The Wall

Israel is a tri-lingual state; Hebrew, Arabic, and English

Israeli soldiers in shopping mall, Jerusalem Wailing Wall, Jerusalem

Wall, Arab East Jerusalem Arab East Jerusalem

The Garden of Gethsemane, sight of Jesus' arrest, Jerusalem

The Wall, seen from the Mount of Olives, Jerusalem February 2006
The Dome of the Rock, seen from the Mount of Olives

The Middle East is awash in myth, and Jerusalem is where they coalesce in blood and earth. Palestinian and Israeli nationalisms, especially Palestinian, are crippled by their focus on victimization. Societies who look back rather than forward, and who remember tragedies as more important than triumphs, are doomed to a cycle of violence that is intertwined with each side's myths about, in third-grade parlance, who started it.

Israelis and Palestinians both resent the very term "cycle of violence", because it implies a process of cold mathematical inevitability, with no beginning, no end, and no moral component. The Israeli narrative holds that the Palestinians and the Arab states "started it" by refusing to accept the U.N. partition proposal of 1947. The Palestinian and Arab narrative holds that the Israelis "started it" by creating a European emigre state, in part to assuage European guilt, in the very heart of the newly "independent" Arab world.

While debating these stances may be enticing to historians and irresistable to the actors involved, it is an ultimately futile act; the focus must instead be a consensus on which facts are established and irreversible. Among these facts must be the existence and legitimacy of Israel within its 1967 borders and the right of the Palestinian people to have a legitimately independent state. Another fact, which is studiously ignored by the United States, is the continued seizure and colonization of Palestinian land by Israel.

The tactic of suicide bombing by Palestinians has sucked the air out of the moral dimension to the conflict; such barbaric attacks inevitably divert attention from Israeli actions, which are somewhat less barbaric but far more damaging to the "peace process".

The decision by the Palestinians to begin suicide attacks against Israeli civilians was taken in the aftermath of the Oslo Agreement in 1993. To American eyes, the images from the White House lawn said all that needed to be said; the Israeli prime minister and the chairman of the PLO had shaken hands. They had signed an assortment of documents. They had made peace.

What was ignored in the West, and especially America, was the implementation of these accords by the Israeli government. As Yasser Arafat, the romantic and despicable chairman of the PLO, was given authority over small and isolated enclaves of Palestinian land, the Israelis rapidly accelerate their seizure and colonization of ever-greater portions of the West Bank. So, while the Palestinians were given balkanized scraps of sovereignty, Israel ensured that the Palestinian state that would theoretically result from the completion of the "peace process" would not include vast areas of the West Bank, especially those adjacent to Arab East Jerusalem.

Militant Palestinian factions discerned Israel's strategy very clearly; the peace "process" would drag on as slowly as possible, incrementaly ceding nominal control of bantustans to Arafat and his corrupt clique. All the while, Israel would create new and permanent facts on the ground by exponentially increasing their rate of settlement in the West Bank, making a full eventual withdrawal from the occupied West Bank politically and emotionally impossible for Israelis. In short, Israel was invested in the process of creating the perception that wide swaths of the West Bank would be annexed to Israel at the end of the peace process.

The Palestinian people understood what Arafat was too vain to see. The Israelis never intended to give back the whole of the West Bank (or Judaea and Samaria, as many Jews insist on calling it). The peace process was merely to be exploited to buy time to build up as many Israeli settlements as possible on Arab land. The Palestinians came to see this, and they attacked.

Colonizing territory that has been seized in war is one of the most fundamental taboos of international law, and Israel's colonization of the West Bank needs to be seen for what it is. Israel has not simply been occupying the West Bank for forty years; it has increasingly been transplanting Israeli citizens onto Palestinian land, using tactics of house demolition, orchard razing, and Jewish-only roads.

As soon as the peace process began in the early 1990's, and it became clear to the Israeli leadership that a Palestinian state was increasingly innevitable, a rapid settlement of large swaths of Palestinian lands began. This was not coincidence. The Israelis never negotiated in good faith with the Palestinians, but the Palestinians' decision to murder civilians has drowned out this fundamental fact.

The wall which is now being built throughout the West Bank has, of course, two very different interpretations. Israel says the wall is necessary to stop suicide bombers from entering Israel. Palestinians say that the wall is designed to annex lands from the West Bank and make these lands part of Israel in any possible future "peace". Both sides are right.

The American government promotes a view in which Palestinian terrorism is being directed by groups who reject the very existence of Israel and are entirely devoid of genuine or rational greivance. Little mention is made of the seizure of Palestinian land, however, as all Israeli actions, especially after 9/11, tend to be seen as defense against terrorism.

Still, one must never forget that, as abusively as Israel treats its subjects, it treats its citizens better than any other state in the Middle East. For any person at all interested in civil rights, individual liberty and dignity, rule of law, and meritocracy, Israel is a…hold your breath, moral relativists…better place to live than any Arab country.

