Every garden has a red Judas tree in it, and it's a wonderful sight: even across the Bosphorus the Asiatic side is a blaze of red silhouetted against the black cypress trees of the vast cemeteries." He had just hosted a successful cocktail party with every delicacy of food and plenty to drink. Anyone would think life was perfect.
Yet he thought this idyll would not last. Once the Germans rested a bit, he predicted:
"A smashing attack will be staged.... I think we have at least a month....I listened to Churchill's broadcast last night, which didn't hold out much comfort. I don't mean that I have the slightest doubt about the ultimate end, but it does look a hell of a way off."
I, too, have no doubt about the ultimate end. But, yes, it seems too far off.
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Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal, and a featured columnist at PajamasMedia http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/ His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is http://www.gloria-center.org. His PajamaMedia columns are mirrored and other articles available at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/.
Monday, June 6, 2011
My Education
This article is published in PajamasMedia
By Barry Rubin
When I was getting a great education--and at a public American school no less--they made us read Shakespeare and Dickens; Wordsworth and Keats; Hemmingway and Faulkner. I found it boring at the time and often didn't understand the material.
But today it is in my head still.
At the time, I understood they were doing this because these were deemed timeless classics. I also knew that the idea was to make us well-rounded people, not just narrow technocrats, so that we would have richer lives.
Now I understand three other things as well.
First, this study connected us with the civilization's and country's past so that we would appreciate what had been accomplished and how that success had been achieved. One key factor in that success had been pluralism, the opposite of what's now called multiculturalism. The idea was to build a strong common foundation and then let people have different sub-cultures as they wished on the upper stories of the structure. That works. The Tower of Babel didn't and won't.
Second, that these works are classics precisely because they provide timeless life lessons. The basic things we have to do in life on a daily and individual basis: dealing with other people, acting morally, coping with success and failure, love and hate, has not changed so dramatically in centuries. The experiences of Shakespeare's characters or those of Dickens can really teach us a lot about how to behave--and not to behave.
I should add, that even in the twenty-first century religion is the only institution that systematically teaches us how to be a moral person. With all of its faults, religion has many centuries of accumulated wisdom that has been tried and tested. That's why even atheists should study religion and get a lot from it even if they believe that this knowledge is wholly human generated. And that's why fads and cults don't work.
Of course, too, a lot of education has to take place at home and through the young person's own efforts outside of school. When one sees all the highly educated people in America who never do anything to develop their kid's intellectual growth it is truly astounding.
Third, that any kind of learning contributes to every other kind of learning or understanding. Knowing Shakespeare, Dickens, or Keats helps me understand contemporary politics, including Middle East politics, much better. The best piece of political analysis I've ever read is Shakepeare's "Julius Caesar." Scientists need to understand the concepts of liberty and search for truth that underpin their methods. Every field and type of person benefits in different ways from understanding that heritage.
When I think about the contemporary educational system, I shudder to think what the next generations of indoctrinated and deprived students will produce. BUT precisely because I received such a good education I know that similar fears have been voiced by almost every previous generation in history.
By Barry Rubin
When I was getting a great education--and at a public American school no less--they made us read Shakespeare and Dickens; Wordsworth and Keats; Hemmingway and Faulkner. I found it boring at the time and often didn't understand the material.
But today it is in my head still.
At the time, I understood they were doing this because these were deemed timeless classics. I also knew that the idea was to make us well-rounded people, not just narrow technocrats, so that we would have richer lives.
Now I understand three other things as well.
First, this study connected us with the civilization's and country's past so that we would appreciate what had been accomplished and how that success had been achieved. One key factor in that success had been pluralism, the opposite of what's now called multiculturalism. The idea was to build a strong common foundation and then let people have different sub-cultures as they wished on the upper stories of the structure. That works. The Tower of Babel didn't and won't.
Second, that these works are classics precisely because they provide timeless life lessons. The basic things we have to do in life on a daily and individual basis: dealing with other people, acting morally, coping with success and failure, love and hate, has not changed so dramatically in centuries. The experiences of Shakespeare's characters or those of Dickens can really teach us a lot about how to behave--and not to behave.
I should add, that even in the twenty-first century religion is the only institution that systematically teaches us how to be a moral person. With all of its faults, religion has many centuries of accumulated wisdom that has been tried and tested. That's why even atheists should study religion and get a lot from it even if they believe that this knowledge is wholly human generated. And that's why fads and cults don't work.
Of course, too, a lot of education has to take place at home and through the young person's own efforts outside of school. When one sees all the highly educated people in America who never do anything to develop their kid's intellectual growth it is truly astounding.
Third, that any kind of learning contributes to every other kind of learning or understanding. Knowing Shakespeare, Dickens, or Keats helps me understand contemporary politics, including Middle East politics, much better. The best piece of political analysis I've ever read is Shakepeare's "Julius Caesar." Scientists need to understand the concepts of liberty and search for truth that underpin their methods. Every field and type of person benefits in different ways from understanding that heritage.
When I think about the contemporary educational system, I shudder to think what the next generations of indoctrinated and deprived students will produce. BUT precisely because I received such a good education I know that similar fears have been voiced by almost every previous generation in history.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
The Key to Obama’s Foreign Policy: The World Turned Upside Down
This article is published on PajamasMedia.
By Barry Rubin
“If buttercups buzz'd after the bee,
If boats were on land, churches on sea,
If ponies rode men and if grass ate the cows,
And cats should be chased into holes by the mouse....
If summer were spring and the other way round,
Then all the world would be upside down.”
--“The World Turned Upside Down,” English ballad, 1643
I think I’ve made a breakthrough in understanding President Barack Obama’s foreign policy of punishing friends, rewarding enemies, and taking risks toward empowering enemies by bashing friends. It isn’t that Obama is a Muslim or a Marxist; it’s that...
He is America's first (and hopefully last) 1960s' New Left president.
Think of how the American left looked at the Cold War. For them, the phrase “Free World” was a joke. America’s allies were often repressive dictators. In Europe, even democratic states like Britain and France were, or until recently were, colonial powers.
Vietnam: America supported South Vietnam (boo) and fought North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front (LBJ, how many kids have you killed today; Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win).
Latin America: In Chile, America supported the army (boo!) and fought President Salvador Allende and the Communists (yeah!). Not to mention those military dictatorships who murdered peasants in South America and killed Che Guevara. And how about those Sandinistas. They wanted land reform and to help the poor and the United States plundered them for United Fruit and other greedy capitalists.
Great Britain: America supported Britain and thought Winston Churchill was a hero but what about colonialism (Get his bust out of the White House!)? Say, in a country like Kenya? Mau-maus (possibly Obama's grandfather) who were called "terrorists," good guys; British, bad guys.
Middle East: America supported the bad guys (Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia) against the good guys (PLO, Egypt, Syria, Iraq).
The Communists: had their shortcomings but at least they wanted to help people, right? And if the USSR was old-fashioned and degenerated at least there were a lot of cool new revolutionaries.
Africa: Obama's own father opposed a generally U.S.-backed Kenyan regime. In theory, he was a leftist and a man of the people. In reality, he was a womanizing, alcoholic and corrupt politician, just the kind of "progressive" Third World politician who pretends to represent the voice of the masses.
And so on.
So the leftist view has been that American allies were bad guys. And since America was also the bad guy, American allies were doubly bad guys.
In contrast, those opposing U.S. policy or allies—notably, Latin American guerrillas; Fidel Castro, the Viet Cong (or National Liberation Front if you wish); Mao Zedong; Che Guevara (remember that Che Guevara poster in the Obama election headquarters in Arizona, was it?); Patrice Lumumba; and so on and so forth were heroes.
Pakistan has it both ways. On one hand, it is an American “ally” but since it just takes money, hides al-Qaida leaders, and sponsors cross-border terrorism against India, it is enough of an enemy to receive favored treatment.
So, the bad guys to America were the good guys and the good guys to America were the bad guys.
I’m putting this in slangy language but I’m very serious.
And for someone raised personally and politically the way Obama was (hat-tip, Stanley Kurtz and Dinesh D’Souza) this was taken for granted.
Thus, be it England or Egypt or Israel or Colombia, if you are partnered with the United States it proves you are bad. And for Venezuela, Syria, or the Palestinian Authority, the more hostile you are to America the better you are.
