Paul Berman, a so-called "liberal hawk," is back on the New York Times op-ed page today selling his particular brand of snake oil (annotated version here). You'd think this ideologue, whose left-leaning pro-war views were often sought out by editorial page editors in the run-up to the invasion to balance...well, all the right-leaning pro-war views, might be hanging his head in embarrassment at the current debacle. But no, he urges us to stay the course to combat his particular bugbear, Islamofascism. Based on his scholarly "discovery" of a sort of Islamic Mein Kampf written by an obscure theologian named Sayyid Qutb, Berman believes that all the diverse Muslim peoples (Arabs, Persians, Pakistanis) can be--are being--united by a paranoid millenarian philosophy that will eventually overcome all sectarian, nationalistic differences and cause Mohammed's followers to goose-step as one. So powerful is this "death-loving" cult that it even includes secular states such as (the former) Baathist Iraq. By inventing a Unified Menace to replace the Soviet Union in the popular imagination Berman was helping, prior to the invasion, to do the intellectual heavy lifting for a belligerent and not-so-brainy Administration; now his role is to develop the fallback position after our failure to find WMDs. Which is: although Saddam wasn't involved with 9/11 (and wasn't an Islamist) he contributed to the Islamofascist "atmosphere" that made the attacks possible. Just so it's clear: we went to war and have lost almost 700 soldiers and killed 10,000 Iraqis because of the "atmosphere" emanating from the country. In his polemic for imposing liberal democracy by force, Berman never gives a hint that Muslims might reasonably fear people who offhandedly refer to actions in Islamic countries as "crusades" or have a military presence spanning such territories called "the footprint." Or who abet the taking of Muslim land by signing off on egregious policies of settlement, wall building, and "annexation" in the West Bank.
Michael Bérubé says much the same thing, but is more deferential to Berman. I left out the part about the oil, but that's sort of implied as the reason we have a "footprint" in the Middle East: As Richard Clarke said in his interview with 60 Minutes: "Osama bin Laden had been saying for years, 'America wants to invade an Arab country and occupy it, an oil-rich Arab country.' We stepped right into bin Laden's propaganda." [...]
For now and for the foreseeable future, I'm going to proceed on the belief that Richard Clarke knows more about al-Qaeda than Paul Berman does.
Atrios, with his usual ability to get right to the heart of an issue and phrase it in the worst possible way for his opponents, says it thusly: The war and occupation are no longer some abstract idea. The cards have been played, and action has resulted in a reaction. The idea, no matter how true, that this could've been a just war with just consequences is pretty irrelevant right now. And to cling to the idea of what could have been, as if it somehow justifies the disaster that it is, is truly bizarre. He's still tacitly conceding that Berman has a point, whereas I think he's kind of a nut job.
Paleoconservative Charlie Reese sounds like Noam Chomsky here. He even departs from "acceptable post 9/11 discourse" and suggests that OBL is (gasp) sane. Why does he hate America?
Bush Blows It Again
by Charley Reese
President George W. Bush continues to mislead the American people as to the cause of terrorism directed against the United States.
This week he guaranteed that more Americans will die from terrorist attacks due to his stabbing the Palestinians in the back. He has from the beginning acted as if he were a ventriloquist's dummy and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon were the ventriloquist.
He proved it again by buying into Sharon's scheme to steal great globs of Palestinian land in the West Bank, and by arrogantly denying the right of Palestinian refugees to return home or be compensated. Israel has no legal right to the land occupied by settlements; the whole world recognizes this and has for decades. The United States used to recognize it until Bush decided to kiss the most ample part of Sharon's anatomy.
How dare George Bush tell Palestinian refugees, ethnically cleansed in 1947–48 and again in 1967, that they have no rights? What unmitigated gall and arrogance he shows, what contempt for the Palestinians and indeed for the whole Muslim world. When did God give George Bush the power to abolish the human rights of other people?
It's no wonder he has to lie through his teeth to try to explain terrorism. We are not victims of terrorism because terrorists hate us or democracy or freedom. We are victims of terrorism because George Bush's policies inflict grievous harm on Palestinians, on Afghans and on Iraqis.
