Depressing Middle East Post
Jul. 14th, 2006 09:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thedeadlyhookWhy is leadership by example important? Gee, let's think about that:
But Israeli officials rebuffed claims that their attacks in Lebanon had shown disproportionate use of force, saying their tactics were comparable to those of the US and Russia. 'We will act in the same proportions that Russia is using against the Chechens and the US has used against (al-Qaida leader Osama) bin Laden in Afghanistan,' the justice minister, Haim Ramon, said.
Heaven help us all.
But Israeli officials rebuffed claims that their attacks in Lebanon had shown disproportionate use of force, saying their tactics were comparable to those of the US and Russia. 'We will act in the same proportions that Russia is using against the Chechens and the US has used against (al-Qaida leader Osama) bin Laden in Afghanistan,' the justice minister, Haim Ramon, said.
Heaven help us all.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-20 01:35 am (UTC)Gotcha. That was what I figured, and I think it's pretty much what everyone else was doing. :-)
As for the Iraq issue, I suspect I'm probably an outlier here. I'm no master pollster, but my impression is that most of the Americans who supported the invasion did so either because they believed Saddam Hussein was about to get nuclear weapons, or that he was personally responsible for September 11, or both. I don't think Bush himself really misled the public on these points, but Cheney and Rumsfeld most certainly did.
As a wooly liberal internationalist who reads lots of superhero comics, I think it's a fine thing for America to use its might to get rid of monstrous dictators and spend billions of dollars on humanitarian relief efforts. But I don't think that's a mainstream American viewpoint, and a lot of the people who supported the invasion as an exercise in revenge or self-defense are now pretty pissed off about it.
Meanwhile, as angry as I am about the postwar handling, I guess there really is no way to know if the reconstruction effort might have succeeded if it had been run in a halfway competent fashion. A lot of commentators now seem to be deciding that it was doomed from the start, with the accompanying political spin - the left-wing version being "Nyah nyah, we told you neocons it wouldn't work," and the right-wing version being "This proves that Arabs and/or Muslims only understand brute force and can't handle democracy after all." But I guess I'm still too idealistic to buy that.
Whew, this is running a bit long, so I'll spare you my own half-baked ideas about "Iraq: What went wrong." But I think it's all probably a lot more complicated than most people would like to think - a lot of different forces, a lot of different agendas. Just for one example, there's the way the late, unlamented Zarqawi refashioned Bin Laden's goal of uniting the Muslim world against the West into a pogrom against Shia Muslims. Now that the Shia are striking back, the Sunnis who started the insurgency are belatedly looking to the U.S. for protection. A U.S. adminstration that spent years denying there even was an insurgency is going to have a hard time managing such a complicated situation, but I guess it's pretty much out of their hands at this point.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-20 01:54 am (UTC)And I too am idealistic — too idealistic to be cynical. I think most Arabs anywhere want peace, freedom and security and to have a flatscreen TV and send their kids to good schools, just like all of us.
BUt I also feel that Arab/Muslim civilisation in general hasn't gone through the same kind of reformation that the Christian West went through in centuries of warfare in Europe that lead to the slow, painful and bloody buildup of the institutions that lead to stable democracy. It's a long slow thing, and I think America has been idealistic in thinking that it can happen quickly. But I think I would err on the side of idealism too, rather than be cynical and hands off which is how I see a lot of European foreign policy. And it intrigues me to read in the Washington Post yesterday (second lead story) that the Bush administration is now under fire from the right for being too moderate and soft in its foreign policy. If you're being castigated from both the left and the right, then maybe you might just be doing OK...
I found an interesting article a few weeks back, which suggests that the West should perhaps just pull back and let Iraq fight itself to a standstill through civil war, and only when they get sick of bloodshed will there be peace. I'm not sure I'm that utilitarian/machiavellian/hardnosed (I'm not clear which word to use) that I would agree, but it is still a very interesting argument.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/05/07/do0709.xml
I would consider myself an internationalist too, perhaps a very dry liberal, or a moderate conservative. I remember discussing the whole free trade issue with people at work — most of our clothes here are now made in China and I don't have a problem with it. I said: all those billions of Chinese workers have to do something. I remember when I was a kid, things like teeshirts and jeans were so expensive that my parents couldn't afford to buy them.
Cheers : }
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-21 06:00 am (UTC)What? But we're talking about politics! On the Internet! That just doesn't seem right somehow. :-)
I think your comment about "the institutions that lead to stable democracy" is very apt. Elections are groovy, but they're not enough to secure peace and freedom all by themselves. You also need the kind of institutional framework that guarantees individual rights and freedoms, private property and private belief, the rule of law and all that other good stuff, or else you basically just have mob rule with a scorecard. (Fareed Zakaria, one of America's best international journalists, recently wrote a book on this subject that I sincerely mean to read some day.) And that's obviously going to be an issue in a heterogenous country like Iraq.
Of course, it's a lot easier for me to sit in my cozy swivel chair saying that to go out and try to build these kinds of institutions. I don't think it's necessary for people to go through centuries of war and turmoil in order to establish these foundations - at least I hope not, considering how easily even civilized nations can lose them again - but I doubt it helps when you have people actively trying to tear your society apart while you're doing it.
If you're being castigated from both the left and the right, then maybe you might just be doing OK...
I'd really like to think so. For all the idealism in Bush's speeches, it seldom seems to filter down the chain of command, and he's entrusted the day-to-day implementation to people who seem fairly indifferent to the state of Iraqi democracy - or even, like Donald Rumsfeld, apparently "bored" of Iraq in general. At least with Condoleezza Rice installed at the State Department, there's finally somebody with both a genuine interest in implementing Bush's goals and the bureaucratic power to do so. I don't have the greatest faith in Bush's foreign-policy instincts, but I'll take them over Cheney's and Rumsfeld's any day of the week. :-)
I found an interesting article a few weeks back, which suggests that the West should perhaps just pull back and let Iraq fight itself to a standstill through civil war, and only when they get sick of bloodshed will there be peace.
Interesting article. I don't think I agree with all the analysis, but I may be able to get behind Luttwak's conclusions. Unlike America or England, which were tied together by ideology and force of habit, there's not much holding Iraq together but the passing whim of a long-ago British bureaucrat. Luttwak's advice would probably just lead to Iraq breaking up into segregated mini-nations, which is kind of the opposite outcome to the American civil war, but at this point that might be the best thing for everyone. I gather Baghdad used to be the kind of place where people of all races and creeds could coexist (at least when they weren't getting bushwacked by the secret police), but then again so was Sarajevo, and look how that turned out...
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-21 05:05 pm (UTC)When you think about the breakup of nations along ethnic lines, there's been quite a bit of those tensions all across central and eastern Europe since the collapse of communism (how blithely we use that phrase ``collapse of communism'' but who would have thought 20 years ago that it would ever be so). I think it's always an ongoing thing. Look how Europe has been reorganising itself since the huge empires of the 18th and 19th century — the Austro-Hungarian, and the Ottoman Empire which ran most of the Middle East. And Scotland and Wales still don't quite want to let go. ;-} So many Scots still loathe the English, the bitterness of centuries, still a lot of ``shouting across the border'' as they call it. C'est la vie.