A Thought Experiment for the Left
Cohen, Mitchell
Here is a thought experiment for the left. It requires a bit of historical imagination, something for which the left is known. Its political implications are weighty. So weighty, I think, that...
...In the 1970s France emerged as the third biggest exporter of arms to the Third World...
...Let's give "you" a persona: you are Eugenia Norma Harrington, a distinguished civil rights attorney, long an eloquent advocate of social and economic fairness in America...
...The United States is fiddling with jihadists too, thinking they may be useful against the Soviets in Afghanistan...
...Perhaps, if they are not too busy having their pictures taken with Begin...
...My apologies, however, to John Rawls...
...Saddam's army is in deep trouble...
...What do you think we should do about Arafat?," you wonder out loud...
...That is a matter of our values, but also of politics...
...Wouldn't want him out of jail...
...The Soviets have been Iraq's main arms supplier since 1958, but Baghdad sought to diversify its sources in the 1970s...
...Look at what it did during the crisis before the '67 Arab-Israeli War...
...8. Richard Falk, "Trusting Khomeini," New York Times, February 16, 1979...
...Regardless of what we do, neither Saddam nor Khomeini is likely to function in ways that are wholly rational and predictable...
...So here's the HOP...
...But right now, it looks more likely that Khomeini could win...
...And Khomeini could well send holy warriors on a detour through Kuwait and Saudi Arabia...
...Arafat says that 'there is no difference between Palestinians and Egyptians...
...Can we minimize the maximum damage each might do...
...The impact of these events is not yet fully clear...
...An Economic Security Council and More Even though you are known for your domestic concerns, you have thought a lot about international affairs, especially the gap between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres...
...She went in as a left-winger ready to be sympathetic to a third world hero...
...Besides, there isn't much reason to have faith in the UN when it comes to this part of the world...
...A miserable regime may defeat a wretched one...
...See "On the Nature and Form of the Essay," in Georg Lukacs, Soul and Forms (London: Merlin Press, 1974), p. 13...
...Arafat versus Sharon as prime minister...
...You initiate a domestic agenda that combines investments in education and job training with affirmative action to address poverty and racism in the country...
...It seems to me that our Mideast policies should seek to consolidate the Israeli-Egyptian peace process, find ways to temper the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, and we must keep a sharp eye on Lebanon...
...As I recall, some prominent American intellectuals, not just Foucault in France, thought highly of him...
...Perhaps the United States should be prepared for big changes in Moscow a few years hence...
...As might be expected, you place great emphasis on social and economic policy...
...And our nation is the Arab one...
...Then there is the Mideast...
...Then there is civil war in Lebanon and, moving east, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan...
...Moscow wanted to reassert itself after its military advisers were thrown out of Egypt in '72 and it was sidelined by Kissinger's 'step by step' diplomacy following the '73 war...
...Moreover, you have been talking to people who study Russia through its complex history rather than by a mechanical application of the theory of totalitarianism...
...1. Think of it as condensing events and details for realistic dramatic purpose, although not quite as freely as in, say, a Michael Moore film...
...Khomeini, who was expelled in October 1978 from Najaf, Iraq, where he was a refugee from the shah [He then went to France.—EDs.], also denounced Saddam as a 'Zionist.' Why else would Saddam attack Iran...
...But the Iraqi invasion helped the new Iranian regime to consolidate instead...
...Still, the peace treaty would never have passed the Israeli Parliament without Labor's support— too much of Likud opposed it...
...Were we out of government, we would probably be writing articles for Dissent saying that the problem is the overall direction of American foreign policy...
...Baghdad's turn to Paris seems to have been prescient...
...In fact, the more you know about those pre-1981 events, the better...
...True," says the secretary, "but the Israelis are pulling out of Sinai, and that is a valuable precedent...
...All this is part of Paris's assertion of military independence after quitting NATO's joint command...
