The Politics of Churlishness

Martin Peretz at The New Republic has long disdained the American political approach to the Israeli/Palestinian debacle. Internationalist institutions like the U.N. have also utterly failed there.

Peretz grants the Bush Administration much credit for its policies towards Israel/Palestine. I must agree, sticking with Ariel Sharon and his centrist vision is by far the best approach anyone has yet conceived. It's Bush's biggest international success. I loathe Bush and his administration, though, and I'm not willing to concede as much credit to Bush as Peretz does: the victory belongs instead to Sharon. Peretz seems to think Bush is out to democratize the Middle East, and is essentially sincere in his goals, but I suspect Bush is instead trying to maintain the flow of oil with a projection of U.S. military power and keep the "ruling Arabs happy." Bush disdains his father's approach as being inadequate to our national security, so he's come up with a new-fangled but still dishonest new approach. Democratization is a slogan Bush employs. Like his father with the Hitler/Saddam analogy, Bush's desire to liberate the Middle East is phony. Peretz states:

The traditional Republican mentality that was so perfectly and meanly represented by Bush père and Baker precluded the United States from pressing the Arabs about reform--about anything--for decades. Not Iraq about its tyranny and its record of genocide, not Syria about its military occupation of Lebanon and its own brutal Baathist dictatorship, not Egypt about loosening the crippling bonds of a statist economy and an authoritarian political system, not Saudi Arabia about its championing of the Wahhabi extremism that made its own country so desiccated and the world so dangerous, and certainly not the Palestinians about the fantasy that they had won all the wars that they had actually lost and were therefore entitled to the full rewards due them from their victories.

Not much has really changed in that respect, despite the invasion of Iraq. The ruling circles of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Egypt have little to fear from Bush's initiatives. Peretz is nevertheless right about Clinton's reluctance to respond effectively to bin Laden. But once again, Peretz gives Bush too much credit for statesmanship:

What the Bush administration gradually came to realize was that fighting the Muslim terrorist international could not be done in a vacuum. If the Islamic and Arab orbits were to continue to revolve around sanguinary tyrannies, there would be no popular basis in civil society to rob the cult of suicidal murder of its prestige. So, rather than being a distraction from the struggle against the armed rage suffusing these at once taut and eruptive polities, confronting their governments was actually intrinsic to that struggle. The Bush administration recognized that removing the effect means removing the cause.

No, Bush just wanted the oil and the glory. And to kick Saddam's ass. These plans predated 9/11. How effective are Bush's attacks against Muslim extremism, really? Great skepticism is warranted.

Whatever the proper historical and cultural analysis of the past, however, the fact is that democracy did not begin even to breathe until the small coalition of Western nations led by the United States destroyed the most ruthless dictatorship in the area.

And does democracy yet breathe? Looks like it's still on life support to me! (sorry, I'm being churlish).

After a year and a half of nearly daily Sunni bloodletting among them, the Shia have not wreaked the vengeance they surely could and, equally as surely, some of them long to take. The U.S. liberation-occupation has now tried to cobble together these diverging Iraqis into the beginnings of a democratic regime. Wonder of wonders, these estranged cousins have shown some talent in the art of compromise; and trying to make this polity work is hardly an effort undertaken without courage.

That's Ayatollah Sisatni's work there (churlish me):

In any case, this churlish orthodoxy tells us that the Sunnis need to be enticed into the political game lest it be deemed illegitimate. In this scenario, it is the murderers who withhold or bestow moral authority.

Not the moral authority - they have guns! They must be dealt with in some constructive way!

Suddenly, the elections in Iraq, Bush's main achievement there, exhilarating and inspiring, sprung loose the psychological impediments that shackled the Lebanese to Syria. Even if the outcomes will not be exactly the same, this was Prague and Berlin at the end of the long subjugation to their neighbor to the east.

Not quite. As Juan Cole churlishly notes, Bush didn't even want these sort of elections. They were forced upon him by Sistani. Hamas and Hezbollah hold far too much sway to be pollyannish yet about the future of Lebanon. Peretz continues:

It is simply stupid, empirically and philosophically, to deny that all or any of this would have happened without the deeply unpopular but historically grand initiative of Bush.

The glory of Bush! But couldn't Bush at least be honest in his rhetoric, actions, and motivations? His thuggery enrages people all around the world. People like me!

Have Democrats begun to wonder how it came to pass that this noble cause became the work of Republicans? They should wonder if they care to regain power. They should recall that Clinton (and the sanctimonious Jimmy Carter even more so) had absolutely no interest in trying to modify the harsh political character of the Arab world. What they aspired to do was to mollify the dictators--to prefer the furthering of the peace process to the furthering of the conditions that make peace possible. The Democrats were the ones who were always elevating Arafat. He was at the very center of their road map. After he stalked out of a meeting room in Paris during cease-fire talks in late 2000, Albright actually ran in breathless pursuit to lure him back. It was the Democrats who perpetuated Arafat's demonic sway over the Palestinians, and it was the Democrats who sustained him among the other Arabs. And so the cause of Arab democracy was left for the Republicans to pursue. After September 11, the cause became a matteralso of U.S. national security.

True enough, to the discredit of the Democrats. Thuggery isn't the answer, though. Too many lives are at stake!

Now that there is some real hope among both Israelis and Palestinians about the future, let us examine the reasons for it. The first is that Bush made no gestures to the hyperbolic fantasies of Palestinian politics. He gave them one dose of reality after another. The second is that he gave Israel the confidence that he would not trade its security for anything--which means that Israel is now willing to cede much on its own. (Israeli dovishness for American hawkishness: This was always the only way.) The third is that Bush is holding Sharon to his commitments, and everyone who is at all rational on these issues now sees the Israeli prime minister as a man of his word and a man of history. After all, Sharon has broken with much of his own political party.

Bush HAS been effective this way!

It has been heartening, in recent months, to watch some Democratic senators searching for ways out of the politics of churlishness. Some liberals appear to have understood that history is moving swiftly and in a good direction, and that history has no time for their old and mistaken suspicion of American power in the service of American values. One does not have to admire a lot about George W. Bush to admire what he has so far wrought. One need only be a thoughtful American with an interest in proliferating liberalism around the world. And, if liberals are unwilling to proliferate liberalism, then conservatives will. Rarely has there been a sweeter irony.

I hope Peretz isn't talking about that Social Security traitor Joe Lieberman, but he probably is.

Look, Democrats can adopt Bush's approach in Israel/Palestine, and I hope they would. But Martin Peretz/Peter Beinart have shown a keener interest instead in exiling Moveon.org and Michael Moore from the Democratic party. Also, by working so closely with Lieberman, Peretz/Beinart are betraying the New Deal, with Bush's misguided Social Security 'reform'. Peretz is shooting himself in the foot as long as he maintains this course. There are better ways. Michael Moore is a gifted propagandist and should be put to work, not thrown into the cold. Moveon.org is the future of the Democratic party. Lieberman's star is fading fast. Democrats can always steal Bush's approach, but backstabbing is unwarranted!