Hence, the business of American policy should be to win over the heroic guerrillas who fight on behalf of the wretched of the earth (reference: Che Guevara, Franz Fanon, The Communist “Internationale”), these are the people who—as they say in Hollywood—we’d like to be in business with.
Consider Obama’s profound disrespect for realpolitik as evidenced in his State Department speech:
“For decades, the United States has pursued a set of core interests in the region: countering terrorism and stopping the spread of nuclear weapons; securing the free flow of commerce and safe-guarding the security of the region; standing up for Israel’s security and pursuing Arab-Israeli peace.”
He says that the United States will continue to do these things. But listen to the subtle differences in that list:
“We will continue to do these things, with the firm belief that America’s interests are not hostile to people’s hopes; they’re essential to them. We believe that no one benefits from a nuclear arms race in the region, or al Qaeda’s brutal attacks. We believe people everywhere would see their economies crippled by a cut-off in energy supplies. As we did in the Gulf War, we will not tolerate aggression across borders, and we will keep our commitments to friends and partners.”
For decades, the United States wanted mainly to keep hostile countries from getting nuclear weapons, while Obama’s policy is to put the priority on eliminating nuclear weapons (including those of the United States) entirely. “Countering terrorism” becomes stopping al-Qaeda! How about stopping Hamas and Hizballah or the Muslim Brotherhood? Nope. Not part of the policy. “Standing up for Israel’s security” becomes the generic “we will keep our commitments to friends and partners.”
Tolerate aggression across borders? But the Obama Administration does tolerate Syrian aggression against Lebanon, Israel, and Iraq; and Iranian aggression in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and against Israel. Soon it will be tolerating Egyptian aggression against Israel.
Perhaps he is referring here to Israel’s holding on to part of the West Bank captured in 1967 as aggression across borders? He certainly has—in contrast to the other cases—tried to do something about that!
Talking about “standing up for Israel’s security” is reserved for speeches.to AIPAC.
In addition, however:
“We must acknowledge that a strategy based solely upon the narrow pursuit of these interests will not fill an empty stomach or allow someone to speak their mind. Moreover, failure to speak to the broader aspirations of ordinary people will only feed the suspicion that has festered for years that the United States pursues our interests at their expense. Given that this mistrust runs both ways –- as Americans have been seared by hostage-taking and violent rhetoric and terrorist attacks that have killed thousands of our citizens -– a failure to change our approach threatens a deepening spiral of division between the United States and the Arab world.”
Yes, the old U.S. policy conducted under lots of presidents, both Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, were focused on U.S. interests. Now, however, Obama defines this as "narrow." The United States must show itself in favor of “the broader aspirations of ordinary people.”
And in the twenty-first century who could be cooler than Facebook Kids, those liberty-loving rascals rebelling against an American-backed dictatorship. Don’t we want to be on their side? We cares about national interests? What could possibly go wrong? The clerical-reactionaries (not that there’s anything wrong with that) couldn’t possibly win against the progressive (Progressive?) forces of history. Power to the people!
This, however, raises two questions:
First, which aspirations?
Second, as expressed by whom?
Suppose the aspirations of the people are against U.S. interests? Example, in the early Cold War the United States covertly intervened in French and Italian politics to make sure Communist parties didn’t win. Did that thwart the aspirations of the people? Quite possibly. Should it have been done: You bet!
The United States has believed that it has no interest in promoting the anti-American aspirations of people. What if the aspirations are to have radical Islamism? What if the majority wants to persecute Christians? What if the majority wants to expel U.S. influence from the region? What if the majority wants to wipe Israel off the map and commit genocide on the Jews?
So no, U.S. policy often needs to oppose the aspirations of the people or certain people. When possible, it does so because it believes that by doing so they will be better able to fill their stomachs (example: Communism as a system failed to do so) and speak their minds (ditto).
But ultimately its goal is not to promote the aspirations of other people. Its main priority should be to promote the aspirations of the American people. Yet if America is not an exceptional, better country, but often a worse one; national identity is out of date, and promoting your own country's interests is a form of racism; if America is rich and greedy, taking more than its share of resources and causing global warming because its living standards are too high, then the aspirations of Egyptians or Venezuelans are equally or more important than those of the American people.
What other wordview could imagine something like "Cap and Trade" in which the U.S. taxpayers paid other countries for the right to use their own air? This is a transfer of wealth from America to others, in no way in the American interest or the interests of Americans.
Remember, Obama is desperate to be popular abroad. And he views popularity as giving the people abroad what they want, whether or not that’s in U.S. interests. If, for example, the “people” of the Middle East don’t want the United States to support Israel, then according to his worldview it shouldn’t.
Let’s face it: If not for the State Department's desperate intervention, Obama would be campaigning for the overthrow of the Jordanian and Egyptian governments. And at the same time, fighting against seeking the overthrow of the Iranian and Syrian governments.
It's not just Israel, though that country is first on the list. If you are a U.S. ally there must be something wrong with you. And if you are a U.S. enemy there must be something right with you. Or, perhaps I should say, "left" with you.
Obama says:
“I believed then -– and I believe now -– that we have a stake not just in the stability of nations, but in the self-determination of individuals. The status quo is not sustainable. Societies held together by fear and repression may offer the illusion of stability for a time, but they are built upon fault lines that will eventually tear asunder.”
So Obama is on the side of the “masses,” whatever the masses ”want.” But conservatives and liberals in power during past presidencies generally understood that authoritarian regimes and totalitarian movements pretended to represent the masses and through good organizing and rigid discipline pushed themselves to the head of the line.
Those who remember Nazism and Fascism and Communism, not to mention the dozens of Third World dictators who pretended to be the voice of the masses, know this. Such experiences and education did not shape Obama. Perhaps Bill Ayers could explain to him how front groups and revolutionary vanguards and the dictatorship of the proletariat work.
Didn't the Communists, Nazis, Fascists, Japanese militarists, Ba'thists, Nasserists, Fidelistas, the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, Tupamaros, Sandinistas, and all those other groups represent their people's aspirations? We could deny it but certainly at the time that seemed to be true.
So why isn't it true for Hamas, Fatah, Hizballah, the Muslim Brotherhood, the dictator in Venezuela and the one in Syria?
Well, we know that this money and self-sacrifice to help the masses of people abroad usually just puts money into the Swiss bank accounts of the dictators and their supporters, the already fat elite. What percentage of U.S. aid money to the Palestinians actually benefited "ordinary" Palestinians? How much will the destruction of American oil-drilling and sending money to Brazil so they can produce oil going to benefit the "ordinary" Brazilian? It certainly won't benefit the ordinary American.
But to return to my main theme, for Obama the world is upside-down from the historic American political mainstream. Again, I stress, both liberal and conservative. For him, the friends of America are bad; the enemies of America are good. He must win over the enemies of America—and “the people” in other countries—by showing him that he appreciates that idea.
From this ideology, rather than some conspiracy or secret identity, he does much harm. And no matter how much experience he accumulates Obama isn’t going to learn any better.
In this world, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is a "reformer" while elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a reactionary who doesn't want peace.
To him, America has been on the wrong side. Now it will be on the “right” side. And, unfortunately, that side is the enemy side. The enemy of America and, ultimately, of the people it claims to represent.
This is not some minor mistake. It is his worldview.
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal, and a featured columnist at PajamasMedia http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/ His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is http://www.gloria-center.org. His PajamaMedia columns are mirrored and other articles available at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com
By Barry Rubin
“If buttercups buzz'd after the bee,
If boats were on land, churches on sea,
If ponies rode men and if grass ate the cows,
And cats should be chased into holes by the mouse....
If summer were spring and the other way round,
Then all the world would be upside down.”
--“The World Turned Upside Down,” English ballad, 1643
I think I’ve made a breakthrough in understanding President Barack Obama’s foreign policy of punishing friends, rewarding enemies, and taking risks toward empowering enemies by bashing friends. It isn’t that Obama is a Muslim or a Marxist; it’s that...
He is America's first (and hopefully last) 1960s' New Left president.
Think of how the American left looked at the Cold War. For them, the phrase “Free World” was a joke. America’s allies were often repressive dictators. In Europe, even democratic states like Britain and France were, or until recently were, colonial powers.
Vietnam: America supported South Vietnam (boo) and fought North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front (LBJ, how many kids have you killed today; Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win).