...Later, when you step into the HOP, I will ask you to drop a veil over your memory for the sake of my argument...
...In fact, Saddam completely misread his enemy...
...Sadat made a big mistake when he relaxed restraints on the Muslim Brothers and their ilk after Nasser died...
...By the end of my presidency," you declared in the campaign, "markets will serve human needs, not vice versa...
...He seems to have been infatuated by Saddam, fantasizing that this dictator is a Napoleon-Nasser-de Gaulle...
...We need to distinguish support of Israel from backing deluded right-wing policies, just as we must distinguish Palestinian suffering from Arafat's appalling leadership...
...In the meantime, we need to start worrying about the situation in Lebanon...
...The national security adviser begins: "The United States has pursued some ill-conceived policies and has had some bad luck in this area...
...There are also a number of reports of fundamentalist stirrings in Syria, especially in the town of Hama...
...The Algiers Accord of 1975 supposedly settled this matter, but Saddam agreed to it under pressure because of the shah's support of Kurdish rebels...
...I hope he doesn't write on `Trusting Arafat' to convince Israelis to make concessions to the Palestinians...
...There have been Iranian offensives and victories...
...My real inspiration, however, is a comment by the young Georg Lukacs...
...5. See Ahmed Youssef, L'Orient de Jacques Chirac: La politique Arabe de la France (Paris: Editions du Rocher, 2003), pp...
...According to intelligence reports, one of Iran's next campaigns will be called "Operation al-Quds," that is, "the Holy"—the Arabic word for Jerusalem...
...We will have an energy program that is friendly to the environment and not to the priorities of oil companies and Mideast potentates...
...You light a cigarette...
...The Soviets and the French are attempting balancing acts between Iran and Iraq, seeking to extend sway in countries at war with each other...
...And we are still left with the West Bank settlements and the Palestinian issue...
...The ESC must be structured so that it cannot be turned into an arena for cold war rivalries or a means to sustain third world dictators or promote the third worldist fantasies of intellectuals who sup with those dictators or serve as yet another forum for yet another resolution about "the Question of Palestine...
...In fact, you assemble a first-rate cabinet...
...One of them, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the founder of Egyptian Islamic Jihad who studied at the American University of Cairo, seems especially fanatical, railing and ranting against infidels and traitors, Americans, and Zionists, hailing Sadat's murder...
...So weighty, I think, that the answer— your answer, Comrade Reader—to the question I pose at its end might well reveal if you can say to fellow citizens that you have the wherewithal to hold political power on their behalf (yes, I assume representative democracy, for all its flaws...
...6o n DISSENT / Summer 2004...
...The situation is even trickier because the French have been helping Saddam to build a nuclear reactor...
...And what of left opinion...
...The AFL-CIO's leader protests this last point: "Why get distracted from anticommunism...
...There's a nightmare for you...
...It's hard to say," the secretary, responds...
...Once the agreement was signed and the shah withdrew support, the Kurdish struggle for national liberation collapsed...
...Then we'll be doing the right thing," you reply, "Why don't we see if we can get Willy Brandt's input...
...Sounds like National Socialism...
...Can you ever re-control decontrolled fundamentalists who believe the future is theirs...
...Saddam thought he could outsmart everyone," the secretary of state continues, as he hands you more papers, "and he outsmarted himself...
...One easily imagines him deploying the worst weapons against his neighbors and his own population...
...If we do tilt to him, our hands become very dirty, and a lot of the consequences are unpredictable...
...Did you ever read the interview of Arafat by Oriana Fallaci back in '72...
...No global five year plans," you advise the secretary, "but real programs that will subordinate global markets to global social decency...
...What THOUGHT EXPERIMENT FOR THE LEFT could be worse than a brawl in Lebanon with Arafat leading the Palestinians and Sharon as Israeli defense minister...
...Still, Israelis would be idiots to disregard this relentless rhetoric...
...We are getting conciliatory signals from Saddam...