Israel is a society in the truest sense of the word. Mandatory military service for all Israeli citizens guarantees that their government can not sustain actions that are not supported by the people they represent; for better or for worse, Israelis are in it together. They are a tolerant society in every sense of the word. Twenty percent of Israelis are Arabs and, despite the inevitable alienation and loneliness that Israeli Arabs must often feel, they are accorded more legal rights and opportunities than Arabs living in any Arab country.

The Palestinian Arabs that were not driven from their homes and were able to stay inside Israel live far freer lives than the Palestinian refugees who were taken in by other Arab states. In Israel, cousins of Israel’s sworn and eternal Arab enemies are elected to serve in parliament. And, surrounded by enemies, Israelis dare to live as free people in an ocean of despotic thugs.

Still, we are faced with the dilemma. How can such a liberal (in the real sense of the word) and overachieving society treat half of the people under their control as subjects rather than citizens? The myth that American leaders need to disavow is the one of Israel as the pure-hearted David fending off the seething Arab Goliath. There are two Israels. One is an oasis of freedom in the most un-free part of the world. The other is a very pillar of that un-free part of the world. They way to get rid of the latter is to end the occupation.

Window Rock, Navajo Nation November 2006

Eifel Tower Paris March 2006

Vatican City March 2006

Swiss Alps March 2006

Avignon, France March 2006

Paris August, 2004

Coliseum, Rome March 2006

On Blowback

To understand, or rather to begin to attempt to comprehend, America’s position in the Middle East today, it is imperative to understand America’s focus on punishing enemies at the expense of a sober analysis of possible negative blowback. The obsession with bleeding the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980’s and with overthrowing Saddam Hussein in 2003 are disturbingly similar examples of the American penchant for instant gratification.

In order to humiliate and weaken the Soviet Union, a goal that any defender of the most basic human liberties would be pressed to endorse, the CIA undertook the largest operation in its history by arming the mujahedin in Afghanistan. The obsession with creating a Vietnam for the Russians led the United States to arm and train its future assassins.

Every penny, every blanket, and every bullet that American sent to the mujahedin during the 1980’s went through Pakistan. Americans were not allowed into Afghanistan; they did not meet with the “freedom fighters” that they so lavishly funded, and they had no say as to which resistance groups would receive the American largesse. All of these responsibilities, these most fundamental strategic and tactical decisions, fell to Pakistan. Pakistan, which was ruled by a military dictator who had hung his civilian predecessor and which used the 1980’s not only to fund and arm their chosen surrogates in Afghanistan, but to build nuclear weapons.

So all encompassing was the obsession with bleeding Russia that the Pakistani nuclear program and the radicalization of an entire generation of Central Asian Muslims were deemed subordinate concerns. One would be hard pressed to make that case today. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, who matched American funds to the mujahedin, decided that American arms and funds should not go to secular, western-leaning nationalist groups, which actually did exist in the region at that time, but to medieval obscurantist fanatics. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia had their own interests in doing so, of course, and states cannot be blamed for pursuing their own interests. The United States can be blamed, however, for enabling their “allies” in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, to transfer American wealth and technology to movements and ideologies that were at their very core virulently anti-American.

The way in which the CIA allowed the Pakistanis and the Saudis to outsource the war was shortsighted enough. American conduct in the aftermath of the Russian retreat was even more so. The last Russian crossing the bridge back into Kazakhstan was taken to be what the pulling down of Saddam Hussein’s statue would be 14 years later; it was taken to be evidence of “Mission Accomplished”, rather than the beginning of a new and even more crucial chapter to the war. What distracted America from Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal? Fittingly enough, Iraq played a part. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait seemed far more relevant to our national interests than did the outcome of a convoluted and barbaric civil war in war-torn but commie-free Afghanistan.

We now know that the civil war in Afghanistan resulted in the rise of the Taliban, who willingly and knowingly hosted al-Qaeda through the 9/11 attacks. Only three nations on earth had full relations with the Taliban, all “moderate” American allies of course: the United Arab Emirates and our favorite bagmen, Saudi Arabia and a nuclear Pakistan. After the 9/11 attacks, our “allies” “supported” our assault on their “former” proxies.

The horror of the 9/11 attacks drowned out any assessment that included even a hint of American responsibility. Pointing to the fact that America may have had a role in funding and training their murderers was equated with justifying the attacks themselves, and willful blindness maintained its insidious power, evident in the manner that the United States attacked Afghanistan.

The Americans did not pour troops into Tora Bora to capture and kill al-Qaeda’s leadership; it hired local Afghan warlords who opposed the Taliban for any number of reasons, very few of which involved any hints of warm feelings for the United States. And what would we do when our enemies reached the border? No worries, our great friends the Pakistanis would apprehend them for us. We would not enter our “ally’s” territory in pursuit of our killers. This staggering betrayal of the dead of 9/11 soon was subsumed by an all too familiar distraction, however.

