Monday, August 04, 2003
From The New Republic, an unexpected bravo for G. W. Bush:
AMERICA'S POST-SADDAM TRIUMPH.
Without Sin
by Martin Peretz
Post date: 08.01.03
Issue date: 08.11.03
ofi Annan recently said, apropos Iraq, that "democracy should not be imposed from outside." Others have said the same thing. But do the critics of U.S.- and U.K.-sponsored regime change in Baghdad actually believe Iraq would have come to democracy on its own? Maybe so. (In which case, their cheerful assumptions about Arab society now hang only on Palestine.) After all, the Arab world has never experienced an indigenous democratic revolution. And the history of Iraq is among the bloodiest of the Arab narratives. It includes inter-sectarian and interethnic hatreds of ancient lineage and constant re-fertilization, extermination of particular populations, random carnage, suffocation of cultures, systematic torture, a boot--as George Orwell put it with reference to Stalinism--stamping on a human face forever. The brothers Uday and Qusay Hussein incarnated this endless brutality; indeed, they were the ghosts of its future. Now that specter has finally passed.
The United States has not yet found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But we have found at least 62 mass graves, filled with decayed corpses, thousands of them mowed down on the spot and buried, victims of Saddam Hussein's relentless war against the majority Shia--reason enough to have taken out the tyrant and feel gratified at having done so. These are the Babi Yars of our time, the Katyn Forests, the Cambodian killing fields.
They are not auspicious settings for democracy or even genuine national reconstruction. But that just makes the president all the more brave for having taken on exactly the kind of nation-building he abjured during the campaign. Yes, the Bush administration has made mistakes. The sad thing about the uranium scandal is that the case for this war did not need the help of untruths. But who really thinks it is the Bush administration's lies that offend France and Russia? What offends them, surely, are America's truths--particularly, its belief in the possibility of using force for democratic good. As for the United Nations, such values do not appear in its portfolio at all, which is committed by the charter to the protection of established states, whether they persecute their populations or not. That's what the diplomatists mean when they utter the sacred phrase "territorial integrity" and apply it to contrived polities. Look at an atlas: Those countries demarked by more or less straight lines are the joint creations of imperial intriguers and corrupt, decolonizing elites.
The U.S. military has been exemplary in the care it has given to the practical human needs of the Iraqi population. This may be attributed--and not whimsically--to what we used to call the American national character, a certain down-to-earth kindness, instinctive practicality, comfort with diversity. There are no epidemics in Iraq and no hunger either. Comparisons to postwar conditions in occupied Germany and Japan (or even Italy) are rather flattering to the present. The widespread faultfinding with the administration's pre-occupation planning seems to assume these ventures can be micromanaged in advance. They can't, and, whatever the route, America's end goal is clear: Iraqi democracy. No occupation in history has been as scrupulous in putting together a provisional government so reflective of the country's population and ideological spread. The head of the Communist Party is among the 25 members of Iraq's new Governing Council. Even more remarkably, so are various anti-democratic Shia clerics, some of them none too supportive of the United States and Britain.
Were the United Nations running Iraq (or even helping run it) and the French, Russians, and Egyptians playing major roles, post-Saddam Iraq would likely be less orderly and less decent. After all, many European and Arab opponents of the war seem to associate Iraqi "stability" with continued Baathist--or at least Sunni--rule. This would, in reality, be no stability at all. It would also be a death sentence for Iraqi democracy, since it would exclude the majority Shia. The State Department has also shown an affinity for prolonged Sunni rule. In fact, many prominent advisers of the elder President Bush showed an affinity for prolonged rule by Saddam. George W. has admirably emancipated himself from his father's delusions. This war is rightly seen as the corrective to Baker's colossal mistake of leaving Saddam in power in 1991.