...We cannot make decisions in government as if we were out of government...
...You ask the secretary of state to draw up plans for a new Economic Security Council (ESC) at the UN, an idea you've liked ever since you read Michael Harrington's The Vast Majority...
...Forgive me if I do not entirely do so...
...Islamic extremists assassinated Sadat just two months ago...
...In short, the Mideast presents its usual tumultuous picture, you think...
...He is running scared, very scared...
...The former are fixed forever because ideology remakes every nook and cranny and brain cell in them while that doesn't happen in the latter...
...But because I am the architect of this thought experiment, I won't say...
...The Lebanese confessional system was stacked against the Shiites, but now, in the midst of civil war, they are demanding their due as never before thanks partly to the leadership of a charismatic religious leader, Iranian born Musa alSadr...
...Fortunately, those Iranian students freed 52 n DISSENT / Summer 2004 THOUGHT EXPERIMENT FOR THE LEFT the American hostages in Tehran on the day of your inauguration...
...Won't American Jewish leaders yell...
...And we don't want to give him the wrong help...
...I will step back (I hear that I am not the first grand designer to do this), and ask you, Madame President: will you tilt to Iraq...
...He rejected Camp David, embraced Khomeini, presents no proposals except `Give me what I demand.' Many of our European friends say, 'Give him a chance.' I wonder if they haven't made a myth of him...
...I must say that the very need to make this decision irks me...
...Fallaci says to him that PLO bombings kill civilians, and Arafat replies, `civilians or military, they're all equally guilty of wanting to destroy my people . . . civilians are the first accomplices of the gang that rules Israel.' Imagine, he says this just months before the massacre at the Munich Olympics...
...He understood how that sort of conference would have rendered Egyptian flexibility hostage to Syria's extremist posturing, to its macho nationalism...
...Walter Mondale joins the new cabinet as secretary of the treasury...
...Anthony Lewis then wrote a Times column chastising Falk for 'trusting in illusions'— things were getting increasingly repressive in Khomeini's Iran—and Falk insists that `to single out Iran for criticism at this point is to lend support to that fashionable falsehood, embraced by Mr...
...Still, he, like everyone else must have been secretly relieved when Israel bombed Iraq's nuclear site last summer...
...I will ask you to pretend that you are ignorant of all post-1981 history...
...There is movement there—is it moveDISSENT / Summer 2004 • 53 THOUGHT EXPERIMENT FOR THE LEFT ment from totalitarianism to authoritarianism...
...You have appointed him—the "centrist" on your team— to reinforce the coalition that enabled you to defeat Reagan...
...For the sake of our purposes here, I must integrate into my design some hints, just a few, about later decades.' I think—hope—it will make sense since we are all reasonable historical creatures...
...The reasoning reminds me a little too much of intellectuals who 'understood' Stalin—in contrast to the bourgeois idiots...
...Almost all its members read—and some even write for —Dissent...
...Just because they spout left-wing words and denounce imperialism...
...In late September, after a rout of the Iraqis, there were fevered, celebratory speeches in the Iranian parliament, the Majlis...
...Let's put real heat on South Africa and also on that SOB Pinochet," you say to your secretary of state...
...Soon his regime may be too...
...But the immediate, very big question is this: If Khomeini, who is devoted to spreading his Islamic revolution, marches to Baghdad and a swell of triumphalist fanaticism rises mightily throughout the region, what then...
...Imagine that these preceding conversations occurred in late May 1981, a few months after you moved into the White House...
...The momentum and selfconfidence of each reinforces the other...
...Now you, as president, must make a choice...
...Now those reactionary Saudis are petrified and Tehran is utterly hostile to us...
...The first thing Sadat's trip to Jerusalem did was to subvert Carter's approach...
...7. Shlomo Avineri, "Lonely at the Top," Haaretz, May 21, 2004...
...And then be given constant retesting...
