American discourse

Our liberal press corps has been behaving akratically again. The New York Times ran an article this weekend about the extensive use of covert government propaganda in local television news programs. This gets to be news because it bears the taint of scandal; what is never news is the more pervasive and utterly ridiculous failure of popular news outlets to provide even a hint of objective analysis.

You don't need to look to government-created stories to find rosy, uplifting portraits of the visionary greatness of our leaders. Consider Fareed Zakaria's strange piece in the March 14 issue of Newsweek, "What Bush Got Right." The subtitle reads, "Freedoms March: The president has been right on some big questions. Now, if he can get the little stuff right, he'll change the world." Strangely, Mr. Zakaria opens the actual article by quoting with approval Tip O'Neill's maxim that all politics is local. "It's true," he writes, "even in the politics of rage."

As long-repressed societies in the Middle East open up, we are discovering that their core concerns are not global but local. Most ordinary Arabs, it turns out, are not consumed by grand theories about the clash between Islam and the West, or the imperialism of American culture, or even the Palestinian cause. When you let the Lebanese speak, they want to talk about Syria's occupation of their country. When Iraqis got a chance to congregate, they voted for a government, not an insurgency. When a majority of Palestinians were heard from, they endorsed not holy terror to throw Israel into the sea, but practical diplomacy to get a state.

The moral here is: Muslims are not all terrorists, and they don't hate us because we're free, they really just want to be free themselves (where freedom, in this simplistic phrase, just is life in a bourgeois capitalist democracy). Zakaria actually writes this sentence: "Perhaps Arabs and Muslims are not some strange species after all."

They're just like us, and they don't want to kill us after all. How reassuring! So why did we go to war with them? Strangely, Zakaria's next point is, "The other noted political scientist who has been vindicated in recent weeks is George W. Bush." You see,

Bush never accepted the view that Islamic terrorism had its roots in religion or culture or the Arab-Israeli conflict. Instead he veered toward the analysis that the region was breeding terror because it had developed deep dysfunctions caused by decades of repression and an almost total lack of political, economic and social modernization....His solution, therefore, was to push for reform in these lands.

"Push for reform" is a wonderful new euphemism for "invade and occupy." I bet Bush wishes he had thought of that one himself. Nevermind that the ideas attributed here to Bush are actually Zakaria's own (perhaps he was just too modest to write an article entitled, "See, I told you so"). Perhaps the analysis is correct; what is more interesting is the claim that, if it is correct, then that vindicates Bush's policy.

The question to ask is: if all politics is local, then how does American intervention help with reform in distant lands? Zakaria writes,

Repressive regimes are often extremely fragile. Syria is the perfect example. Bashar al-Assad's rule rests on the narrowest base of fear and coercion....The other Arab regimes are less fragile. Mubarak, while unpopular, is not despised. The Saudi royal family is more stable than many think. But everywhere, there is pressure to change.

The Middle East would do well with incremental but persistent reform, as is taking place in Jordan, Qatar and Dubai.

Given everything he has written up until now, one might have the hopeful impression that the triumph of bourgeois capitalism and democracy is inevitable in the Middle East. The "but" is extremely weak: "So far there has been more talk than action on this front." So, the implicit conclusion goes, we had to invade and occupy Iraq. I suppose in order that reform should happen now. Why the urgency? Could it be that the sense of urgency here was generated not through a shared vision of democratic and economic reform, but by the unfounded threat of terrorist attacks using weapons from Iraq? Or by the conception, discredited earlier in the article, of Muslims as some strange species bent on destruction?

Even if Zakaria's ideas about the problems in the Middle East and how to solve them are right, it does not seem that this vindicates the actions of the president, which, we must remember, were not "pushes for reform" but rather invasion and occupation. All that aside (and it has been meant mostly as background for the following), the following paragraph is the one that most astounded me.

People have often wished that the president had traveled more over the years. But Bush's capacity to imagine a different Middle East may actually be related to his relative ignorance of the region. Had he traveled to the Middle East and seen its many dysfunctions, he might have been disheartened. Freed from looking at the day-to-day realities, Bush maintained a vision of what the region could look like.

First Zakaria sets up a straw man--who are these people who have this strange wish? Then he attempts to show their wish is for something undesirable in a bizarre hypothetical way. He might have been disheartened? And then what--he might not have gone to war? Again it is not easy to see how the things Zakaria writes at the beginning of the piece are supposed to show that going to war was the right thing to do. Can you imagine what purpose this paragraph could possibly serve in the argument? But this is a script we have heard before. One might recall the story in a New York Times Magazine last October by Ron Suskind, in which

[an anonymous White House] aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality--judiciously, as you will--we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Zakaria seems to be claiming that we are better off with a visionary leader--one who acts to bring about her vision of reality without regard to the "realities" that might stand in the way. (Let us not forget that the "realities" that might stand in the way are such things as human lives, human freedom, human dignity, and other things that we used to respect in accordance with Enlightenment principles, which are now apparently obsolete.) And, certainly, this was one of main points with which Bush was sold to us during the 2004 campaign. Is the outcome of the war meant also to be a vindication of this "leadership style"? Perhaps implicit in the idea that Bush's actions "create reality" is the idea that his actions will be justified or not in virtue of the goodness of the realities they create. Zakaria applauds Bush's vision of a transformed Middle East, and so he takes it that actions conducive to realizing it are good; questions of the goodness of the means of transformation are left to one side. It is not the outcome of the war specifically that vindicates Bush's leadership style; rather, if the war can be vindicated in the way that Zakaria thinks it is, then Bush's leadership style is vindicated as well since its alleged "flaw"--the ignoring of realities that might stand in the way of achieving its visions--is really no flaw at all.

Zakaria ends his piece by noting, "For most countries, the debate over Iraq was not really about Iraq. It was about how America would wield its enormous global power." Bush's way of wielding American power, he tells us, will be vindicated if "five years from now, Iraq, Afghanistan, and perhaps an independent Palestine and a democratic Lebanon are thriving countries with modern political and economic systems." However, and this is absolutely crucial, the form this vindication (or lack of it) will take is described:

America will be honored and respected--and the talk of anti-American terror will have dissipated considerably. If, on the other hand, those countries are chaotic and troubled...people there will blame America. Remember, all politics is local.

So Zakaria apparently believes that going to war will have been the right thing to do just in case people do not hate us for having done it five years from now. There is just nothing to be said right now, apparently, about whether it was the right thing to do, except insofar as there are hopeful or discouraging signs about whether people will still be angry about it in five years. If that is the case, we have reason to hope, for time heals all wounds, even, perhaps, those caused by the unjustified deaths of loved ones in a foreign invasion. Zakaria believes that, in five years, people will be happy or unhappy based mostly on their economic situation at the time. Apparently he means to be speaking of temporal location when he reminds us that all politics is local.

If you think there might be something to this, here is one consequence of Zakaria's view. In 2003, when we were debating whether or not to go to war (we citizens--it was clear that Bush's mind was made up long before), the question we should have asked ourselves is this one: In 2010, will those Arabs and Muslims who are left alive hate America? I suppose one way to ensure the answer to this question would be 'no' would have been to kill them all. Maybe that is the thing to have done.