Latin America: In Chile, America supported the army (boo!) and fought President Salvador Allende and the Communists (yeah!). Not to mention those military dictatorships who murdered peasants in South America and killed Che Guevara. And how about those Sandinistas. They wanted land reform and to help the poor and the United States plundered them for United Fruit and other greedy capitalists.
Great Britain: America supported Britain and thought Winston Churchill was a hero but what about colonialism (Get his bust out of the White House!)? Say, in a country like Kenya? Mau-maus (possibly Obama's grandfather) who were called "terrorists," good guys; British, bad guys.
Middle East: America supported the bad guys (Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia) against the good guys (PLO, Egypt, Syria, Iraq).
The Communists: had their shortcomings but at least they wanted to help people, right? And if the USSR was old-fashioned and degenerated at least there were a lot of cool new revolutionaries.
Africa: Obama's own father opposed a generally U.S.-backed Kenyan regime. In theory, he was a leftist and a man of the people. In reality, he was a womanizing, alcoholic and corrupt politician, just the kind of "progressive" Third World politician who pretends to represent the voice of the masses.
And so on.
So the leftist view has been that American allies were bad guys. And since America was also the bad guy, American allies were doubly bad guys.
In contrast, those opposing U.S. policy or allies—notably, Latin American guerrillas; Fidel Castro, the Viet Cong (or National Liberation Front if you wish); Mao Zedong; Che Guevara (remember that Che Guevara poster in the Obama election headquarters in Arizona, was it?); Patrice Lumumba; and so on and so forth were heroes.
Pakistan has it both ways. On one hand, it is an American “ally” but since it just takes money, hides al-Qaida leaders, and sponsors cross-border terrorism against India, it is enough of an enemy to receive favored treatment.
So, the bad guys to America were the good guys and the good guys to America were the bad guys.
I’m putting this in slangy language but I’m very serious.
And for someone raised personally and politically the way Obama was (hat-tip, Stanley Kurtz and Dinesh D’Souza) this was taken for granted.
Thus, be it England or Egypt or Israel or Colombia, if you are partnered with the United States it proves you are bad. And for Venezuela, Syria, or the Palestinian Authority, the more hostile you are to America the better you are.
Hence, the business of American policy should be to win over the heroic guerrillas who fight on behalf of the wretched of the earth (reference: Che Guevara, Franz Fanon, The Communist “Internationale”), these are the people who—as they say in Hollywood—we’d like to be in business with.
Consider Obama’s profound disrespect for realpolitik as evidenced in his State Department speech:
“For decades, the United States has pursued a set of core interests in the region: countering terrorism and stopping the spread of nuclear weapons; securing the free flow of commerce and safe-guarding the security of the region; standing up for Israel’s security and pursuing Arab-Israeli peace.”
He says that the United States will continue to do these things. But listen to the subtle differences in that list:
“We will continue to do these things, with the firm belief that America’s interests are not hostile to people’s hopes; they’re essential to them. We believe that no one benefits from a nuclear arms race in the region, or al Qaeda’s brutal attacks. We believe people everywhere would see their economies crippled by a cut-off in energy supplies. As we did in the Gulf War, we will not tolerate aggression across borders, and we will keep our commitments to friends and partners.”
For decades, the United States wanted mainly to keep hostile countries from getting nuclear weapons, while Obama’s policy is to put the priority on eliminating nuclear weapons (including those of the United States) entirely. “Countering terrorism” becomes stopping al-Qaeda! How about stopping Hamas and Hizballah or the Muslim Brotherhood? Nope. Not part of the policy. “Standing up for Israel’s security” becomes the generic “we will keep our commitments to friends and partners.”
Tolerate aggression across borders? But the Obama Administration does tolerate Syrian aggression against Lebanon, Israel, and Iraq; and Iranian aggression in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and against Israel. Soon it will be tolerating Egyptian aggression against Israel.
Perhaps he is referring here to Israel’s holding on to part of the West Bank captured in 1967 as aggression across borders? He certainly has—in contrast to the other cases—tried to do something about that!
Talking about “standing up for Israel’s security” is reserved for speeches.to AIPAC.
In addition, however:
“We must acknowledge that a strategy based solely upon the narrow pursuit of these interests will not fill an empty stomach or allow someone to speak their mind. Moreover, failure to speak to the broader aspirations of ordinary people will only feed the suspicion that has festered for years that the United States pursues our interests at their expense. Given that this mistrust runs both ways –- as Americans have been seared by hostage-taking and violent rhetoric and terrorist attacks that have killed thousands of our citizens -– a failure to change our approach threatens a deepening spiral of division between the United States and the Arab world.”
Yes, the old U.S. policy conducted under lots of presidents, both Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, were focused on U.S. interests. Now, however, Obama defines this as "narrow." The United States must show itself in favor of “the broader aspirations of ordinary people.”
And in the twenty-first century who could be cooler than Facebook Kids, those liberty-loving rascals rebelling against an American-backed dictatorship. Don’t we want to be on their side? We cares about national interests? What could possibly go wrong? The clerical-reactionaries (not that there’s anything wrong with that) couldn’t possibly win against the progressive (Progressive?) forces of history. Power to the people!
This, however, raises two questions:
First, which aspirations?
Second, as expressed by whom?
Suppose the aspirations of the people are against U.S. interests? Example, in the early Cold War the United States covertly intervened in French and Italian politics to make sure Communist parties didn’t win. Did that thwart the aspirations of the people? Quite possibly. Should it have been done: You bet!
The United States has believed that it has no interest in promoting the anti-American aspirations of people. What if the aspirations are to have radical Islamism? What if the majority wants to persecute Christians? What if the majority wants to expel U.S. influence from the region? What if the majority wants to wipe Israel off the map and commit genocide on the Jews?
So no, U.S. policy often needs to oppose the aspirations of the people or certain people. When possible, it does so because it believes that by doing so they will be better able to fill their stomachs (example: Communism as a system failed to do so) and speak their minds (ditto).
But ultimately its goal is not to promote the aspirations of other people. Its main priority should be to promote the aspirations of the American people. Yet if America is not an exceptional, better country, but often a worse one; national identity is out of date, and promoting your own country's interests is a form of racism; if America is rich and greedy, taking more than its share of resources and causing global warming because its living standards are too high, then the aspirations of Egyptians or Venezuelans are equally or more important than those of the American people.
What other wordview could imagine something like "Cap and Trade" in which the U.S. taxpayers paid other countries for the right to use their own air? This is a transfer of wealth from America to others, in no way in the American interest or the interests of Americans.
Remember, Obama is desperate to be popular abroad. And he views popularity as giving the people abroad what they want, whether or not that’s in U.S. interests. If, for example, the “people” of the Middle East don’t want the United States to support Israel, then according to his worldview it shouldn’t.
Let’s face it: If not for the State Department's desperate intervention, Obama would be campaigning for the overthrow of the Jordanian and Egyptian governments. And at the same time, fighting against seeking the overthrow of the Iranian and Syrian governments.
It's not just Israel, though that country is first on the list. If you are a U.S. ally there must be something wrong with you. And if you are a U.S. enemy there must be something right with you. Or, perhaps I should say, "left" with you.
Obama says:
“I believed then -– and I believe now -– that we have a stake not just in the stability of nations, but in the self-determination of individuals. The status quo is not sustainable. Societies held together by fear and repression may offer the illusion of stability for a time, but they are built upon fault lines that will eventually tear asunder.”
So Obama is on the side of the “masses,” whatever the masses ”want.” But conservatives and liberals in power during past presidencies generally understood that authoritarian regimes and totalitarian movements pretended to represent the masses and through good organizing and rigid discipline pushed themselves to the head of the line.
Those who remember Nazism and Fascism and Communism, not to mention the dozens of Third World dictators who pretended to be the voice of the masses, know this. Such experiences and education did not shape Obama. Perhaps Bill Ayers could explain to him how front groups and revolutionary vanguards and the dictatorship of the proletariat work.
Didn't the Communists, Nazis, Fascists, Japanese militarists, Ba'thists, Nasserists, Fidelistas, the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, Tupamaros, Sandinistas, and all those other groups represent their people's aspirations? We could deny it but certainly at the time that seemed to be true.
So why isn't it true for Hamas, Fatah, Hizballah, the Muslim Brotherhood, the dictator in Venezuela and the one in Syria?
