July 21, 2006

The Mailbag

Thanks for all your E-mails. Here's a selection of reader views from the past couple of days.

Mr Djerejian: Thanks for your recent thoughtful but no less heartfelt comments on the terrible war in Lebanon. I think Western opinion makers are still very badly behind the "power curve" in assessing just how dangerous this war is and consequently why every effort should be made to stop it. You note "Israel's right to self-defense", as just about everybody does. The right to self-defense, however, does not give a nation the absolute right to destroy its neighbor. When Argentina seized the Falklands in 1982, did Britain respond by bombing Buenos Aires, or blockading the River Plate? (For that matter, did the US bomb Pnomh Penh when the VC used Cambodia as a "sanctuary"?) Goodness knows there is still controversy about the sinking of the General Belgrano, a heavy cruiser that threatened the Royal Navy's small task force. Yet even you suggest that it's perfectly OK for Israel to bomb Beirut, as long as it's aiming at "select party leadership targets of import".

Frankly, that's throwing proportionality out of the window. Hezbollah ambushed an IDF patrol on the Israeli side of an armistice line for which the Israelis have had precious little regard when it suited them. The Hezbollah rockets didn't start to fly until the Israeli bombs and shells started to fall on Lebanon. Even then, bombing Beirut was hardly going to stop a guerilla from firing a Katyusha rocket -- more significantly, if the Israelis really believed that it would cause the Lebanese government to stop the guerillas, they are even more deluded than our reality-challenged neo-cons in Washington.

I am not suggesting that the Israeli government should just cave in to Hezbollah, but frankly as an American I don't think it's my business to tell the Israelis what they should do, per se. On the other hand, as an American I think it's perfectly OK for me to tell the Israeli government that whatever they're doing in Lebanon, they won't be doing it on our nickel and with our gear. Otherwise, we are endorsing their actions, and with the increasingly closer identification of the US with Israel since 1967 I don't see how we can avoid that characterization (particularly when the President practically embraces it). Israel is radicalizing people who have little use for armed militia, but have less use for being indiscriminately bombed out of their homes and livelihoods. The Germans were fond of "community punishment" techniques during their battles with European resistance movements during the war, and we all know how much that endeared the Germans to their fellow Europeans. Giving a blank cheque to Israel is as mad as Kaiser Wilhelm giving a blank cheque to Conrad von Hötzendorf in 1914.

Of course, our government will take no such drastic action, particularly not having "committed" itself as it has, but how ironic that fifty years ago this summer our government rather brutally brought the Suez crisis to an end by squeezing Britain until the pips squeaked. I would defy anyone to reconcile the strategic worldview of the United States as reflected by these two seminal events.

More:

Mr. Djerejian, if Hezbollah is supported by the Lebanese population to the degree election results suggest, particularly in the south, then Cordesman's suggestion, that, "First, the UN has to help Lebanon actually disarm Hizbollah, stop it from receiving further arms from Iran and Syria and prevent it sending military aid to Hamas." is simply a silly fantasy. If that large a percentage of the Lebanese population wishes to wage war on Israel, then there will be war, and Israel will inevitably wage war on the population of Lebanon, and there isn't a damned thing that the President of the United States can do about it, whether it be George Bush, John McCain, John Kerry, Rudy Giuliani, Bill or Hillary Clinton, or anybody else who is so unwise as to want the job.

When a large percentage of a population desire war, war is the result. Only later, when they look around at the rubble and corpses, does the reappraisement begin; attitudes among the populations of Europe in 1918 were much different than they had been in 1914. We live in interesting times, and I don't have the slightest notion as to how to make them less interesting, until after a trip into the abyss has occurred, and it depresses me greatly to think, as I have reluctantly come to do, that nobody else has the slightest notion as to how to accomplish this either...Might things be delayed? I suppose, but the desire for war runs too strong, among to many people, for it to be avoided.

The other depressing aspect to contemplate, of course, is that we also stand on a precipice of a new era in which the proliferation of destructive technology has reached a point where unavoidable wars, unavoidable due to the
sheer number of people who desire it, can pull many other nations into the whirlpool, even if they are better led than the European nations were in 1914. Always happy to send along a cheerful note...

Another, from blogger Praktike:

Just wanted to drop you a quick note to express my solidarity with you in your frustration at the lack of leadership across the political class in America...it seems that the realists are too scared to speak the truth for fear of being branded pro-Hizballah or somesuch nonsense.

From my perspective, what the US needs to remember--because under Bush I and Clinton and before them it knew this--that nations other than the US have interests and to one extent or another they need to be accomodated or they will seek undiplomatic means of attaining their goals. As odious as the Syrian regime may be, and as much as we don't like Hizballah, they are there and only a horrific amount of violence will be able to dislodge the latter. As for the former, its removal would create another Lebanon/Iraq, with Hizballah-aligned Sunnis coming to power after a protracted bloodletting.

From my seat here in Cairo, the American democratization project in the Middle East is "ala faresh al-mout" or on its deathbed. I'm sure you know well that Condi Rice's decision not to go troubleshoot until Israel has time to "mop up" is being received very, very, very angrily in the region. This will not be forgotten, and rest assured that more
Americans will die. Americans seem to have forgotten that moral indignation will only get you so far in foreign affairs; at the end of the day, politics is about power and interests and only secondarily about norms and values.

And more:

Hi Greg,

I just sent you the DC Post story on conservative critics of second term administration foreign policy. It's nothing you don't know, but still interesting to see in print. One thing that struck me, in the context of Hugh Hewitt, was Kenneth Adelman's suggestion that Bush was now taking the foreign policy stance of any 'middle of the road' administration. Hewitt, of course, keeps referring to his own views as 'center-right,' but of course Adelman has it right---at least where NON-Middle East policies are concerned. It's odd: the right doesn't want to be the right. Instead, Hewitt seems to want to pretend---or perhaps he is simply so parochial that he can't imagine a real left or has never encountered it---that he and his friends are the center and people like Hillary Clinton, who as you know is a right wing social democrat in European, Indian, or Latin American terms---is a raving leftist. Mrs C. is far closer to Calderon than to Lopez Obrador in the Mexican context, for example. Oscar Wilde said that the nineteenth century's dislike of realism was Caliban seeing his own face in the mirror, while the nineteenth century's dislike of romanticism was Caliban's dislike at NOT seeing his own face in the mirror. People like Hewitt want to claim that theirs is a radical departure from the culture of what they call appeasement, and associate themselves with the transformative international project enunciated in the President's second inaugural. They insist that the 'status quo' policies of the past sixty years in the Middle East have been an abject failure and both for morality's sake and that of US national security, they had to be transformed. But then, when called radicals, by you and now by George Will, they indigantly insist that they are nothing of the sort.' Caliban's rage. Of course, given the other agenda of people like Hewitt---that of the rapture, I mean--- and the other agenda of people like Krauthammer---Israel, I mean---perhaps such subterfuge is only to be expected.

Please keep the notes coming, I'll try to post representative samples once in a while.

Posted by Gregory at July 21, 2006 02:44 AM