The United States funded and armed our future enemies in order to achieve the instant gratification of bleeding our arch-nemesis the Soviets. We then abandoned the country with an inconceivable disregard for who would ultimately use their American-supplied weapons and money to gain control of Afghanistan. After the 9/11 attacks, the Americans again largely outsourced a war in Afghanistan and lost focus after the ostensible enemy had been “defeated”, again betrayed a lack of concern over who really controlled Afghanistan which was even more incomprehensible after 9/11. Most of Afghanistan is now “governed” by a group of narco-militias and Taliban insurgents in what appears to be a sickeningly familiar cycle, especially since American attention was again diverted from Afghanistan to Iraq.

The obsession with overthrowing Saddam Hussein had the same effect on American policy as the obsession with bleeding the Soviets did; it led to a fatal failure to imagine possible blowback. The act of removing Saddam Hussein from power was infinitely easier than driving the Soviets out of Afghanistan, and Americans did most of the fighting themselves rather than recruiting unsavory mercenaries, but the flaw was identical; their entire operation betrayed a laser-like focus on who would be assaulted, accompanied by a cosmic ignorance of who would be empowered by the action.

The CIA action in Afghanistan and the American invasion of Iraq appear increasingly to have been short-term tactical successes and long-term strategic disasters. Both wars are historically colored not by who was overthrown by Americans, but by who assumed local power after America’s enemy had been bested. Can anyone today honestly say that bleeding and weakening the Red Army in Afghanistan was worth the cost of the global radical Islamist insurgency that rose from its ashes? Can anyone today honestly say that toppling Saddam Hussein was worth the cost of empowering Iran, attracting al-Qaeda to a resurgence in the heart of the Arab world, and dragging American credibility and prestige to dust in much of the world?

This is not an argument for ignoring enemies or coddling potential aggressors. Rather, it should serve as evidence that a perceived moral superiority over an enemy like the Red Army or Saddam Hussein does not translate into the inherent rationality of attacking and destroying them. Somewhere, deep down, don’t we all miss Gorbachev with his broken elevators and his rusty submarines? Don’t we all miss the no-fly zones and the weapons inspectors?

Coming and Going for all the Wrong Reasons

The way we went to war in Iraq said some bad things about the American people, as well as our leadership. Naïve and myopic are words that come to mind. Naïve was the conviction that Iraqis would welcome any American dictate and policy, naïve was the conviction that the overthrow of the Ba’athist government would be the war, and that the ephemeral and studiously ignored aftermath would inevitably be easy, given the clear benevolence of American motives. Here enters the myopia which plagues us; it must be acknowledged that the real driving force behind the current “anti-war” sentiment in the country is the feeling that the war has simply gone on for too long.

The national “debate” about the invasion of Iraq in 2002 and 2003 was fueled by naiveté and myopia, leaving no room for a sober analysis of several issues. For example, President Bush was proposing that the United States do exactly what Nazis had been hanged at Nuremberg for doing and exactly what Saddam Hussein did by invading Kuwait; the United States would invade a sovereign nation that had neither attacked it or threatened it with attack. The United States would start a war. The United States was now a country that, if it unilaterally concluded that its interests were threatened, arrogated to itself the right to break the most fundamental law of civilization, the right to wage aggressive war.

Four years on, most Americans disapprove of this war. President Bush’s surge will guarantee that the war will not end in the next two years. The house-to-house battle for Baghdad, so mercifully avoided during the invasion, now awaits us. In 2003, Bush declared that America was victorious in the battle for Iraq. Four years on, the capital of Iraq is the most dangerous place on the planet. While the threat that Iraq posed in 2002 was nearly non-existent, the threat that it poses now is very, very real. All those fickle millions who were so eager to engage in this crime when there was no real threat are now equally eager to simply wash our hands of Iraq even though the threat that now exists there is far worse than we could have imagined it becoming.
Out of sight, out of mind will not work in Iraq.

And yet we must withdraw. We must withdraw because there is no American military solution to this problem. Period. When officers in the American military say this in public, that there is no American military solution to this problem, every American soldier who dies after this utterance is being murdered by his own government. Period. Americans are dying in Iraq so that Mr. Bush will be out of office when Mr. Bush’s war is lost.

We are so far behind the curve in Iraq that we are introducing new counterinsurgency strategies into a situation that has not been a classical insurgency in at least 12 months; Iraq’s biggest problem currently is the civil war, which has proven far more lethal to Iraqi people and institutions than the Sunni insurgency against American forces. By sending more troops to aid the Iraqi government, we are not putting down an insurgency against that government. We are in fact funding and arming one party to a civil war. That is what we fail to grasp; the Iraqi government is not the “democracy” fighting the “terrorists”. The Iraqi government is a group that represents one side (the Shi’a) of an ongoing civil war.

The ultimate tragedy is the manner in which the United States will leave Iraq. It will leave Iraq not because it has achieved victory or because the American people have decided that the interests of the Iraqi people are best served by a withdrawal. The United States will leave Iraq because when so many Americans clambered for war four years ago, it seemed never to dawn on them that people would die. It seemed never to dawn on them that years of effort would be needed to rebuild a brutalized society. And so, when the going got tough, Americans reached for the remote.

