CAPITOL IDEAS: The Rival Fanaticisms of Our Day
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS TOM BETHELL The Rival Fanaticisms of Our Day A perceived American defeat could bring a more dangerous world. N A MONTHLY MAGAZINE, a good excuse for not writing about...
...Better to have avoided this Quixotic crusade altogether...
...They are anti-American to the core...
...Just as they surelywere by the Spanish bombing, election reversal, and instant withdrawal...
...Its appearance at the time of Napoleon was "patently due to European influence...
...Now" for me is Memorial Day weekend...
...Democracy will merely serve as a transition to Shi'a theocracy, Iran-style, while Sunnis and Kurds break loose...
...The media will call for apologies...
...It was "our biggest undertaking in the foreign world since Vietnam...
...We as a nation pay dearly every day...
...The word siassah, now used asa synonym for politics, initially meant whipping stray camels into line....The closest translation may be: regimentation...
...It was plain that American control could be achieved only at the cost of being portrayed as oppressors...
...That is particularly true now...
...Leslie Gelb of the Council of Foreign Relations suggested local autonomy, but the State Department (currying favor with the powers that be as always) wants "stability...
...Maybe they will sweep Western news media out of the country, and then do whatever is necessary to consolidate power...
...policy being captured by ideologically motivated groups...
...Then there's the familiar fanaticism of American liberalism...
...In the modern world you do fight war on images...
...foreign policy redirected...
...The residual American power is supposed to be transferred from the Pentagon to the State Department...
...Bush keeps talking about Iraqi freedom, but Bernard Lewis pointed out some years ago that the notion of political freedom was unknown in the Islamic world for over a thousand years...
...Nor do we have a word for politics...
...An inner frenzy seems to be their normal collective state...
...The masses still had their bread and circuses...
...CAPITOL IDEAS TOM BETHELL The Rival Fanaticisms of Our Day A perceived American defeat could bring a more dangerous world...
...Two weeks earlier, David Brooks had said on the PBS NewsHour: "Can we fight a war in the media age...
...That was fanaticism, another instance of U.S...
...Now they tell us...
...They are not, and it will not be...
...I suspect the liberals themselves relished what they had pretended to find shocking, just as they had enjoyed every minute of the supposed crisis of Watergate...
...Only if we are shocked by war itself (as perhaps we should be...
...Consider now the opposed and very different fanaticism of the neoconservatives who enticed Bush into war...
...For you the famous June 30th deadline will have passed...
...Probably, unruly Arabs can be ruled only by tyranny...
...Please remember that...
...If such idiocies survive, my guess is that the Iraqis in charge will play along to keep the reconstruction billions flowing...
...military as a reservoir of power that could be mobilized, and U.S...
...We have had to contend with it on and off since Vietnam, but the photographs from the Baghdad prison brought it roaring back¡ªSusan Sontag and all the trimmings...
...N A MONTHLY MAGAZINE, a good excuse for not writing about headline news is that everything is out of date by the time it's in print...
...Is there something about Islam that takes possession of its young men...
...Nowwe seem to be dashing for the exits, and there are insufficient grounds for that, too...
...went to war with an "embedded" media...
...Are we really so shocked that Iraqi prisoners were taunted and humiliated...
...So you know more than I do...
...As soon as it became clear that enough Iraqi fanatics would use guerrilla tactics and blow themselves up, the story changed...
...So, they were planning to change the culture of the Middle East...
...There was (maybe still is) a crazed American plan to ensure that in the coming democracy, 40 percent of the legislators would be women...
...This time I sympathized with Krauthammer...
...Who knew that their plans were so ambitious...
...We fight under the gaze of multitudes in the Arab world who wish us ill...
...An Iranian Muslim, Amir Taheri, pointed out in the Times that democracy is based on equality But "there is no equivalent [word] in any of the Muslim languages," he wrote...
...Commentators on TV have their unguarded moments, and here is Charles Krauthammer on Inside Washington, as recently as last December 27: "If we succeed in changing the culture of the Middle East, starting in Iraq and spreading elsewhere, that's going to be the key to our safety and our children's in the next generation...
...Yet Donald Rumsfeld and Tony Blair cite Iraq in the same breath as post-war Germany and Japan...
...More recently, there was an exchange between Krauthammer and Nina Totenberg, a liberal zealot employed by National Public Radio...
...She was both complacent and triumphant because she knew that images appear on television, and that liberals control television...
...There have been plans to unleash all kinds of liberal nostrums, ranging from fuzzy math to condom distribution...
...The airwaves were so filled with cross-talk about avenging 9/11, weapons of mass destruction, punishing al Qaeda, catching the dictator Saddam, that few could keep their eye on the goal, which I guess was planting the U.S...
...Actually, in March 2003, the U.S...
...Iraq was created in 1921 by lines drawn in the desert...
...When President Bush launched the war, in March 2003, I thought his stated reasons for doing so were grossly insufficient...
...The last mistake may be worse than the first...
...policy, the Islamists will be emboldened...
...Seeing that 800 American deaths were all it took to change U.S...
...It's clear from their response to the pictures from Abu Ghraib that the American empire that Krauthammer was hoping for is just not in the cards...
...By late May, Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins was adopting a somber tone...
...Yes you do," Totenberg replied...
...Our enemies have taken our measure...
...It was a huge gamble, both for the country and for his own presidency...
...But the neoconservatives saw the U.S...
...That is the problem...
...We were reminded of just how crazed the liberals are...
...We seem to be living at a time of rival fanaticisms...
...It risked making the Middle East an even more dangerous place...
...And if we fail it will be catastrophic...
...They saw, too, that the public would mostly slumber on...
...Maybe Kurds, Sunnis, and Shi'ites should divide up the country...
...If Iraq must indeed remain unified, another tyrant will certainly emerge...
...Tom Bethell is a senior editor of The American Spectator...
...S FOR DEMOCRACY, here is Simon Jenkins, formerly the ¡¡¡¡¡¡ditor of the Times of London: "Just one pre-requisite of a democra cy is that all groups share sufficient national cohesion for a minority to acquiesce in majority rule...
...A perceived American defeat is likely to turn Iraq, and other parts of the Middle East, into a more dangerous place than it was before the war began...
...Islam has never been compatible with democracy and that won't change overnight...
...Its message was their message, that Americans are the true oppressors of the planet...
...If cameras can find "oppressed" people, there will be pictures on television, breast beating, and terrified politicians...
...Only a fool could say that of modern Iraq...
...Not encouraging...
...So, yes, we probably can fight a war in the media age...
...Some journalists were killed...
...We are deluded if we imagine that they are waiting for democracy to be brought to them on a platter...
...Then they will privatize as much of the money as they can by moving it to offshore accounts...
...The new if unstated rules will be set not by the Pentagon but by Amnesty International and the United Nations...
...On television (and I have no desire to get any closer than that) we see the fanaticism of the Islamic madmen...
...Our Islamic enemies will be emboldened...
...They knew that Abu Ghraib had played into their hands...
...Democracy is normally a bulwark against fanaticism...
...Scholars were unable to translate it into Arabic...
...You don't run a war on images," he said...
...They behave like agitated children...
...But after the "war" stage is over, media rules apply...
...Do British colonial borders have to be preserved indefinitely...
...military in the Middle East with a view to "changing the culture...
...They have taken stock of our national discord over war...
Vol. 37 • July 2004 • No. 6