Well, we know that this money and self-sacrifice to help the masses of people abroad usually just puts money into the Swiss bank accounts of the dictators and their supporters, the already fat elite. What percentage of U.S. aid money to the Palestinians actually benefited "ordinary" Palestinians? How much will the destruction of American oil-drilling and sending money to Brazil so they can produce oil going to benefit the "ordinary" Brazilian? It certainly won't benefit the ordinary American.
But to return to my main theme, for Obama the world is upside-down from the historic American political mainstream. Again, I stress, both liberal and conservative. For him, the friends of America are bad; the enemies of America are good. He must win over the enemies of America—and “the people” in other countries—by showing him that he appreciates that idea.
From this ideology, rather than some conspiracy or secret identity, he does much harm. And no matter how much experience he accumulates Obama isn’t going to learn any better.
In this world, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is a "reformer" while elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a reactionary who doesn't want peace.
To him, America has been on the wrong side. Now it will be on the “right” side. And, unfortunately, that side is the enemy side. The enemy of America and, ultimately, of the people it claims to represent.
This is not some minor mistake. It is his worldview.
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal, and a featured columnist at PajamasMedia http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/ His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is http://www.gloria-center.org. His PajamaMedia columns are mirrored and other articles available at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com
Sunday, May 22, 2011
U.S. Policy: To Understand the Middle East Why Not Study The Real Middle East?
This article is published in PajamasMedia.
By Barry Rubin
A lot of people may think that I’m too tough on President Barack Obama and the New York Times. Yet every day they do something that—despite my high suspicions and low expectations—amazes me.
Consider a New York Times article, “Obama Seeks Reset in Arab World. First, the concept of “reset” was invented by the Obama Administration and has been used by it to describe the new policy about to be announced on the Middle East. One could not possibly think of an idea more unsuited to the region.
Reset implies starting over, forgetting everything that has happened before. Yet there is arguably no part of human society that is more obsessed with history than the Middle East. You have people ready to die and kill to realize a vision of society from more than twelve centuries ago, a reborn country that had been destroyed more than nineteen centuries ago, and the world’s longest-lasting continuing conflict that has been going full steam now for more than six decades. And those are only three examples.
Who thinks like this, that you can press a button and have history disappear? Americans, or at least a certain kind of American. The concept of reset is so remarkably ignorant and doomed to fail that it is shocking that the great geniuses who guide America haven’t thought of this problem. To my best knowledge not a single person has pointed out this fatal flaw though everyone in the Middle East innately understands it!
The Arab world isn’t erasing history so much as reliving it, heading back to the 1950s and 1960s, but with revolutionary Islamism replacing Arab nationalism. And that’s even worse.
Then there is this shocking quote from the same article:
"Obama has ordered staff members to study transitions in 50 to 60 countries to find precedents for those under way in Tunisia and Egypt. They have found that Egypt is analogous to South Korea, the Philippines and Chile, while a revolution in Syria might end up looking like Romania's."
I’m not a big fan of this type of political science, which never produces useful results. But leaving that aside, doesn’t anyone notice a few details? Revolutionary Islamism doesn’t really exist as a national factor in those countries. Neither does radical Arab nationalism. The three countries mentioned as being like Egypt are in fact dominated by a basic pragmatic approach, an absence of dominating ideology, a strong social flexibility.
No matter how many degrees he might have anyone who would use such a method as a guide to policymaking on a life-and-death issue is a fool. (Oops! There goes my hope of a job in the Obama Administration!)
Now, in about 400 words and taking about three minutes of your time I have explained why the current policy plans of this U.S. government are doomed. Why not instead study Egyptian history and society, the Muslim Brotherhood, and things like that?
Yet I suspect there is one more hidden factor here. The American government has this thing called the State Department and sections of the Defense Department that do this kind of thing. There are people who have been following Arab politics and ideology and the military for decades. Why not call on them for their analysis?
I think that Obama is instead turning to his clueless National Security Council staffers (the ones who wanted Husni Mubarak overthrown in 24 hours) and left-wing academics or think-tanks, and a couple of pundits (the names Zakaria and Friedman have in fact been mentioned) instead. The result is going to be something of a combination of hilariously stupid and the kind of policy that ends up setting off wars and getting tens of thousands of people killed.
But then if your advisors deny that the Muslim Brotherhood is a radical Islamist anti-American group favoring genocide against Jews—indeed argue it is sort of secular—what can one expect? If the courtiers keep calling you the smartest president in all of history how are you going to correct your errors?
Now if one could only reset Obama’s worldview….
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/12/us/politics/12prexy.html?_r=1
By Barry Rubin
A lot of people may think that I’m too tough on President Barack Obama and the New York Times. Yet every day they do something that—despite my high suspicions and low expectations—amazes me.
Consider a New York Times article, “Obama Seeks Reset in Arab World. First, the concept of “reset” was invented by the Obama Administration and has been used by it to describe the new policy about to be announced on the Middle East. One could not possibly think of an idea more unsuited to the region.
Reset implies starting over, forgetting everything that has happened before. Yet there is arguably no part of human society that is more obsessed with history than the Middle East. You have people ready to die and kill to realize a vision of society from more than twelve centuries ago, a reborn country that had been destroyed more than nineteen centuries ago, and the world’s longest-lasting continuing conflict that has been going full steam now for more than six decades. And those are only three examples.
Who thinks like this, that you can press a button and have history disappear? Americans, or at least a certain kind of American. The concept of reset is so remarkably ignorant and doomed to fail that it is shocking that the great geniuses who guide America haven’t thought of this problem. To my best knowledge not a single person has pointed out this fatal flaw though everyone in the Middle East innately understands it!
The Arab world isn’t erasing history so much as reliving it, heading back to the 1950s and 1960s, but with revolutionary Islamism replacing Arab nationalism. And that’s even worse.
Then there is this shocking quote from the same article:
"Obama has ordered staff members to study transitions in 50 to 60 countries to find precedents for those under way in Tunisia and Egypt. They have found that Egypt is analogous to South Korea, the Philippines and Chile, while a revolution in Syria might end up looking like Romania's."
I’m not a big fan of this type of political science, which never produces useful results. But leaving that aside, doesn’t anyone notice a few details? Revolutionary Islamism doesn’t really exist as a national factor in those countries. Neither does radical Arab nationalism. The three countries mentioned as being like Egypt are in fact dominated by a basic pragmatic approach, an absence of dominating ideology, a strong social flexibility.
No matter how many degrees he might have anyone who would use such a method as a guide to policymaking on a life-and-death issue is a fool. (Oops! There goes my hope of a job in the Obama Administration!)
Now, in about 400 words and taking about three minutes of your time I have explained why the current policy plans of this U.S. government are doomed. Why not instead study Egyptian history and society, the Muslim Brotherhood, and things like that?
Yet I suspect there is one more hidden factor here. The American government has this thing called the State Department and sections of the Defense Department that do this kind of thing. There are people who have been following Arab politics and ideology and the military for decades. Why not call on them for their analysis?
I think that Obama is instead turning to his clueless National Security Council staffers (the ones who wanted Husni Mubarak overthrown in 24 hours) and left-wing academics or think-tanks, and a couple of pundits (the names Zakaria and Friedman have in fact been mentioned) instead. The result is going to be something of a combination of hilariously stupid and the kind of policy that ends up setting off wars and getting tens of thousands of people killed.
But then if your advisors deny that the Muslim Brotherhood is a radical Islamist anti-American group favoring genocide against Jews—indeed argue it is sort of secular—what can one expect? If the courtiers keep calling you the smartest president in all of history how are you going to correct your errors?
Now if one could only reset Obama’s worldview….
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/12/us/politics/12prexy.html?_r=1
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
The West’s Foreign Policy Theme—Like Me Before You Kill Me—Applied to Israel
By Barry Rubin
Recently, it was revealed that President Barack Obama had consulted Tom Friedman in formulating his Middle East policy. Here’s an example of where disastrous policy comes from.
Friedman writes:
“Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu of Israel is always wondering why his nation is losing support and what the world expects of a tiny country surrounded by implacable foes. I can’t speak for the world, but I can speak for myself. I have no idea whether Israel has a Palestinian or Syrian partner for a secure peace that Israel can live with. But I know this: With a more democratic and populist Arab world in Israel’s future, and with Israel facing the prospect of having a minority of Jews permanently ruling over a majority of Arabs — between Israel and the West Bank, which could lead to Israel being equated with apartheid South Africa all over the world — Israel needs to use every ounce of its creativity to explore ways to securely cede the West Bank to a Palestinian state.”