Rome, March 2006

Sunset over Barcelona, March 2006

The Perils of Faith

Among the endless ironies and unspeakable truths of the Global War on Terror, which in turn symbolizes so many of the dangers of globalization, is the similarity of the “opposing” paradigms involved in this conflict. Let me be quick to state: this argument is not about to descend into sophomoric moral relativism; there is simply no useful comparison between Americans and radical Islamists when it comes to treatment of women, tolerance for minorities, etc. We are better than them, and shame on us if we hesitate to firmly say so. There is a disquieting parallel, however, one that is so immune from criticism that “political correctness” does not begin to describe the deafening lack of discourse concerning it. To distill it to its simplest iteration, radical Islamists and most Americans are similar when viewed from afar; both groups order their very existence on expressions of faith. Faith is the biggest threat to mankind in the 21st century.

After the 9/11 attacks, there was an interminable avalanche of assertions from American leadership that Islam was a religion of peace that had been hijacked by sadistic zealots. They earnestly cited a sura in the Koran forbidding self-destruction as evidence that suicide attacks were not justified in Islam. By projecting such authority onto these words, however, these would-be exonerators were endorsing the very mindset of their murderers; they allowed that the Koran was indeed a holy book, written by the hand of God himself, which had simply been misinterpreted. Once one allows that any “holy book” has any authority whatsoever, they are subjected to the ramifications of any possible “interpretation” of the text.

It seems clear to me that God did not create man in his own image, but that, rather, man created God in his own image. One must concede that the God of the “holy books” has some rather human tendencies. One human tendency is fear, and one common element in the monotheistic faiths is the concern with cheating death. The fear of death inevitably leads one to think about how to somehow create doubt as to its universal certainty. Constructing an ideology that seeks to cast doubt upon the one undoubtable aspect of the human existence, death, obviously requires quite considerable leaps of faith.

There is nothing wrong with vainly trying to deny death; it’s the most natural impulse imaginable. The danger lies in the creeping of faith, of rejection and refusal and indifference to evidence, into other walks of life and into other decision-making processes. This leakage is inevitable, of course, as no realm of the brain or the heart can be quarantined from the next.

Does anyone really doubt that President Bush’s willingness to accept possibilities as fact, to treat caution as defeatism, and to interpret clear failure as a trial by fire was fueled, in large part, by his well-documented pre-disposition towards faith? If one constructs his very moral fabric and personal paradigms on convictions that proudly require no evidence, would this mentality not inevitably be evident in his other decisions?

Faith is not required for everyday acts of kindness and for the disposition of people to help other people. It is, however, necessary to commit large-scale acts of murder. Much has been made of the “fact” that the most murderous regimes of the most murderous century were technically godless, but that obscures the point; communism and fascism were ideologies of faith that were fueled, as faith always is, by clinging to myths in the face of either no evidence or of contradicting evidence. Soviet state planners actually adopted an ideology called “socialist agriculture”, in which seeds were planted in comradely groups rather than as autonomous individuals. The problem was that Mother Nature’s ideology of agriculture held that seeds planted in bunches will not grow. Whether the purity of Aryan blood or the benefits of “socialist agriculture”, the virginity of Mary or the resurrection of Christ, faith is recognizable for what it is by anyone predisposed to reason.

One thing I believe deeply, although I cannot prove it, is that the ancients were far wiser than we moderns give them credit for. In many ways, they were superior to us. One cannot walk through Istanbul or Jerusalem or Athens or Rome without at least considering that they were far superior at aesthetic architecture. It is not shocking that some of the prophets and intellectuals of 2000 years ago were granted such credibility for their beliefs; charismatic and passionate people will always attract a following. The shocking thing is that, 2000 years later, the “holy books” are still granted any credibility at all rather than seen for what they are: just a few of many myths conjured in the past, no different in substance than the Canterbury Tales or The Hobbit.

If we transported the smartest person from the Roman Empire 2000 years ago to today, this genius of his own time would be thoroughly embarrassed by a sixth grader in a contest of knowledge of astronomy, biology, chemistry, genetics, and on down the line. Since we rightly see that all fields of measurable knowledge that the ancients possessed was less complete than is ours, why are we still so invested in their spiritual outlook? Why do we assume that people who thought the earth was flat and whose descendents nearly 2000 years later were still burning women at the stake for witchcraft in the most developed part of the world somehow held the keys to the most fundamentally important issues that exist?

Faith is not a style of thought; it is the absence of thought. The most important invention in human history was the scientific method, because it codified how to prove things. Some things, of course, are unprovable, and we must find our own intuitive ways to their conclusions. There is nothing wrong with that. For example, I believe that it was wrong to invade Iraq, although I can’t prove it. The difference between reasoned opinions and faith is that faith is coercive. When two reasoning people have a debate about any subjective issue, neither person will be completely swayed to his partner’s arguments, but neither person will feel the exact same as they did before the debate, either. Not so with faith. If you have faith in Islam, for example, you are required to believe that anyone who does not share your view is damned. And, depending upon how you interpret the word of God, you may be required to kill them. You may even be required to kill them without provocation, without regard to age or gender. You may be required to kill them all for the crime of not sharing your faith.

