Thus, however ineptly it may have been phrased and implemented, the Bush administration’s improvised adoption of political change in the region may bear some comparison with Reagan’s repudiation of Cold War stasis. And I see no sign that the American Left and the liberals understand what it means to have become once again the party of the status quo. In his wishful and overconfident subtitle, where he asserts that only liberals can win this war, Beinart vainly tries to split a difference. In the first place, it is a war against a version of apocalyptic fascism, of which terrorism is only the expression. In the second place, the bulk of the liberal consensus has already demonstrated a want of spine and sinew, and ceded much ground to the freshly converted and clumsy anti-isolationist Right. Retrospect may grant us time to pass a verdict on which of these two blunders was the decisive one. Meanwhile, the rough retranslation of Beinart’s title is Hillary in 2008—a prospect some distance short of a liberal dream.
(The Atlantic, May 2006)
How Uninviting
IN JANUARY OF this year, I was invited by a group called the Republican Jewish Coalition to come and speak at a public meeting. The subject was the UN “oil for food” program or, to give it another name, the means by which the corruption of the United Nations had actually helped Saddam Hussein to finance many of the French, Russian, and British friends of his regime. I was eager to say more about this appalling scheme, and it didn’t matter to me that I had little else in common with the group that had been kind enough to offer me a platform. A date was booked, a place arranged (an old temple in downtown DC), and I even remember telling the organizers that I also do this for a living and would expect a modest fee.
At about the time that pre-publicity for the event had gotten under way, Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America began to raise a stink. If I picked up the phone in those days, it was invariably to hear a reporter from the Forward, or some other such paper, asking me to comment on his comments. Klein didn’t appreciate some of the things I had said about Israel and Israeli policy over the years. He was empurpled by the idea that a conservative Jewish group would even consider inviting me. It didn’t matter to him that I wasn’t even being asked to comment on Zionism, let alone on the ultra-Jabotinsky Zionist faction of which he is the bugle. The upshot was that the meeting was canceled. I received even more calls from the Republican Jewish Coalition, in which they spoke critically of Klein, alluded in the most heartfelt way to the scheduling conflict that had suddenly arisen, and assured me most warmly that the invitation still stood. And then the telephone fell mercifully silent.
I wasn’t born yesterday, and I have sources of my own within Washington’s Jewish community, so it didn’t take that long to discover what I already knew, which was that I had not been the accidental victim of a scheduling conflict. So, we can score one for Morton Klein, and we can cancel that tiny check that I had earmarked for my favorite charity (the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan).
I think that Klein and the Republican Jewish Coalition were well within their rights. I have a perfect right, which I would defend to the death, to express my views on the question of Palestine. But I do not have a perfect right to express that opinion—which would have had to come up, even in a discussion of Iraq and the degeneration of the United Nations—at a meeting of a private group that takes the opposing view. Nor do I have an absolute right to criticize Theodor Herzl and all his works from a podium belonging to a neutral organization. Such outfits have their own right to pick and to choose and even to reconsider.
What a chance I missed to call attention to myself. I now can’t open my e-mail or check my voice mail without reading or hearing about the repression visited on Professor Tony Judt of New York University. It seems that he was booked to speak at a meeting sponsored by a group called Network 20/20 at the Polish consulate in New York and had his event canceled when the relevant Polish diplomat decided that the evening might be—given Professor Judt’s views on Israel—more trouble than it was worth. I now hear of a fulminating letter, signed by no fewer than 114 intellectuals, that has been published in the New York Review of Books (there’s glory for you) in which this repression is denounced. How dare the Polish consulate refuse the heroic dissident Judt a platform! And how dare the Anti-Defamation League, or its chief spokesman Abraham Foxman (it’s not quite clear who called) even telephone the Poles to complain?
I live my life without reference to Foxman. He was a leading mourner at the funeral of the fascist bigmouth Meir Kahane, and he took donations of $250,000 from the fugitive scumbag Marc Rich and did some lobbying of Bill Clinton in respect of a pardon (which caused William Safire to demand that he resign his post, which he has not). Who is such an abject sap as to require a kosher stamp from such a man? And what is the ADL, which is supposed to counter slanders against Jews, doing in the first place by taking a position on Jewish criticism of Israel? Yet the 114 signatories make indignant squeals, crediting the ADL as “an organization dedicated to promoting civil rights and public education.” No doubt they believe themselves to be ironic. And so they are, inasmuch as they give literal credit to Foxman. But on what basis can they demand that criticism of Israel be granted as a right on those square feet of New York City that constitute Polish soil?
The astonishing extent of this brouhaha recalls the reception accorded to the John Mearsheimer–Stephen Walt critique of Jewish-American influence on US foreign policy. And the two episodes are, in fact, somewhat related. Once again, absolutely conventional attacks on Israeli and US policy are presented as heroically original. Once again, it is insinuated that the bravery of those making the point is such as to draw down the Iron Heel. Once again, no distinction is made between private organizations and the public sphere. Mearsheimer and Walt ended up complaining of persecution because they got a rude notice from Alan Dershowitz! Such self-pity.