By the way, the picture of “a minority of Jews permanently ruling over a majority of Arabs” has not been accurate since 1994, that’s 17 years ago. The Palestinian Authority rules over the West Bank Arabs. Hamas, which has now merged with the Palestinian Authority, rules in the Gaza Strip. The only non-citizen Arabs that “Jews” are ruling over are those in east Jerusalem, according to an agreement that Israel made with the PLO.
So a big part of Israel's difficulty is that people like Friedman are perpetuating anti-Israel lies instead of attacking them.
In other words, if your enemies lie about you does that mean that you must take huge risks? There’s a clever bumper sticker that says: Never apologize. Your enemies don’t care and your friends don’t need it.
But leaving all of that aside, let’s start with Friedman’s opening sentence. I certainly don’t speak for Netanyahu and didn’t vote for him, but I really doubt he’s wondering why these things are happening. He knows the reasons, as do most Israelis, even those critical of his policy:
The greater international weight of the Arab world; oil money; well-intentioned but ill-placed sympathy for an apparent underdog; aspects of Islam rejecting ever accepting a Jewish state; Arab nationalist rejection of a Jewish state; a clever anti-Israel propaganda campaign; Western leftist sympathy for its enemies; the rejection of Zionism by some Jews; the honest belief that if you resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict by Israeli concessions the whole world will be stable and terrorism will disappear; antisemitism; and more.
There’s no mystery here.
But there is a problem. If you equate that hostility to one cause and one cause only: Israel is “permanently ruling” over a majority of Arabs. That’s it. Solve that problem and everything else will fall into place.
Yet what if you know that giving up the West Bank will not solve every problem—a viewpoint almost never aired in the Western mass media and universities nowadays? Then Friedman’s concept and that of most Western policies immediately collapses.
Israel has conducted extensive experiments with this concept, experiments that have cost about the same number of Israeli lives as September 11 took American lives. Since the population of the United States is approximately 40 times that of Israel you can calculate the impact of those costs.
After all, Israel already acted “to securely cede” (the split infinitive is Friedman’s) the Sinai to Egypt, with the result that this peace treaty is about to be abrogated. It tried to “securely cede” the Gaza Strip to the Palestinian Authority, getting rockets and mortars and cross-border attacks in return. It also sought “to securely cede” southern Lebanon and got rockets and cross-border attacks. To see what would happen it acted “to securely cede” much of the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority and then received in return incitement to violence, terrorist attacks, and intransigence.
Might there be a pattern here?
Yes, it would be better to have a stable, two-state solution that ended the conflict and made Israel’s neighbors friendly. But here’s where the gap is between Israel and much of the Western political elites today:
We tried it and it didn’t work.
That is not a “right-wing” statement. It is an Israeli consensus statement. And even if Israel tries and tries again, this doesn’t mean that people don’t know that.
Now, there are people in the Middle East—millions of people—who openly make my point every day. These include the governments of Iran, Syria, Turkey, and the Gaza Strip, as well as probably Egypt’s next government and those running Lebanon. Islamists openly proclaim that no matter how much territory Israel cedes they won’t be satisfied until it has ceded everything and gone out of existence altogether.
What Friedman calls “a more democratic and populist Arab world” means a more radical and Islamist Arab world. In fact, the radicals will remain radicals (Syria, Iran) while the formerly moderate become more extremist (Egypt). Why, then, should Israel make dangerous concessions when these will be taken advantage of to attack it more effectively? Why give things to people who want to kill you no matter what you do?
But there’s one point that is so overwhelming in Friedman’s piece, so symptomatic of everything wrong with the Western vision of Israel, the Middle East, and even the entire world (and especially with the Obama Administration’s policy), that it should resound with everyone who reads that article:
Friedman is telling us that a good public relations’ image is more important than material security. Israel will survive an infinite number of nasty articles or sneering professors without great difficulty. It would not survive concessions that make Israel weak and vulnerable, more than ever at a time when—let’s face it—American and European guarantees are worthless.
Golda Meir already dealt with Friedman’s idea decades ago: Better a bad press than a good epitaph.
That’s a principle which North America and European countries should think about adopting as their motto.
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal, and a featured columnist at PajamasMedia http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/ His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is http://www.gloria-center.org. His PajamaMedia columns are mirrored and other articles available at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
A Leading Intellectual Gives The Long-Term Perspective On Today's Problems
This article is published on PajamasMedia.
By Barry Rubin
The incomparable Walter Laqueur was born in Breslau, Germany (now Poland), in 1921. Recently, he had a 90th birthday party that was a very special and enjoyable event. Walter was 12 when the Nazis took power and went through his high school years under the increasingly oppressive regime. He was able to go to the land of Israel (i.e., the British mandatory territory of Palestine) but his parents were killed.
He went through the 1948 war as a journalist, became an expert on the USSR, learned a total of eight languages, and wrote far more books on the Middle East, Europe, terrorism (a subject he pioneered), and even wrote novels. Walter had a lot to do with the development of think tanks. He invented the concept of "contemporary history." He knows everyone, has read everything, and has a remarkable memory and an archive of anecdotes.
At the party, I remarked to him that these are very difficult times we are going through.
His response? "I've seen worse."
We laughed because, of course, it's so true. And that's a good thing to keep in mind as we deal with the phenomena ranging from nonsensical to horrific every day.
By Barry Rubin
The incomparable Walter Laqueur was born in Breslau, Germany (now Poland), in 1921. Recently, he had a 90th birthday party that was a very special and enjoyable event. Walter was 12 when the Nazis took power and went through his high school years under the increasingly oppressive regime. He was able to go to the land of Israel (i.e., the British mandatory territory of Palestine) but his parents were killed.
He went through the 1948 war as a journalist, became an expert on the USSR, learned a total of eight languages, and wrote far more books on the Middle East, Europe, terrorism (a subject he pioneered), and even wrote novels. Walter had a lot to do with the development of think tanks. He invented the concept of "contemporary history." He knows everyone, has read everything, and has a remarkable memory and an archive of anecdotes.
At the party, I remarked to him that these are very difficult times we are going through.
His response? "I've seen worse."
We laughed because, of course, it's so true. And that's a good thing to keep in mind as we deal with the phenomena ranging from nonsensical to horrific every day.
Monday, May 16, 2011
A Brief Guide to Why 1948 Was a Palestinian Arab and Arab Disaster
This article is published on PajamasMedia.
By Barry Rubin
In 1947 the UN voted to partition the British mandate of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. The Jews accepted partition into two states; the Arabs rejected it.
The international community offered to make Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian Arabs' leader, head of a state despite the fact that he and his closest colleagues were the subject of a 1938 British arrest warrant for terrorist activities (not mythical but for killing lots of people), and had spent World War Two in Berlin doing pro-Nazi propaganda, recruiting for SS units, and planning a Holocaust of Jews in the Middle East.
But al-Husseini rejected partition and so did all of the Arab states. While Jordan wanted to make a deal and Egypt’s government wasn’t enthusiastic, they all had to go along with al-Husseini’s intransigence, their hysterical public opinion, and the other Arab states' pressure. The Arab League's leader, a Nazi agent during World War Two, bragged that the Jews would be massacred. The Muslim Brotherhood, which collaborated with the Nazis during the war and were subsidized by them before the war, sent volunteers to fight the Jews.
And so a Palestinian Arab army, whose three chief commanders had all fought for the Nazis during World War Two, went to war against the Jews using Nazi-supplied weapons (provided for the Palestinian Arab revolt in 1939 and for an Egyptian revolt that never happened in 1942). They lost.
Then the armies of the Arab states invaded Israel. They largely lost, though the Egyptian held onto the Gaza area while the Jordanians took east Jerusalem and what became known as the West Bank. Egypt ran Gaza; Jordan annexed the West Bank.
Everything that happened afterward was due to Arab decisions to reject both a two-state solution and Israel’s creation.
That’s the bottom line. So the disaster was due first and foremost to the Palestinian Arab leadership and secondly to the Arab states and publics.
Dealing with the “nakba” would then require that the Palestinian Arabs and the Arabic-speaking world generally would recognize that the disaster resulted from their refusal to accept Israel’s existence and to seek a genuine, compromise two-state solution.