One hates to say it, but Osama bin Laden makes more sense than Bush. If you doubt the role of our support for Israel's brutalizing Palestine in causing terrorism, listen to what bin Laden says:
"The greatest rule of safety is justice, and stopping injustice and aggression. It was said: Oppression kills the oppressors, and the hotbed of injustice is evil. The situation in occupied Palestine is an example. What happened on 11 September and 11 March (the Madrid bombings) is your commodity returned to you."
In plainer English, the more the Israelis shed Palestinian blood with our unadulterated support, the more of our blood bin Laden hopes to shed. He says quite plainly – addressing himself to the people instead of politicians – why don't you stop shedding our blood so we can stop shedding yours?
He scoffs at being called a terrorist and says, "Our acts are reaction to your own acts, which are represented by the destruction and killing of our kinfolk in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine."
He goes on to say that rational people would not sacrifice their security, their money and their children "to please the liar of the White House. Had he been truthful about his claim for peace, he would not describe the person who ripped open pregnant women in Sabra and Shatila (a reference to Sharon) and the destroyer of the capitulation process (a reference to the peace process) as a man of peace."
Bin Laden says further: "He also would not have lied to people and said that we hate freedom and kill for the sake of killing. Reality proves our truthfulness and his lie. The killing of Russians was after their invasion of Afghanistan and Chechnya; the killing of Europeans was after their invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan; and the killing of Americans on the day of New York was after their support of the Jews in Palestine and their invasion of the Arabian Peninsula."
As much as you might hate bin Laden, he is telling the truth about the cause of the conflict, and Bush is lying.
Bush ought to come clean and tell the American people the truth about why we are in this war instead of spreading the lie that we were just innocent bystanders picked on by madmen. Even terrorists have rational reasons for what they do.
Bush is following the Israeli example. Rather than address the cause of the problem, he just tries to kill his way out of it. That policy has failed the Israelis, and it will fail us.
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Paul Berman, a so-called "liberal hawk," is back on the New York Times op-ed page today selling his particular brand of snake oil (annotated version here). You'd think this ideologue, whose left-leaning pro-war views were often sought out by editorial page editors in the run-up to the invasion to balance...well, all the right-leaning pro-war views, might be hanging his head in embarrassment at the current debacle. But no, he urges us to stay the course to combat his particular bugbear, Islamofascism. Based on his scholarly "discovery" of a sort of Islamic Mein Kampf written by an obscure theologian named Sayyid Qutb, Berman believes that all the diverse Muslim peoples (Arabs, Persians, Pakistanis) can be--are being--united by a paranoid millenarian philosophy that will eventually overcome all sectarian, nationalistic differences and cause Mohammed's followers to goose-step as one. So powerful is this "death-loving" cult that it even includes secular states such as (the former) Baathist Iraq.
By inventing a Unified Menace to replace the Soviet Union in the popular imagination Berman was helping, prior to the invasion, to do the intellectual heavy lifting for a belligerent and not-so-brainy Administration; now his role is to develop the fallback position after our failure to find WMDs. Which is: although Saddam wasn't involved with 9/11 (and wasn't an Islamist) he contributed to the Islamofascist "atmosphere" that made the attacks possible. Just so it's clear: we went to war and have lost almost 700 soldiers and killed 10,000 Iraqis because of the "atmosphere" emanating from the country. In his polemic for imposing liberal democracy by force, Berman never gives a hint that Muslims might reasonably fear people who offhandedly refer to actions in Islamic countries as "crusades" or have a military presence spanning such territories called "the footprint." Or who abet the taking of Muslim land by signing off on egregious policies of settlement, wall building, and "annexation" in the West Bank.
- tom moody 4-15-2004 7:05 pm
Michael Bérubé says much the same thing, but is more deferential to Berman. I left out the part about the oil, but that's sort of implied as the reason we have a "footprint" in the Middle East:
- tom moody 4-17-2004 7:32 am
Atrios, with his usual ability to get right to the heart of an issue and phrase it in the worst possible way for his opponents, says it thusly:
He's still tacitly conceding that Berman has a point, whereas I think he's kind of a nut job.- tom moody 4-17-2004 5:56 pm
Paleoconservative Charlie Reese sounds like Noam Chomsky here. He even departs from "acceptable post 9/11 discourse" and suggests that OBL is (gasp) sane. Why does he hate America?
- tom moody 4-17-2004 6:25 pm