American faith is manifested quite differently than that of the radical Islamists, of course, but they are fundamentally the same. More Americans believe in angels than evolution. More Americans believe in the devil than global warming. Americans also have blind faith in the supremacy of their system of government. They have faith that the ideal state of the world would be one in which all nations had adopted the American model. How many Americans know that exactly zero nations have adopted the American system? All democracies on Earth, save America, are modeled on the British and French models. In many ways, the behavior of the American leadership and the American public during the run-up to the war in Iraq was a clear distillation of American faith in action. Faith in American supremacy over the enemy overshadowed reasoned consideration of who the enemy was, what the enemy’s intentions were or what the enemy’s capabilities were. For the American government, faith in their moral superiority and benign intentions outweighed the lack of solid evidence for their very justifications for their actions. For the American people, faith in their government outweighed the same.

On "Islamo-fascism"

Oversimplification is easy. More to the point, it is simple; in fact, it is over simple. As such, it is comfortable, welcoming, reinforcing, reassuring, redemptive, and much more. The problem is that oversimplification is not in our nation’s interest. This ought to be reason enough to reject the artificially monochromatic paradigm that our president is parroting as the latest justification for the war in Iraq.

Is the United States at war? The United States is most certainly not at war, as war would have been defined by any previous generation of Americans. The idea of a war against an ideology, rather than a nation, is unprecedented for the republic, despite what the Bush administration may incessantly claim.

The president repeatedly cites Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union as examples of previously vanquished threats that were fundamentally similar to the current threat from “Islamo-fascism”.

Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were similar in their chauvinistic racism, jingoistic nationalism, and aggressive imperialism, but, fortunately for the United States, both of the threatening ideologies were analogous to a specific nation-state that could be targeted, assaulted, and eventually forced into unconditional surrender. No longer global military powers, Germany and Japan are now among the handful of the world’s wealthiest nations. And let us not forget that this economic ascendance has been aided immeasurably by the occasionally onerous protection of the American military for the past six decades.

The Soviet Union did not share the racism of the swastika or the rising sun, but it shared their contempt for individual human life and their expansionist tendencies. Since the USSR had a deterrent in the form of a nuclear arsenal from 1950 onwards, they were defeated through decades of covert and proxy wars, propaganda, diplomacy, and economic warfare, rather than a few years of total war. And we should give thanks daily that the leadership of the Soviet Union had the historically unparalleled wisdom to allow their empire to dissolve peacefully. Still, one thing holds between Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union. There was always a rational political entity that could be deterred in the face of an obvious imbalance of military power.

The current, stateless, threat is impervious to such deterrence. Therefore, it is fundamentally different from the threats that we have previously faced. Our enemies are certainly captured by the prefix “Islamo”, but what of fascism?

Fascism has no universally recognized definition; like communism, it is an ideology that has been routinely hijacked by messianic murderers that co-opt it as a label in a misbegotten attempt at self-bestowed political legitimacy. Fascism’s first progenitor, Benito Mussolini, stated that, “fascism is better called corporatism”. All definitions of fascism find room for nationalism, capitalism, and militarism.

We are at war with people who wish to resurrect a long-dead Islamic caliphate. This idea, by definition, rejects the western ideology of nationalism, which serves as the most load-bearing beam in the insidious architecture of fascism. Not only do our enemies not stress nationalism, they cite it as a western plot to weaken Muslims. To our enemies, the borders between Iraq and Kuwait, Syria and Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, Israel and anyone, are western inventions that serve no other purpose than to act as western colonialism’s time-rusted compass. Our enemies seek to erase scores of national boundaries in the interest of creating a single political entity, which would be “political” in an almost imperceptible sense.

There is an enemy. We are at war. But this is not 1941, and it is not 1962. The president does no justice to the need for an informed citizenry by continually parroting these tired and misleading reference points for our current foreign entanglements. We are not children, Mr. President. We all saw 9/11; we live here, too. We understand that what happened that day portended something new, something brand new, something that called for a fundamental reordering and restructuring of our outlook on the world. We knew something had changed. We only wish that you had understood that as well as we did. And if I’m wrong, if you really do get it, stop insulting our intelligence by telling us that we are fighting monsters that we all know to be dead.

States of Mind

”Black and hideous to me is the tragedy that gathers, and I’m sick beyond cure to have lived on to see it. You and I…should have been spared this wreck of our belief that through the long years we had seen civilization grow and the worst become impossible. The tide that bore us along was then all the while moving to this as its grand Niagara—yet what a blessing we didn’t know it. It seems to me to undo everything, everything that was ours, in the most horrible retroactive way---but I avert my face from the monstrous scene!” Henry James, 1914.