But, instead, in the name of the 1948 disaster they are repeating the same policies that brought it about! Indeed, they are the same policies that led to the self-inflicted disasters of 1967, 2000, and others since then.
For example, as part of the preparations for the commemoration of the 1948 disaster, Palestinian Authority television played repeatedly a music video entitled "On the Way to Jerusalem" The main lines are:
"Jaffa, Acre, Haifa, and Nazareth are ours.
[ I ], Muhammad, sing about the Galilee and the Golan (Heights).
Jaffa, Acre, Haifa and Nazareth are ours."
This is precisely the one-state, wipe-Israel-off-the-map that brought on them the disaster of 1948, disaster every year since then, and more disaster into the forseeable future. Sixty-four years (counting from 1947) of failed policy has not brought wisdom.
Almost every event--Egypt's revolution, demonstrators trying to cross Israel's border, a terrorist attack, Western sympathy, and so on--is interpreted as proving that Israel's destruction is possible and so additional decades should be spent in diplomatic intransigence and the incitement of violence rather than some constructive effort. That's one reason, by the way, why the Palestinians always ultimately lose.
This has also been going on so long that much of the West has forgotten the roots and ongoing causes of this conflict, Palestinian suffering, Israeli suffering, and the terrorist violence and defamation of Israel.
Note: The use of the words “Nazi collaborator” and other mentions of pro-Nazi activities in this article are not name-calling but based on German and U.S. intelligence materials. These points will be fully and in detail documented in the forthcoming book by myself and Wolfgang Schwanitz, to be published by Yale University Press next year.
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal, and a featured columnist at PajamasMedia http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/ His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is http://www.gloria-center.org. His PajamaMedia columns are mirrored and other articles available at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/.
By Barry Rubin
In 1947 the UN voted to partition the British mandate of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. The Jews accepted partition into two states; the Arabs rejected it.
The international community offered to make Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian Arabs' leader, head of a state despite the fact that he and his closest colleagues were the subject of a 1938 British arrest warrant for terrorist activities (not mythical but for killing lots of people), and had spent World War Two in Berlin doing pro-Nazi propaganda, recruiting for SS units, and planning a Holocaust of Jews in the Middle East.
But al-Husseini rejected partition and so did all of the Arab states. While Jordan wanted to make a deal and Egypt’s government wasn’t enthusiastic, they all had to go along with al-Husseini’s intransigence, their hysterical public opinion, and the other Arab states' pressure. The Arab League's leader, a Nazi agent during World War Two, bragged that the Jews would be massacred. The Muslim Brotherhood, which collaborated with the Nazis during the war and were subsidized by them before the war, sent volunteers to fight the Jews.
And so a Palestinian Arab army, whose three chief commanders had all fought for the Nazis during World War Two, went to war against the Jews using Nazi-supplied weapons (provided for the Palestinian Arab revolt in 1939 and for an Egyptian revolt that never happened in 1942). They lost.
Then the armies of the Arab states invaded Israel. They largely lost, though the Egyptian held onto the Gaza area while the Jordanians took east Jerusalem and what became known as the West Bank. Egypt ran Gaza; Jordan annexed the West Bank.
Everything that happened afterward was due to Arab decisions to reject both a two-state solution and Israel’s creation.
That’s the bottom line. So the disaster was due first and foremost to the Palestinian Arab leadership and secondly to the Arab states and publics.
Dealing with the “nakba” would then require that the Palestinian Arabs and the Arabic-speaking world generally would recognize that the disaster resulted from their refusal to accept Israel’s existence and to seek a genuine, compromise two-state solution.
But, instead, in the name of the 1948 disaster they are repeating the same policies that brought it about! Indeed, they are the same policies that led to the self-inflicted disasters of 1967, 2000, and others since then.
For example, as part of the preparations for the commemoration of the 1948 disaster, Palestinian Authority television played repeatedly a music video entitled "On the Way to Jerusalem" The main lines are:
"Jaffa, Acre, Haifa, and Nazareth are ours.
[ I ], Muhammad, sing about the Galilee and the Golan (Heights).
Jaffa, Acre, Haifa and Nazareth are ours."
This is precisely the one-state, wipe-Israel-off-the-map that brought on them the disaster of 1948, disaster every year since then, and more disaster into the forseeable future. Sixty-four years (counting from 1947) of failed policy has not brought wisdom.
Almost every event--Egypt's revolution, demonstrators trying to cross Israel's border, a terrorist attack, Western sympathy, and so on--is interpreted as proving that Israel's destruction is possible and so additional decades should be spent in diplomatic intransigence and the incitement of violence rather than some constructive effort. That's one reason, by the way, why the Palestinians always ultimately lose.
This has also been going on so long that much of the West has forgotten the roots and ongoing causes of this conflict, Palestinian suffering, Israeli suffering, and the terrorist violence and defamation of Israel.
Note: The use of the words “Nazi collaborator” and other mentions of pro-Nazi activities in this article are not name-calling but based on German and U.S. intelligence materials. These points will be fully and in detail documented in the forthcoming book by myself and Wolfgang Schwanitz, to be published by Yale University Press next year.
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal, and a featured columnist at PajamasMedia http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/ His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is http://www.gloria-center.org. His PajamaMedia columns are mirrored and other articles available at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/.
Tell Me What They're Reading and I'll Tell You Who Will Win?
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By Barry Rubin
There's an interesting point about pre-World War One Europe that applies very well to today's international situation as well. In Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman pointed out the difference between what the British and Germans were reading on the eve of the war.
In 1909 Norman Angell, a British member of parliament wrote a pamphlet, "The Great Illusion," that became a best-seller. It argued that since war had become so terrible and governments were rational and would understand this, another major international war was impossible.
But in Germany they were reading Friedrich von Bernhardi's Germany and the Next War, where he argues that "war is a biological necessity" based on the law of nature, the struggle for existence.
Germany was preparing for war; Britain was pacifist. The same process repeated itself before World War Two. And the same process was again repeated in the brief time before the end of World War Two and the Cold War.
Each time, though, the "less prepared" but more democratic side won in the end. Still, because the "fat, materialistic, having a good time" democracies took too long to realize what was going on and the resulting conflict took longer and cost more lives than might have been possible.
In 1940, John F. Kennedy published Why England Slept, a book about how British appeasement helped create an atmosphere where Nazi aggression prospered. Of course, his own father had favored and encouraged those policies. Of course, the war he was "warning" about had already begun the previous year. But the surprise attack that killed about 2400 Americans and brought the United States into the war took place more than a year later.
Twenty years later, Kennedy was elected president.
In 2006, Bruce Bawer published While Europe Slept. It was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. One panel member described the book as "racist," while the group's president lamented, "I have never been more embarrassed by a choice" and called it an example of "Islamophobia." Needless to say, he didn't win the award.
For anyone to have read the book and made such statements is a measure of the intellectual insanity that has seized hegemony in the West. Bawer's book was published not one but five years after the conflict he described had already visibly emerged in the form of 3000 Americans killed in a surprise terrorist attack on New York and Washington. As of today, the United States is engaged in three different wars relating to the issues he discussed.
So far nobody's been talking about electing Bawer president.
We can call this state of being, post-September 11 snoring.
We're in the grip of a new version of Angell's "The Great Illusion," a double-edged title if there ever was one. Surely, nobody could want a radical Islamist state! Certainly, nobody would be willing to sacrifice their life for such a thing! Nor would anyone conceivably prefer martyrdom and murder to having a nice toaster and a hybrid car!
That's why all of this talk about Usama bin Ladin hiding behind women, pleading for his life, doing drugs, and having a pornography library really bothers me. Such things stem from this need to prove the other side doesn't really mean what it says, they're really just sybaritic, materialistic, hedonistic hypocrites. Because if they are, well there really isn't any threat, is there? They can be bought off.
Meanwhile, anyone who examines the real politics, current religious thinking, and actual behavior doesn't get an award but is slandered instead. Or, at best, is ignored and barred from access to the mass media's audience.
Yet every day on the other side, the argument is openly and publicly being made that--in a slight paraphrase of von Bernhardi's theme--that war is a religious necessity (jihad) based on the law of the divine being and natural struggle for existence.
And simply repeating what that side is saying daily is a thought crime.
Last October, I published an article about the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's declaration of war against the United States. A few months before the Egyptian revolution, the speech by the Brotherhood's leader made clear that it was a radical, Islamist, antisemitic, anti-American movement that incited violence.