Professor Judt has a podium of his very own, at the Remarque Institute at New York University. He once invited me to speak there. He would not have invited me if I were a Kahane supporter and, though I defend the right of the Kach Party to hold its own meetings, I would protest if it were allowed to use the Remarque Institute for this purpose. This distinction seems worth making, at a time when free expression has much deadlier enemies who succeeded, for example, in preventing any of the editors who signed the Judt letter, as well as the magazine in which their letter appears, from publishing the Danish cartoons. To do that would have taken some nerve. This protest does not.
(Slate, October 23, 2006)
Look Who’s Cutting and Running Now
ACCORDING TO THE Associated Press, Henry Kissinger made it official Sunday morning in London, when he told a BBC interviewer that military victory was not possible in Iraq. Actually, what he said was this:
If you mean by “military victory” an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don’t believe that is possible.
There are a couple of qualifications in there, and what Kissinger is describing is really more the definition of a political victory than a military one, but say what you will about our Henry, he wasn’t born yesterday. He must have known that the question would come up, what his answer would be, and what the ensuing AP headline (“Kissinger: Iraq Military Win Impossible”) would look like.
Taken together with the dismissal of Donald Rumsfeld, the nomination of Robert Gates, and the holy awe with which the findings of the Iraq Study Group are now expected, this means that the Bush administration, or large parts of it, is now cutting if not actually running, and it is looking for partners in the process. (You have to admit that it was clever of the president to make it appear that Rumsfeld had been fired by the electorate rather than by him.) It seems that Kissinger has been giving his “realist” advice even to the supposedly most hawkish member of the administration, namely the vice president,
and at a dinner in honor of the president-elect of Mexico a few nights ago, I saw him mixing easily with such ISG elders as former Rep. Lee Hamilton. Members of this wing or tendency were all over the New York Times on Sunday as well, imputing near-ethereal qualities of leadership to Robert Gates, so a sort of self-reinforcing feedback loop appears to be in place.
The summa of wisdom in these circles is the need for consultation with Iraq’s immediate neighbors in Syria and Iran. Given that these two regimes have recently succeeded in destroying the other most hopeful democratic experiment in the region—the brief emergence of a self-determined Lebanon that was free of foreign occupation—and are busily engaged in promoting their own version of sectarian mayhem there, through the trusty medium of Hezbollah, it looks as if a distinctly unsentimental process is under way.
This will present few difficulties to Baker, who supported the Syrian near-annexation of Lebanon. In order to recruit the Baathist regime of Hafez al-Assad to his coalition of the cynical against Saddam in the Kuwait war, Baker and Bush Sr. both acquiesced in the obliteration of Lebanese sovereignty. “I believe in talking to your enemies,” said Baker last month—invoking what is certainly a principle of diplomacy. In this instance, however, it will surely seem to him to be more like talking to old friends—who just happen to be supplying the sinews of war to those who kill American soldiers and Iraqi civilians. Is it likely that they will stop doing this once they become convinced that an American withdrawal is only a matter of time?
At around the same time he made this statement, Baker was quoted as saying, with great self-satisfaction, that nobody ever asks him any more about the decision to leave Saddam Hussein in power in 1991. It’s interesting to know that he still feels himself invested in that grand bargain of realpolitik, which, contrary to what he may think, has not by any means been forgotten. It’s also interesting in shedding light on the sort of conversations he has been having in Baghdad. For millions of Iraqis, the betrayal of their uprising against Saddam in 1991 is something that they can never forget. They tend to bring it up, too, and to fear a repetition of it. This apprehension about another sellout is especially strong among the Shiite and Kurdish elements who together make up a majority of the population, but it seems from its public reports so far that the ISG has not visited the Kurdish north of the country. If Baker thinks that the episode is a closed subject, it shows us something of what the quality of his “listening” must be like.
In 1991, for those who keep insisting on the importance of sending enough troops, there were half a million already-triumphant coalition soldiers on the scene. Iraq was stuffed with weapons of mass destruction, just waiting to be discovered by the inspectors of UNSCOM. The mass graves were fresh. The strength of sectarian militias was slight. The influence of Iran, still recovering from the devastating aggression of Saddam Hussein, was limited. Syria was—let’s give Baker his due—“on side.” The Iraqi Baathists were demoralized by the sheer speed and ignominy of their eviction from Kuwait and completely isolated even from their usual protectors in Moscow, Paris, and Beijing. There would never have been a better opportunity to “address the root cause” and to remove a dictator who was a permanent menace to his subjects, his neighbors, and the world beyond. Instead, he was shamefully confirmed in power and a miserable twelve-year period of sanctions helped him to enrich himself and to create the immiserated, uneducated, unemployed underclass that is now one of the “root causes” of a new social breakdown in Iraq. It seems a bit much that the man principally responsible for all this should be so pleased with himself and that he should be hailed on all sides as the very model of the statesmanship we now need.