hope the United States sends troops to save Liberia. But one has to wonder: Why are the United Nations, the Europeans, and even the Africans--who otherwise view the United States as an imperialist hegemon that needs restraining--so eager for the United States to go in? Because they don't trust anyone else, including themselves, to effectively do the job. They have seen our handiwork in Iraq. And they know it is what Liberia desperately needs. In the aftermath of that war, America's sway in the world has never been greater, and that is a salutary development for peace, material progress, and freedom. In Europe, the former Warsaw Pact countries are coming into their own, in some measure because they have chosen to be allies of the United States. Poland is not a lesser country than Belgium or Sweden, and it has more of a sense of nationhood than either. The Easterners have also put a crimp in the mindless and undemocratic surge to one technological and bureaucratic Europe, in which nobody, as it happens, really thinks himself a European. Our movement of troops and bases eastward, closer to the troubled areas where they would likely be deployed, supports this current. It is also realistic. Austria forbade our movement of troops from Germany by rail toward Iraq. A world in which Washington, having ensured the peace of Europe for decades, has to propitiate Vienna--with its catastrophic decline in population growth rates, an index of its decline in everything else--is not a realistic or prudent world.
America's relationships with the English-speaking democracies are also deepening. Add to Great Britain and Australia India, whose internal and external strains have kept it from participating in the Iraqi venture but is allying itself with the United States and its friends nonetheless. Symbolically, India's growing ties with Israel are the most sonorous because they reflect its emergence from the fictional cuckoo-land of the non-aligned. This escape from delusion is even being played out--more tentatively, to be sure--in Pakistan, which has begun debating whether to recognize Israel. Can anybody imagine these developments shorn of the coalition's intervention against Iraq?
The uprising in Iran must also be seen through the Iraqi prism. Not that opposition to the mullahs depended on America's war: The turmoil in Iran is indigenous and deep-rooted. But its success was until recently limited by its neighborhood. Would Saddam have stood by while Tehran reopened ties to Washington and Jerusalem? And, surely, the promise of liberalism across the border emboldens Iran's democratic revolutionaries.
America's relationship with Germany is also being refreshed after the Iraq war. Berlin's foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, has made it clear to everyone who will listen that, despite Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's personal animosity to the Bush administration, Germany is not about to join France in a doomed anti-American cabal. Both the Fischer wing of the government and the Christian Democratic opposition yearn to reestablish the historic alliance that made Germany a democracy and a trusted member of the Western coalition. Germany's rite of passage came when it participated confidently and unapologetically in the humanitarian use of military power to defend Kosovo against a lesser Saddam. Don't count Germany on the other side. Nor Japan, which will send 1,000 combat engineers to Iraq, the first deployment of its forces anywhere in 58 years, accomplished without sanction from the United Nations or assent from China.
he Arab street will rise, warned the naysayers; the United States will be without friends and without influence in the Middle East. Well, the Arab street did not rise, and America's influence has never been stronger. Look at Aqaba, where Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas met in public to certify their travels on the road map. President Bush presided. But no one from the United Nations, the European Union, or Russia was in attendance. Their presence would have been inappropriate. After all, they have not produced a single concession from the Palestinians, ever. They are not actors in the Israeli-Palestinian drama but shadow actors. And now the United States has overthrown the dictator who cast his own shadow over the Arab world. With Saddam's end, his longtime comrade Yasir Arafat is finally sidetracked (a belated recognition that Sharon was right about him all along).
To be sure, Arafat still receives official Swedish, French, and Belgian visitors. And he still conspires against the man forced on him as Palestinian prime minister. He is also conspiring against the road map: A July 23 dispatch in The Boston Globe details Arafat's ongoing payments to Fatah's own Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, certified by the United States as a terrorist group, and other paramilitary units that have not accepted the current cease-fire. These militias control two large Palestinian cities, Jenin and Nablus. According to the Globe, Jenin's governor, an Abbas ally, "was abducted from his home, ... publicly beaten, marched barefoot through the Jenin refugee camp, and thrown into a cave, where he was beaten again." The governor has now resigned, a victory for the enemies of peace. Similar incidents are occurring daily elsewhere. This is really a civil war in the making.