Once the initial anguish and anger over the 9/11 attacks have lost their immediacy, if they have not already, our nation’s responses to those attacks will be seen as having immeasurably more historic weight than the attacks themselves. This, it seems fair to surmise, is exactly how the terrorists would have it; if a single horrific attack on the American mainland would lead to a reaction that would perhaps fatally undermine America’s standing in the world, the barbarity and moral bankruptcy of the attacks themselves would, fairly or not, fade into the chloroform.
This is jiu-jitsu in its most elemental form; when attacking a superior enemy, goad him into using his own weight and inertia to bring himself down, since you could not possibly achieve such a result directly through your own comparable weakness.

In the 1970’s Chou Enlai was asked what he thought the historical ramifications of the French Revolution of 1789 had proven to be. He responded that, “it is too soon to tell”. After only five years, it is obviously far to early to glean the ramifications of 9/11, but at this admittedly myopic vantage point of 2007, it appears to have been a textbook jiu-jitsu strike by al-Qaeda. Joshua Walker put it best when he said that bin Laden’s strategic goal was not the fanciful destruction of the United States and the Pax Americana, but simply “to get the ball rolling.”

We should all take great stock in the recent revelations that, prior to 9/11, there were rifts within al-Qaeda over the strategic wisdom of the planned assaults. One faction, which in our paradigm would be termed “realist” or “pragmatic” or “conservative”, included one of bin Laden’s sons. This group felt that the 9/11 attacks would deliver short-term spectacle and long-term misery. The true target, they held, should be the “near enemy”, namely the despotic secular regimes of the Islamic, and especially Arab, world. According to this school, attacking the American mainland would ensure the destruction of al-Qaeda’s Afghan safe havens at the hands of the American military.

The other, ultimately victorious, faction held that the group’s best interests would be served by a catastrophic attack in the very bosom of the “far enemy”, the United States. In our paradigm, these terrorists would be “internationalist liberals” or “romantic” or “naïve” or, perhaps, “neo-conservative”. “Forget fighting them here”, this group said, “let’s fight them over there”. This group, headed by bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, won the internal battle.

It seems clear that for the organization known as al-Qaeda, as it existed on 9/10, the 9/11 attacks were a tactical masterpiece and a strategic train wreck; the 9/10 al-Qaeda is no more. The people personally responsible for the 9/11 attacks were for the most part dead or in American custody before 2001 was out, and al-Qaeda no longer had a sanctuary in Afghanistan. However, just as the individual hijackers gave their lives on 9/11 for what they considered to be an honorable cause, so did al-Qaeda. It seems to me that we must entertain the idea that al-Qaeda knowingly committed institutional suicide on 9/11, with the calculated gamble that the American response to the attacks, or the lack of the same, would somehow give their ideology, if not their physical organization, a new lease on life.

So, the 9/11 attacks were carried out, after al-Qaeda engaged in more internal introspection than did the United States Congress before invading Iraq. Our reaction against its infrastructure and support networks in Afghanistan was the most morally unambiguous use of violence that this country has engaged in for at least 60 years. The long-term strategic mistake by the United States government, however, arose before the war in Afghanistan. The Global War on Terrorism, as defined, is inherently unwinnable.

Such an ambitious declaration was, in a way, inevitable. Americans are given to ambition and zealotry; it is our greatest strength, but is also sometimes employed in cynical attempts to obscure the fact that we are not omnipotent; we are good, not perfect. Winning the Global War on Terrorism, a world war against a tactic, rather than a political institution, would require perfection. This is one way for a power to fatally undermine itself; set out an impossible goal, inevitably fail at it, and compromise your own standards and credibility in the process.

The beautiful thing about being an American is that, with relatively rare exceptions, I need not ask which side is “right” in war. While war itself is inherently wrong, it is just as surely prevalent. The United States, since 9/11, has invaded two nations with governments that could not be argued by any rational person to be in any way comparable to the government of the United States. The governments of Afghanistan and Iraq were murderous, despotic, medieval, and genuinely revolting to all standards of secular humanism as well as any modern interpretation of morality. In other words, the wars that the United States waged against Afghanistan and Iraq were never about which government was more just.

This was the crippling obstacle to the anti-war movement in America during the run up to the war in Iraq. The enemy was so inarguably vile that other, far more important concerns were obscured in the long and dark shadow of this fact. The fundamental question that was obscured before the invasion of Iraq was not whether the condemned government was worth defending, but whether our own motives and strategy were sound. The evil of Saddam Hussein should have been seen as completely inconsequential to whether the invasion of Iraq made any sense for the United States. Saddam would last weeks; how long would Iraq last?

Counselors for patience in Iraq, as well as proponents of the invasion who turned against the occupation, have all constructed their analyses around an incredibly weak assumption. All policy has been formulated with the assumption that people who live in Iraqi territory consider themselves to be Iraqis first and foremost, if at all. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the 20th century history of the Middle East knows that said assumption is far from safe.

The original rationale for the war has long since fallen apart. The Bush administration’s rationale for war was presented as being a terrorist / weapons of mass destruction nexus in Ba’athist Iraq. The vision held that removal of the dictatorship would lead to democracy and an absence of terrorists and WMD in Iraq.