Not a single mass media television station or newspaper has mentioned that speech to this day, despite huge coverage of the Muslim Brotherhood. The chiefs of American intelligence seem to remain unaware of it. On the contrary, one could find hundreds (thousands?) of claims that the Brotherhood is secular, moderate, pro-democratic, and against violence.
Recently I was interviewed on a big-city radio station. When I made some of these points, the show's host retorted that their correspondent in Cairo "speaks lots of languages," is very experienced, and hadn't mentioned any of these things. So why should he believe me?
Don't believe me, I explained (without any success in this case). Believe what America's enemies are reading, and saying, and doing. Of course, to do that you first have to know about what they're reading, saying, and doing.
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal, and a featured columnist at PajamasMedia http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/ His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is http://www.gloria-center.org. His PajamaMedia columns are mirrored and other articles available at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/.
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By Barry Rubin
There's an interesting point about pre-World War One Europe that applies very well to today's international situation as well. In Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman pointed out the difference between what the British and Germans were reading on the eve of the war.
In 1909 Norman Angell, a British member of parliament wrote a pamphlet, "The Great Illusion," that became a best-seller. It argued that since war had become so terrible and governments were rational and would understand this, another major international war was impossible.
But in Germany they were reading Friedrich von Bernhardi's Germany and the Next War, where he argues that "war is a biological necessity" based on the law of nature, the struggle for existence.
Germany was preparing for war; Britain was pacifist. The same process repeated itself before World War Two. And the same process was again repeated in the brief time before the end of World War Two and the Cold War.
Each time, though, the "less prepared" but more democratic side won in the end. Still, because the "fat, materialistic, having a good time" democracies took too long to realize what was going on and the resulting conflict took longer and cost more lives than might have been possible.
In 1940, John F. Kennedy published Why England Slept, a book about how British appeasement helped create an atmosphere where Nazi aggression prospered. Of course, his own father had favored and encouraged those policies. Of course, the war he was "warning" about had already begun the previous year. But the surprise attack that killed about 2400 Americans and brought the United States into the war took place more than a year later.
Twenty years later, Kennedy was elected president.
In 2006, Bruce Bawer published While Europe Slept. It was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. One panel member described the book as "racist," while the group's president lamented, "I have never been more embarrassed by a choice" and called it an example of "Islamophobia." Needless to say, he didn't win the award.
For anyone to have read the book and made such statements is a measure of the intellectual insanity that has seized hegemony in the West. Bawer's book was published not one but five years after the conflict he described had already visibly emerged in the form of 3000 Americans killed in a surprise terrorist attack on New York and Washington. As of today, the United States is engaged in three different wars relating to the issues he discussed.
So far nobody's been talking about electing Bawer president.
We can call this state of being, post-September 11 snoring.
We're in the grip of a new version of Angell's "The Great Illusion," a double-edged title if there ever was one. Surely, nobody could want a radical Islamist state! Certainly, nobody would be willing to sacrifice their life for such a thing! Nor would anyone conceivably prefer martyrdom and murder to having a nice toaster and a hybrid car!
That's why all of this talk about Usama bin Ladin hiding behind women, pleading for his life, doing drugs, and having a pornography library really bothers me. Such things stem from this need to prove the other side doesn't really mean what it says, they're really just sybaritic, materialistic, hedonistic hypocrites. Because if they are, well there really isn't any threat, is there? They can be bought off.
Meanwhile, anyone who examines the real politics, current religious thinking, and actual behavior doesn't get an award but is slandered instead. Or, at best, is ignored and barred from access to the mass media's audience.
Yet every day on the other side, the argument is openly and publicly being made that--in a slight paraphrase of von Bernhardi's theme--that war is a religious necessity (jihad) based on the law of the divine being and natural struggle for existence.
And simply repeating what that side is saying daily is a thought crime.
Last October, I published an article about the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's declaration of war against the United States. A few months before the Egyptian revolution, the speech by the Brotherhood's leader made clear that it was a radical, Islamist, antisemitic, anti-American movement that incited violence.
Not a single mass media television station or newspaper has mentioned that speech to this day, despite huge coverage of the Muslim Brotherhood. The chiefs of American intelligence seem to remain unaware of it. On the contrary, one could find hundreds (thousands?) of claims that the Brotherhood is secular, moderate, pro-democratic, and against violence.
Recently I was interviewed on a big-city radio station. When I made some of these points, the show's host retorted that their correspondent in Cairo "speaks lots of languages," is very experienced, and hadn't mentioned any of these things. So why should he believe me?
Don't believe me, I explained (without any success in this case). Believe what America's enemies are reading, and saying, and doing. Of course, to do that you first have to know about what they're reading, saying, and doing.
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal, and a featured columnist at PajamasMedia http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/ His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is http://www.gloria-center.org. His PajamaMedia columns are mirrored and other articles available at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/.
Monday, May 9, 2011
Charles Dickens Explains The Main Current Problem of the U.S. Economy and Government
Published on PajamasMedia
By Barry Rubin
"`My other piece of advice, Copperfield,' said Mr. Micawber, 'you know. Annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 19.19, result happiness. Annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 20.06, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered...and, in short, you are forever floored.'"
--Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
By Barry Rubin
"`My other piece of advice, Copperfield,' said Mr. Micawber, 'you know. Annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 19.19, result happiness. Annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 20.06, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered...and, in short, you are forever floored.'"
--Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Washington Post: Old Arab Order Pro-bin Laden! British Government: Hamas-Fatah Merger is Great!
This article was published in PajamasMedia. The text is provided here for your convenience.
By Barry Rubin
It is amazing what nonsense appears in the mass media. Consider the following paragraph from a Washington Post story:
“A decade ago, the Middle East might have responded to the killing of Osama bin Laden with fury at the United States. But with the region convulsed by mostly peaceful popular revolutions, the response to his death has been muted, another signal that the old Arab order is being swept away.”
So what does this say? Ten years ago, there would have been fury in the Middle East about bin Laden’s killing but now, with the democracy movement, that’s no longer true.
Two governments have been overthrown in the Middle East, Egypt and Tunisia. These regimes were repressing Islamists. They would have cheered bin Laden’s death. So would every other government in the region. Iran, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and Syria was no fan of bin Laden, either, at least not publicly. Either these governments were anti-Islamist or, in Iran’s case, were a different kind of Islamist.
The same applies to the Islamist movements. The Muslim Brotherhood held no brief for bin Laden himself, though it supported the insurgent movement in Iraq that was led by al-Qaida. Hamas and Hizballah were not big supporters either. As a Shia group, Hizballah would not have mourned bin Laden, whose movement hated Shia Muslims. True, bin Laden—based on his recent September 11 success—was higher in the public opinion polls. But the few pro-bin Laden demonstrations would have been repressed by the rulers.
In fact, the situation was the precise opposite. Many Islamist groups were angry at bin Laden after September 11 just as an organized crime family would be outraged by some new gang who shot up the town and brought a police crackdown. As a result of the post-September 11 crackdown, Islamist agents were deported from Europe and arrested at home.
Every government could not only suppress their own Islamists with Western backing but also go after non-Islamist dissidents as well by portraying them as Islamist terrorists. Even Syria, for example, blamed internal dissent on al-Qaida and bragged about helping the United States round up a dangerous al-Qaida man.
Now, contrast this with the present-day era of upheavals. The government of the Gaza Strip and a key part of the Palestinian Authority condemned the killing and came out on bin Laden’s side. So did the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the single most powerful political force in the country whose influence has been expanded due to U.S. policy.
The old Arab order—except in Syria—was anti-Islamist! Removing it gives a blessed chance for democracy but it also provides an equal or better chance for radical Islamist takeovers. Each country is a different story. But if the Western governments don’t notice the problem how is it going to be solved?
An example. The British government heartily endorsed the Fatah-Hamas cooperation agreement. It’s not every day that America’s oldest and strongest ally cheers a coalition agreement that brings a genocidal, antisemitic, terrorist-supporting, client of Iran into a regime that survives on Western financial subsidies. But the fact that London took this action only hours after the highest Hamas political figure—certain to be playing a major role in any coalition government—endorsed Usama bin Laden, architect of the September 11 attacks.
By Barry Rubin
It is amazing what nonsense appears in the mass media. Consider the following paragraph from a Washington Post story:
“A decade ago, the Middle East might have responded to the killing of Osama bin Laden with fury at the United States. But with the region convulsed by mostly peaceful popular revolutions, the response to his death has been muted, another signal that the old Arab order is being swept away.”