Nothing, then, guarantees that the road map will lead anywhere. Still, the progress that has been made is attributable to three things: Israel's resilience in its long struggle with terror, widespread Palestinian dismay with their situation after nearly three years of self-destructive intifada, and America's willingness to go it almost alone in Iraq. The progress will only continue if Abbas wants to live in the real world and temper his demands accordingly. Maybe his internal enemies won't let him live there. He must become stronger and they weaker, and Israel can help him. But it cannot save him. In any case, his current demands are both unrealistic and counterintuitive. Despite his pledge as part of the road map to quash Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other recalcitrant terrorist groups, Abbas has refused even to begin disarming them. This is a danger not only to Israel but to his own government. A few terrorist incidents--or one big one--and the road map will be over. Israel still has no reason to trust either the intentions of Palestinian fanatics or the will and ability of Palestinian moderates to stop them. Which is why it is building the elaborate and psychologically depressing fence that President Bush ever so coyly calls a "problem." But the real problem is that Israel still needs to protect its own population from random murder. When there is sustained and sustainable quiet, the fence can be taken down.
On releasing prisoners, the dynamic is the same. In the real world, prisoners are not released until their polity is at peace with those they have designated as enemies. The United States has already pressed Israel to release more prisoners than most Israelis consider prudent to let go. Some of these captives may by now be harmless. But the harmless ones are not whom the Palestinians crave. Just a few freed prisoners who return to their old line of work could destroy Bush's best-laid plans. No matter, say the inveterate peace-processors: Israel must make more (and more) accommodations. The rationale for such Israeli concessions--even those, such as prisoners, that are not mentioned in the road map--is confidence-building, the cliché that demonstrates goodwill in a tight spot but hardly ever works. Besides, it is the Israelis who require confidence; after years of being targeted by terror, it is their trust that has to be built. The improvisation of ad hoc and unreciprocated bargains gives signed agreements a bad name in a neighborhood where they have never had a good one. Confidence-building is the lingua franca of peace-pretenders, such as those who wanted to keep Saddam in power and pretended nothing good would come from his removal.
George W. Bush will need to remember the lessons he learned in Iraq so as not to lose the opportunities he now has in the land where many of mankind's deepest convictions were born. This is his real test.
Martin Peretz is editor-in-chief of TNR.
AMERICA'S POST-SADDAM TRIUMPH.
Without Sin
by Martin Peretz
Post date: 08.01.03
Issue date: 08.11.03
ofi Annan recently said, apropos Iraq, that "democracy should not be imposed from outside." Others have said the same thing. But do the critics of U.S.- and U.K.-sponsored regime change in Baghdad actually believe Iraq would have come to democracy on its own? Maybe so. (In which case, their cheerful assumptions about Arab society now hang only on Palestine.) After all, the Arab world has never experienced an indigenous democratic revolution. And the history of Iraq is among the bloodiest of the Arab narratives. It includes inter-sectarian and interethnic hatreds of ancient lineage and constant re-fertilization, extermination of particular populations, random carnage, suffocation of cultures, systematic torture, a boot--as George Orwell put it with reference to Stalinism--stamping on a human face forever. The brothers Uday and Qusay Hussein incarnated this endless brutality; indeed, they were the ghosts of its future. Now that specter has finally passed.
The United States has not yet found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But we have found at least 62 mass graves, filled with decayed corpses, thousands of them mowed down on the spot and buried, victims of Saddam Hussein's relentless war against the majority Shia--reason enough to have taken out the tyrant and feel gratified at having done so. These are the Babi Yars of our time, the Katyn Forests, the Cambodian killing fields.
They are not auspicious settings for democracy or even genuine national reconstruction. But that just makes the president all the more brave for having taken on exactly the kind of nation-building he abjured during the campaign. Yes, the Bush administration has made mistakes. The sad thing about the uranium scandal is that the case for this war did not need the help of untruths. But who really thinks it is the Bush administration's lies that offend France and Russia? What offends them, surely, are America's truths--particularly, its belief in the possibility of using force for democratic good. As for the United Nations, such values do not appear in its portfolio at all, which is committed by the charter to the protection of established states, whether they persecute their populations or not. That's what the diplomatists mean when they utter the sacred phrase "territorial integrity" and apply it to contrived polities. Look at an atlas: Those countries demarked by more or less straight lines are the joint creations of imperial intriguers and corrupt, decolonizing elites.