...On the other hand, the Israelis can defend themselves with their army and that doesn't require Jewish Khomeinis in West Bank settlements and Gaza...
...By the end of my presidency, we will have health insurance that is friendly to the sick, instead of to insurance companies...
...If we help him too much, he'll become the danger, almost certainly...
...6 In the meantime, the war has made it impossible for Iraq to use the Gulf for oil exports, and Baghdad is dangerously dependent on a pipeline through Syria—Iran's ally and Iraq's rival...
...It would have also been hostage to the ambitions of Syria's patron...
...Reagan heads back west in a wagon train (he aims to live out his days encouraging Republican movie stars to act as if they are suitable for public office...
...Then Saddam got busy repressing Iraqi communists, throwing away the "National Action Charter" signed by the Baath with them in 1973...
...Ever since Saddam attacked Khomeini's regime last September the area has DISSENT / Summer 2004 5 5 THOUGHT EXPERIMENT FOR THE LEFT suffered enormous carnage, massive misery, and high death tolls...
...At least, we can give Carter some credit," you remark...
...For starters, I don't intend to wear a veil myself...
...So you doubt if America's rival is shaped solely by—or frozen in—an idea...
...No, it is Khomeini who is really the 'Zionist,' Saddam riposted...
...The national security adviser asks, "What are the alternatives...
...We need a policy that won't help the UN shoot its own foot...
...Hard to tell the greater danger: reaching an agreement with Saddam or not reaching an agreement with him...
...Still, we'd better deliberate hard about a `tilt' to someone like Saddam...
...That's why he accepted the idea of Palestinian 'autonomy,' rather than demanding immediate Palestinian statehood," continues the secretary "It was not just because he wanted a separate peace, like half the Arab world charged, but because it opened a way to a next step...
...If we botch this, if we show the American people that the left cannot conduct foreign policy, then we can expect Reagan's wagon train to turn around...
...Problem is," says the secretary of state, "our influence is at a nadir...
...As it happens, you were looking through a file on the Arab-Israeli conflict that morning...
...Well, at least something went right in the region, the Israel-Egypt peace...
...And let's make sure ours is astute too and pay special attention to developments in this region...
...I hope its grasp of the consequences of these sorts of policies is more astute...
...Palestine is a small drop in the great Arabic ocean...
...So he became a galvanizing myth, and then just after his disappearance, the Iranian revolution energized Lebanese Shiites even more...
...God wants us to share, together with the nation of Iraq, in the honor of toppling Saddam and his executioner regime,' declared Iran's prime minister, Ali Raja'i...
...Do we have some overriding interest in sticking our nose in just now...
...It is unsettling, and one just never knows what sort of stunt Arafat could pull next...
...Our European friends say he changed with his UN speech in '74," comments the secretary, "Nixon went to China...
...yOU ARE ESPECIALLY concerned about the long-term impact of American power in the world...
...Whenever he is unhappy with developments, he throws everything into the air and hopes the Europeans will save him...
...And here is where I will ask you, Dissent reader, to recall that you are supposed to imagine yourself to be Eugenia Norma Harrington, the fortieth president of the United States, in this Historical Original Position...
...And let's bolster the Solidarity movement in Poland...
...He visited Khomeini in France...
...Obviously, this is tied to sustaining huge investments in its domestic arms industry...
...It'll never work...
...His article complained that the ayatollah was maligned when Carter and Brzezinski 'until recently associated him with religious fanaticism.' Falk protests that The news media have defamed him in many ways, associating him with efforts to turn the clock back 1,300 years, with virulent anti-Semitism, and with a new political disorder, "theocratic fascism" about to be set loose on the world.' He explains to readers that Khomeini 'indicated' that non-religious leftists would be able to participate fully in an Islamic republic and that 'to suppose that Ayatollah Khomeini is dissembling seems almost beyond belief.' He adds that `the depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary, and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false.'8 "The article is entitled 'Trusting Khomeini," you note...