So what does this say? Ten years ago, there would have been fury in the Middle East about bin Laden’s killing but now, with the democracy movement, that’s no longer true.
Two governments have been overthrown in the Middle East, Egypt and Tunisia. These regimes were repressing Islamists. They would have cheered bin Laden’s death. So would every other government in the region. Iran, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and Syria was no fan of bin Laden, either, at least not publicly. Either these governments were anti-Islamist or, in Iran’s case, were a different kind of Islamist.
The same applies to the Islamist movements. The Muslim Brotherhood held no brief for bin Laden himself, though it supported the insurgent movement in Iraq that was led by al-Qaida. Hamas and Hizballah were not big supporters either. As a Shia group, Hizballah would not have mourned bin Laden, whose movement hated Shia Muslims. True, bin Laden—based on his recent September 11 success—was higher in the public opinion polls. But the few pro-bin Laden demonstrations would have been repressed by the rulers.
In fact, the situation was the precise opposite. Many Islamist groups were angry at bin Laden after September 11 just as an organized crime family would be outraged by some new gang who shot up the town and brought a police crackdown. As a result of the post-September 11 crackdown, Islamist agents were deported from Europe and arrested at home.
Every government could not only suppress their own Islamists with Western backing but also go after non-Islamist dissidents as well by portraying them as Islamist terrorists. Even Syria, for example, blamed internal dissent on al-Qaida and bragged about helping the United States round up a dangerous al-Qaida man.
Now, contrast this with the present-day era of upheavals. The government of the Gaza Strip and a key part of the Palestinian Authority condemned the killing and came out on bin Laden’s side. So did the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the single most powerful political force in the country whose influence has been expanded due to U.S. policy.
The old Arab order—except in Syria—was anti-Islamist! Removing it gives a blessed chance for democracy but it also provides an equal or better chance for radical Islamist takeovers. Each country is a different story. But if the Western governments don’t notice the problem how is it going to be solved?
An example. The British government heartily endorsed the Fatah-Hamas cooperation agreement. It’s not every day that America’s oldest and strongest ally cheers a coalition agreement that brings a genocidal, antisemitic, terrorist-supporting, client of Iran into a regime that survives on Western financial subsidies. But the fact that London took this action only hours after the highest Hamas political figure—certain to be playing a major role in any coalition government—endorsed Usama bin Laden, architect of the September 11 attacks.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Yes, Virginia, Obama Foreign Policy Is Ignorant and Stupid Rather Than a Conspiracy
This article is published in PajamasMedia. The full text is provided here for your convenience.
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BLOOM (screaming): “Have you lost your mind? What are you talking about? Kill the actors. You can't kill the actors --they're not animals, they're human beings!”
BIALYSTOCK: “They are? Have you ever eaten with one?”
--“The Producers”
By Barry Rubin
The most common question—or remark—that I get from readers is to say that I’m wrong to talk about how Western policymakers (and especially the Obama Administration) are ignorant, ideologically deluded, and unable to learn from experience. They claim that these problems arise from a deliberate malevolent effort to destroy America.
It tells something about how bad a lot of the administration's policies are as to make such a conclusion possible. Nevertheless, it's not correct.
With academia, mass media, most of the publishing industry, and Hollywood on their side how would these policymakers know any better? Their professors told them they were brilliant; the books they read all tell them they're right. Nobody corrects or criticizes them except those who they can rationalize are opponents--and evil people, too!--and thus these are partisan carpings to be disregarded.
If the critics can be described as conservatives their views are discounted. If you are proven to be correct that seems to have no effect on the powerful institutions and elite opinions.
In fact, the very fact of being a critic is used to disqualify criticism. When I wrote a detailed critique of Obama's policies in a prestigious policy journal, the prestigious authors responded that what I said should be discounted--and my specific arguments need not be persuasively countered-- because...I was critical of Obama's policies!
I cannot imagine any other time in modern Western intellectual history when this kind of thing has happened.
So the usual corrective institutions aren’t functioning. If no one tells the emperor and his courtiers that they are under-dressed such people are going to keep peeling off clothes confident of the fact that nobody (or at least anyone who counts) will tell them that they are naked. With so much insulation, they don't feel the chill.
Those certain that Obama and his government—and I only speak of foreign policy here—must be acting deliberately out of malice generally have one thing in common: they have never actually dealt with high-level politicians and decisionmakers.
Believe me, ignorance, arrogance, stupidity, a smug arrogance that closes one off to learning from advice or experience, and ideological blinders are not so unique in those circles. I've seen this pattern over and over again, both as a historian and from direct observation.
And those readers who have had such first-hand experience are no doubt nodding their heads at this point and thinking of their funniest anecdotes that demonstrate this point.
What's unique is the almost total way various enablers keep up this pretense, making the situation far more extreme than usual. Presidents like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush no doubt believed in their positions. But having to confront daily a firestorm of ridicule and criticism forced them to question themselves constantly, to make adjustments, and even to change. policies that clearly were either not working or were too unpopular.
That's the way the system is supposed to function.
What is different now are the following points:
--In the past, there was a lot of feedback from non-government institutions that had to be taken into account. Even if you were a smug, arrogant son-of-a-gun you had to be cautious so as not to be embarrassed or humiliated by doing something dumb and getting called on it. The Obama Administration doesn’t have to worry, and that has a bad effect on its behavior.
--Conservatives and Republicans still have to live by the old rules because they get no such pass by these institutions. On the contrary, they are subjected to intense scrutiny, biting criticism, and even deliberate misrepresentation. So whether or not they are correct, they know that every mistake or miscalculation will be relentlessly highlighted. This can be annoying and unfair but it is also a good thing for a government to deal with critics and not just courtiers.
If Sarah Palin says something stupid, a hundred sources will ridicule her and she won't make the same mistake again. If Barack Obama says something stupid he won't learn anything because of the silence of the fans.
--Conversely, politicians want to be loved by the "cream" of society, the people they meet at Washington cocktail parties. They are stung by being considered fools and so trim their sails in order to court praise. But if the intellectual elite, the universities, the mass media, the cultural elite, and Hollywood almost unanimously sing your praises daily it is easy to think you are infallible no matter how wrong you are.
--The career bureaucracies at the State and Defense departments represent an institutional memory and an independent source of information and analysis. Even if one doesn’t agree with ideas and proposals put forward by the uniformed military, Foreign Service, and civil service, they have a lot of experience and knowledge that is indispensible.
Unfortunately, while all presidents decide not to listen to this advice at times no one has done so more freuquently than the Obama Administration.
This is partly due to having a secretary of state who is a former rival and a secretary of defense who is a holdover from the previous administration. The CIA is led by someone who is clueless, while the national security advisor is a political operative who administers ideologues who have their own channel to the president.
In short, this is a moment in history when external and internal checks have failed to an almost unprecedented extent.
--Finally, it is helpful to have a president with some grasp of international affairs, who is willing to depend on someone with tremendous knowledge (think of President Richard Nixon’s close working relationship with National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State Henry Kissinger), and doesn’t think he already knows everything.
Let’s face it, why would a man who has only been a community organizer, adjunct law professor, state legislator, and very briefly a senator with a bad attendance record have a real feel for international affairs? The fact that he is an ideologue and arrogant even by the usual standards of politicians and presidents makes things worse.
So while there are some very good people in U.S. government agencies and even some very competent political appointees, the mess does result from arrogance, stupidity, ignorance, inexperience, and ideology of those who are making the final decisions.
Of course, it is also true that the ideology guiding these decisions--which is supposedly so wonderful--is objectively quite destructive of U.S. interests. A reader wisely suggests the maxim that there are those who know what they are doing and those who don't. For those who really understand the ideology they are promoting, it is intended to weaken the U.S. role in the world because they think it has been bad, to end U.S. leadership because they think it has been bullying, and to empower various people in the Third World because they think that they've been oppressed and exploited by the United States.
They are thus doing a huge amount of damage and dismantling--hopefully only temporary--much that American diplomats and soldiers have spent decades in building.
Yes, they are doing the best they can. And that’s precisely the problem.
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal, and a featured columnist for PajamasMedia at http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is http://www.gloria-center.org/. His PajamaMedia columns are mirrored and other articles available at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/.
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