The U.S. military has been exemplary in the care it has given to the practical human needs of the Iraqi population. This may be attributed--and not whimsically--to what we used to call the American national character, a certain down-to-earth kindness, instinctive practicality, comfort with diversity. There are no epidemics in Iraq and no hunger either. Comparisons to postwar conditions in occupied Germany and Japan (or even Italy) are rather flattering to the present. The widespread faultfinding with the administration's pre-occupation planning seems to assume these ventures can be micromanaged in advance. They can't, and, whatever the route, America's end goal is clear: Iraqi democracy. No occupation in history has been as scrupulous in putting together a provisional government so reflective of the country's population and ideological spread. The head of the Communist Party is among the 25 members of Iraq's new Governing Council. Even more remarkably, so are various anti-democratic Shia clerics, some of them none too supportive of the United States and Britain.
Were the United Nations running Iraq (or even helping run it) and the French, Russians, and Egyptians playing major roles, post-Saddam Iraq would likely be less orderly and less decent. After all, many European and Arab opponents of the war seem to associate Iraqi "stability" with continued Baathist--or at least Sunni--rule. This would, in reality, be no stability at all. It would also be a death sentence for Iraqi democracy, since it would exclude the majority Shia. The State Department has also shown an affinity for prolonged Sunni rule. In fact, many prominent advisers of the elder President Bush showed an affinity for prolonged rule by Saddam. George W. has admirably emancipated himself from his father's delusions. This war is rightly seen as the corrective to Baker's colossal mistake of leaving Saddam in power in 1991.
hope the United States sends troops to save Liberia. But one has to wonder: Why are the United Nations, the Europeans, and even the Africans--who otherwise view the United States as an imperialist hegemon that needs restraining--so eager for the United States to go in? Because they don't trust anyone else, including themselves, to effectively do the job. They have seen our handiwork in Iraq. And they know it is what Liberia desperately needs. In the aftermath of that war, America's sway in the world has never been greater, and that is a salutary development for peace, material progress, and freedom. In Europe, the former Warsaw Pact countries are coming into their own, in some measure because they have chosen to be allies of the United States. Poland is not a lesser country than Belgium or Sweden, and it has more of a sense of nationhood than either. The Easterners have also put a crimp in the mindless and undemocratic surge to one technological and bureaucratic Europe, in which nobody, as it happens, really thinks himself a European. Our movement of troops and bases eastward, closer to the troubled areas where they would likely be deployed, supports this current. It is also realistic. Austria forbade our movement of troops from Germany by rail toward Iraq. A world in which Washington, having ensured the peace of Europe for decades, has to propitiate Vienna--with its catastrophic decline in population growth rates, an index of its decline in everything else--is not a realistic or prudent world.
America's relationships with the English-speaking democracies are also deepening. Add to Great Britain and Australia India, whose internal and external strains have kept it from participating in the Iraqi venture but is allying itself with the United States and its friends nonetheless. Symbolically, India's growing ties with Israel are the most sonorous because they reflect its emergence from the fictional cuckoo-land of the non-aligned. This escape from delusion is even being played out--more tentatively, to be sure--in Pakistan, which has begun debating whether to recognize Israel. Can anybody imagine these developments shorn of the coalition's intervention against Iraq?
The uprising in Iran must also be seen through the Iraqi prism. Not that opposition to the mullahs depended on America's war: The turmoil in Iran is indigenous and deep-rooted. But its success was until recently limited by its neighborhood. Would Saddam have stood by while Tehran reopened ties to Washington and Jerusalem? And, surely, the promise of liberalism across the border emboldens Iran's democratic revolutionaries.