When the Bush administration presented its evidence of terrorists in Iraq, it cited 1 or 2 retired thugs. How many international terrorists are now in Iraq? To be conservative, thousands. Not even the most passionate supporter of the policy in Iraq can possibly argue that the invasion of Iraq resulted in a decrease of terrorists in Iraq.

The WMD didn’t exist, so that’s off the board. Would that it were all so easy.
As for democracy, the American military, which was never trained to do the job they have found themselves tasked with doing in Iraq, has done a commendable job in guiding a process in which several legitimate elections with high voter turnout were conducted in a relatively brief period of time. This triumph has been overshadowed by the fact that, although elections were held, trash was not picked up. Lights and air conditioners and incubators and refrigerators did not work.
People were murdered in broad daylight for selling ice, which was deemed a betrayal of the faith since ice did not exist in the time of Mohammed.

The abject failure of providing security surely has been, in large part, the fault of the US occupation. It has been in larger part, however, the fault of Iraqis. Political correctness and insipid relativism should not hide the truth about the violence in Iraq. However many Iraqis have died since the US invasion, it is clear that most of them were killed by other Iraqis.
Does anyone actually think that if all forms of American law enforcement disappeared tomorrow that Americans would start carrying out suicide bombings and beheadings against other Americans? I don’t really believe that “Iraqis” are any more inherently violent than anyone else. They just really, really, really don’t like each other. Remember when Americans really, really, really didn’t like each other? 1860-ish? What did we call that?

To construct a frame of reference for what has happened in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad, the most recent relevant precedents took place in the Soviet Union and in Yugoslavia. Out of the ashes of the Soviet Union, many newly sovereign nations emerged. Why was this transition relatively bloodless, while the aftermath of equally cataclysmic regime changes in Yugoslavia and Iraq were marked by spasms of the worst imaginable manifestations of violence?

We would do well to consider the unprecedented moral bravery exhibited by the Soviet leadership upon the demise of the Soviet Union. The USSR was immeasurably larger and more powerful than Yugoslavia or Iraq, to say the very least. It was a global superpower that held the means to destroy the vast majority of humanity in minutes. Not only was it unprecedented in the annals of history for such a power to voluntarily allow its government to be overthrow by peaceful, democratic means, but there was another, equally important decision taken. That decision was to dissolve the USSR itself as a political entity.

The leadership understood that the state itself was a political fiction that could not possibly be maintained in a democratic system. Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Ukrainians, Estonians, Latvians, Byelorussians, Tajiks, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Georgians, Albanians, and Lithuanians had never voluntarily chosen to live in the Soviet Union, nor would they ever do so. Therefore, rather than face the inevitable bloodletting that would have resulted from an attempt at coercive unions with mother Russia, the satellite states were given independence. Not only did the communist party cede control over the Soviet Union, they ceded the very idea of the Soviet Union itself as a political entity.

After the end of communism in Yugoslavia, which was not subject to direct Soviet rule, an attempt was made to preserve the political fiction of the Yugoslav state. Yugoslavia can be seen as a microcosm of the USSR. Rather than Uzbeks and Ukrainians suffering under Russian dominance, Yugoslavia was characterized by Croatians, Slovenians, Macedonians, and Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims dominated by Serbs. Unlike their Russian counterparts, the Serb overlords insisted on preserving the artificial union by force.

When addressing the situation in Iraq, all policies proffered so far by the American government are fundamentally insufficient due to one inescapable fact. It is possible, if not probable, that Iraq, like Yugoslavia, existed on the map but not in the hearts and minds of the center of gravity, which is the population of the country in question.

Saddam and Gerry

Saddam Hussein and Gerald Ford faded into the ether last week, presaging the passage of two pivotal actors in the last 30 years of American history. Both men in some sense represented the flaws of American power, both as practiced in the republic and as projected overseas.
The dominant paradigm of Gerald Ford, endlessly invoked following his death, is that of an honorable, apolitical man who steadied the republic in one of its most turbulent hours and who proved that “we are a nation of laws, not of men”. We were buffeted with video clips of Ford asserting “the Constitution works” after assuming office.

Gerald Ford was the last of five men who have served as president without having been elected to the office, the others being John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, and Chester A. Arthur. These men are to be distinguished from the several accidental presidents who finished their predecessors’ terms and were subsequently elected in their own right. Two disturbing facts divorce Ford from these men, however. Firstly, the first four un-elected presidents finished the terms of elected presidents who had fallen to illness or assassins. Secondly, all of these men had the legitimacy of having been elected vice-president. Thirdly, these men served at a time before the imperial presidency; these accidental presidents were not even the most powerful people in the nation (that honor belonged to the Speaker of the House), never mind the world.

Gerald Ford’s predecessor had not died in office; Richard Nixon had resigned to avoid impeachment and conviction by the Senate for high crimes. Gerald Ford had not been elected to serve as the second in line for the presidency. He was appointed by the soon to be discredited Nixon after the elected vice-president, Spiro Agnew, had resigned, hounded by scandals of his own. And in the hour of the imperial presidency, Gerald Ford became the most powerful man alive, having been elected to no national office. Never before had the people of Michigan been kingmakers. This is surely far from reassuring evidence that “the Constitution works”. While there was nothing unconstitutional about Ford’s accession, the fact that his appointer was so loose with the constitution in other matters cast a deeper shadow over Ford’s already dubious legitimacy.