(Slate, November 20, 2006)
Oriana Fallaci and the Art of the Interview
HERE IS AN excerpt from an interview with what our media culture calls a “world leader”:
Dan Rather: Mr. President, I hope you will take this question in the spirit in which it’s asked. First of all, I regret that I do not speak Arabic. Do you speak any . . . any English at all?
Saddam Hussein (through translator): Have some coffee.
Rather: I have coffee.
Hussein (through translator): Americans like coffee.
Rather: That’s true. And this American likes coffee.
And here is another interview with another “world leader”:
Oriana Fallaci: When I try to talk about you, here in Tehran, people lock themselves in a fearful silence. They don’t even dare pronounce your name, Majesty. Why is that?
The Shah: Out of an excess of respect, I suppose.
Fallaci: I’d like to ask you: if I were an Iranian instead of an Italian, and lived here and thought as I do and wrote as I do, I mean if I were to criticize you, would you throw me in jail?
The Shah: Probably.
The difference here is not just in the quality of the answers given by the two homicidal dictators. It is in the quality of the questions. Mr. Rather (who is in mid-interview in one of Saddam’s palaces and who already knows that his subject doesn’t speak English and uses only his own interpreters) begins to ask a question, half apologizes for doing so, and is then completely unhorsed by an irrelevant remark about coffee. It’s unclear whether he ever returned to the question that he hoped would be taken in the spirit in which it was asked, so we will never know what that “spirit” was. And at no point in the interview, which was in February 2003, did Rather ask Saddam Hussein about his somewhat, shall we say, spotty record on human rights. It was enough that he had secured what the networks call “the big get.” After that, the interviewee could spout all the boilerplate he liked, and CBS would hold the megaphone by which this was transmitted to the world:
Rather: Are you afraid of being killed or captured?
Hussein: Whatever Allah decides. We are believers. We believe in what he decides. There is no value for any life without imam, without faith. The believer still believes that what God decides is acceptable. . . . Nothing is going to change the will of God.
Rather: But don’t my research notes say that you are a secularist?
Actually, I made up that last question. Dan Rather just sat through the preceding answer and went on to the next question on his list, which was about Osama bin Laden. Perhaps there was someone telling him to move things along a bit. At least he never began a question by asking, “Mr. President, how does it feel . . . ”
Whereas when the supposedly secular Shah also began speaking as if the opposite were the case, burbling about his deep religious faith and his personal encounters—“not in a dream, in reality”—with the Prophet Ali, Oriana Fallaci was openly skeptical:
Fallaci: Majesty, I don’t understand you at all. We had got off to such a good start, and instead now . . . this business of visions, of apparitions.
(Subsequently she asked His Imperial Majesty—no doubt with a wary eye on the exit—“Did you have these visions only as a child, or have you also had them later as an adult?”)
With Oriana Fallaci’s demise at seventy-seven from a host of cancers, in September, in her beloved Florence, there also died something of the art of the interview. Her absolutely heroic period was that of the 1970s, probably the last chance we had of staving off the complete triumph of celebrity culture. Throughout that decade, she scoured the globe, badgering the famous and the powerful and the self-important until they agreed to talk with her, and then reducing them to human scale. Facing Colonel Qaddafi in Libya, she bluntly asked him, “Do you know you are so unloved and unliked?” And she didn’t spare figures who enjoyed more general approval, either. As a warm-up with Lech Wałęsa, she put Poland’s leading anti-Communist at his ease by inquiring, “Has anyone ever told you that you resemble Stalin? I mean physically. Yes, same nose, same profile, same features, same mustache. And same height, I believe, same size.” Henry Kissinger, then at the apogee of his near-hypnotic control over the media, described his encounter with her as the most disastrous conversation he had ever had. It’s easy to see why. This well-cushione
d man who had always been the client of powerful patrons ascribed his success to the following:
The main point arises from the fact that I’ve always acted alone. Americans like that immensely.
Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into the town, the village, with his horse and nothing else. Maybe even without a pistol, since he doesn’t shoot. He acts, that’s all, by being in the right place at the right time. In short, a Western. . . . This amazing, romantic character suits me precisely because to be alone has always been part of my style or, if you like, my technique.
Neither Kissinger nor “Americans” in general liked this passage when it appeared in all its full-blown absurdity in late 1972. In fact, Kissinger disliked it so much that he claimed to have been misquoted and distorted. (Always watch out, by the way, when a politician or star claims to have been “quoted out of context.” A quotation is by definition an excerpt from context.) In this case, though, Oriana was able to produce the tape, a transcript of which she later reprinted in a book. And there it is for all to read, with Kissinger raving on and on about the uncanny similarities between himself and Henry Fonda. The book is called Interview with History.