America's relationship with Germany is also being refreshed after the Iraq war. Berlin's foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, has made it clear to everyone who will listen that, despite Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's personal animosity to the Bush administration, Germany is not about to join France in a doomed anti-American cabal. Both the Fischer wing of the government and the Christian Democratic opposition yearn to reestablish the historic alliance that made Germany a democracy and a trusted member of the Western coalition. Germany's rite of passage came when it participated confidently and unapologetically in the humanitarian use of military power to defend Kosovo against a lesser Saddam. Don't count Germany on the other side. Nor Japan, which will send 1,000 combat engineers to Iraq, the first deployment of its forces anywhere in 58 years, accomplished without sanction from the United Nations or assent from China.
he Arab street will rise, warned the naysayers; the United States will be without friends and without influence in the Middle East. Well, the Arab street did not rise, and America's influence has never been stronger. Look at Aqaba, where Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas met in public to certify their travels on the road map. President Bush presided. But no one from the United Nations, the European Union, or Russia was in attendance. Their presence would have been inappropriate. After all, they have not produced a single concession from the Palestinians, ever. They are not actors in the Israeli-Palestinian drama but shadow actors. And now the United States has overthrown the dictator who cast his own shadow over the Arab world. With Saddam's end, his longtime comrade Yasir Arafat is finally sidetracked (a belated recognition that Sharon was right about him all along).
To be sure, Arafat still receives official Swedish, French, and Belgian visitors. And he still conspires against the man forced on him as Palestinian prime minister. He is also conspiring against the road map: A July 23 dispatch in The Boston Globe details Arafat's ongoing payments to Fatah's own Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, certified by the United States as a terrorist group, and other paramilitary units that have not accepted the current cease-fire. These militias control two large Palestinian cities, Jenin and Nablus. According to the Globe, Jenin's governor, an Abbas ally, "was abducted from his home, ... publicly beaten, marched barefoot through the Jenin refugee camp, and thrown into a cave, where he was beaten again." The governor has now resigned, a victory for the enemies of peace. Similar incidents are occurring daily elsewhere. This is really a civil war in the making.
Nothing, then, guarantees that the road map will lead anywhere. Still, the progress that has been made is attributable to three things: Israel's resilience in its long struggle with terror, widespread Palestinian dismay with their situation after nearly three years of self-destructive intifada, and America's willingness to go it almost alone in Iraq. The progress will only continue if Abbas wants to live in the real world and temper his demands accordingly. Maybe his internal enemies won't let him live there. He must become stronger and they weaker, and Israel can help him. But it cannot save him. In any case, his current demands are both unrealistic and counterintuitive. Despite his pledge as part of the road map to quash Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other recalcitrant terrorist groups, Abbas has refused even to begin disarming them. This is a danger not only to Israel but to his own government. A few terrorist incidents--or one big one--and the road map will be over. Israel still has no reason to trust either the intentions of Palestinian fanatics or the will and ability of Palestinian moderates to stop them. Which is why it is building the elaborate and psychologically depressing fence that President Bush ever so coyly calls a "problem." But the real problem is that Israel still needs to protect its own population from random murder. When there is sustained and sustainable quiet, the fence can be taken down.
On releasing prisoners, the dynamic is the same. In the real world, prisoners are not released until their polity is at peace with those they have designated as enemies. The United States has already pressed Israel to release more prisoners than most Israelis consider prudent to let go. Some of these captives may by now be harmless. But the harmless ones are not whom the Palestinians crave. Just a few freed prisoners who return to their old line of work could destroy Bush's best-laid plans. No matter, say the inveterate peace-processors: Israel must make more (and more) accommodations. The rationale for such Israeli concessions--even those, such as prisoners, that are not mentioned in the road map--is confidence-building, the cliché that demonstrates goodwill in a tight spot but hardly ever works. Besides, it is the Israelis who require confidence; after years of being targeted by terror, it is their trust that has to be built. The improvisation of ad hoc and unreciprocated bargains gives signed agreements a bad name in a neighborhood where they have never had a good one. Confidence-building is the lingua franca of peace-pretenders, such as those who wanted to keep Saddam in power and pretended nothing good would come from his removal.
George W. Bush will need to remember the lessons he learned in Iraq so as not to lose the opportunities he now has in the land where many of mankind's deepest convictions were born. This is his real test.
Martin Peretz is editor-in-chief of TNR.
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