Aside from the fact that he became president at all, we must look at Ford’s pardon of Nixon and see if that serves as further evidence, as we were endlessly told after Ford’s death, that “the Constitution works”. Gerald Ford pardoned a man who had been convicted of no crime. The pardon thus served not to give mercy to the condemned, but to avoid the very process of assessing what crimes Richard Nixon had committed in office. Again, there is nothing unconstitutional about this pardon, but the effect was that Richard Nixon was able to serially violate the constitution, resign to avoid impeachment as spelled out in the constitution, and receive a full pre-emptive pardon from his appointed successor. Is this evidence that “the constitution works”? Or is it evidence that, in an hour of unparalleled peril, the constitution was not allowed to work?

Amid all the folksy yarns about how Air Force One never took off without Gerald Ford’s favorite flavor of ice cream (butter pecan), I noticed an even more intriguing anecdote about the man that may have more relevance to us than his endearing love affair with butter pecan ice cream. In an interview given by Ford released after his death, he informed us that he had pardoned Nixon because they were longtime friends and he wanted to save his friend from humiliation. Does the constitution tell us that presidents shall only be punished for high crimes if such punishment would not be humiliating to the fallen chief? This staggering, casual statement by Ford serves as quite the counter to his assertion that “We are a nation of laws, not of men”. If the law had taken its course, Richard Nixon would have gone to prison. In 1974, the United States was indeed a nation of men, and the man among men was Gerald Ford, who subverted constitutional accountability and disinterested justice to concern for a friend’s sensitivities.

How to connect Gerald Ford to Saddam Hussein? Well, in 1975, the Ford administration cut off all support for the Kurdish insurgency in Iraq. Since the Iraqi government had decided to settle a simmering border dispute with Iran, America’s preeminent ally in the Middle East, Washington no longer had reason to pay for attacks by Kurds on the Iraqi government. Any concern over Ford’s abandonment of America’s allies can be dissipated by the unparalleled amorality of his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. The United States has no friends, only interests. The Kurds were subsequently slaughtered, of course, and the young Saddam Hussein was temporarily rid of one of the perennial threats to the Ba’athist regime.

Iraq under Saddam Hussein was obviously a nation of men, not of laws. Actually, it was a nation of man, not of laws. Actually, it wasn’t a nation at all, but that’s another story. A story we’re told every day lately. If Gerald Ford’s accession to office and pardon of Nixon said some troubling things about America’s commitment to the law, what did Saddam Hussein’s execution say of the Iraqi government’s commitment to the law when it comes to punishing its own fallen presidents?

While the trial of Saddam Hussein suffered severe flaws, it would be overly dismissive to tag it as a show trial. And it was infinitely fairer than the trial given to Richard Nixon. That is to say, it was better than nothing. It appeared that the trial could serve as evidence of Iraq’s monumental transition from rule by men to rule by law. In large part, it did. Until the execution, that is. One should not be surprised that Shi’a witnesses to Saddam’s hanging could not contain their emotions. The Americans did not hand over Saddam until the eleventh hour because they did not want him tortured. They took custody of his corpse so that it would not be desecrated. We should harbor no illusions about how Saddam would have fared in Iraqi custody. The real surprise is that Saddam was subjected only to a few taunts, not even a slap or a loogie in the face for the sadistic destroyer of a whole society.

The problem lies not in the understandable emotions involved, but in the staggering incompetence of the Iraqi government and what it means for the war there. The Iraqi government is so incompetent that it could not prevent one of its representatives from filming the execution on a cell-phone camera and releasing it to the world. There were twenty people in the room. How hard is it to spot one man among twenty holding a cell phone aloft? And how could the government allow the voyeur to leave the chamber and release the video, which is unflattering, to say the least, to the Iraqi government, and somehow manages to make Saddam look like an unbowed victim of victor’s justice?

In that chamber, Iraq was a nation of men. And one man, Saddam, had to die. More significantly, another man, Moqtada al-Sadr, was invoked as the new man. The one chanted word, “Moqtada”, shifted the procedure from justice to vengeance in the eyes of the viewer. Was this the same Saddam who had been so humiliated in his spider hole? Who had gone out like a bitch, not to put too fine a point on it, by failing to fire his weapon at his Zionist-Crusader captors? Now, his neck in the noose, head held high, he sneered at his executioners. “Is this how you show your bravery as men? Is this the courage of Arabs?” And then the coup de grace, “I bear witness that there is no God but God and Mohammed is his prophet”. And then he died, this great butcher of Arabs and Muslims, having been allowed to cast himself as the true Arab and the true Muslim, martyred by godless imperialists and their spineless collaborators.

We should not be surprised that Iraq is still more a nation of men than of laws. We should, however, be ashamed that, three decades after Watergate, we can’t bear the thought that we may be as well.