...Despite his initial battlefield success, he found himself in a military deadlock by late November 1980, not long after you defeated Reagan...
...They're too afraid of dying.' He declares, 'Losses to us don't count, we don't care if we die.'4 This guy will drive his people off a cliff while insisting he knows the one route to freedom...
...And we have received a quiet message from Mitterrand: 'Saddam must not fall.' He isn't saying that merely because of French investments in Iraq...
...A lot of Israeli policy is bad," you continue...
...That's true," responds the secretary of state, "but only some...
...Sadat thought that if he could cut a deal with the Israelis, it might be a real step toward solving other issues and encourage other Israeli compromises...
...The Soviets held back military supplies at the beginning of the war, but are preparing to deliver again...
...Imagine that you have become president of the United States in a particular set of circumstances...
...We already have a recession at home that has been helped along significantly by the oil crisis following Khomeini's rise...
...policy in the seventies was based on 'two pillars,' both of them conservative, dominating the Gulf— Tehran and Riyadh...
...Hard to tell," you say, "In the meantime, Begin is running for reelection and Sharon could be defense minister...
...26-30...
...Islamic fundamentalists seem to be on a roll— Sunnis as well as Shiites, for all the antagonisms between them...
...He wanted an international conference under joint U.S.-Soviet auspices to push a `Comprehensive Settlement' of all Arab-Israeli problems in one quick swoop...
...And things are becoming more and more precarious because of the IranIraq War...
...One of its chief tasks will be to find ways to counter-balance the power of multinational corporations and financial institutions...
...He sees the dire consequences, long and short term, of a Khomeini sweep...
...Relations between the United States and Iraq were broken in 1967, in the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli war...
...What is with that fellow Chirac...
...The United States is on the outs with both Tehran and Baghdad...
...Moreover," you interject, "ours is supposed to be a foreign policy of the left...
...Lewis, that what has happened in Iran is the replacement of one tyranny by another.'" "Well, I don't think we'll consult him," you comment...
...You quit smoking years back, but you've been cheating in recent days as you contemplate the decision you might have to make...
...Due to an unexpected constellation of events, an insurgent movement called Democratic Equality wrests the Democratic presidential nomination from Jimmy Carter in 1980...
...115-117...
...What if we linked U.S...
...Military intelligence makes it clear that the hour is very late...
...Over the years you have come to suspect that ideological "third worldism," which once moved you deeply—for all the right reasons, because you despise imperialism—is often quite bad for people living in the third world...
...it is a nation extending from the Atlantic to the Red Sea and beyond.' He is being interviewed in Jordan and he insists they are in Palestine, that Jordan is Palestine...
...Nasser mobilized his army, demanded removal of UN Emergency Forces that served as the buffer between Egypt and Israel for a decade, and next thing you know, the UNEF is on the way out...
...He is atrocity incarnate...
...Complications Then the secretary of state says, "There is another matter—the Persian Gulf and the IranIraq War...
...aid to both West Bank settlements and terrorism...
...We don't want peace...
...You replace him...
...Foreign exchange reserves have plummeted, and Baghdad will have to impose economic austerity soon...
...You turn to the secretary of defense and ask him to assess the impact of the Iranian revolution on the Iraqi military...
...Thatcher will howl...
...Carter's role at Camp David was then truly impressive, even heroic, yet only after he yielded to political reality...
...Qadaffi claims alSadr boarded a return flight, but he wasn't on it when the plane arrived in Lebanon...
...The Iranians dealt the Iraqis more blows by early December and severed crucial communications and logistical ties among Iraqi forces...
...More Complications So that provides part of the HOP into which you, Comrade Reader, will have to step when you make your decision as president of the United States...
...He believed internal struggles had so weakened Khomeini's regime that it would simply fall apart as Iraq's army advanced...
...Jimmy Carter seeks to be an effective ex-president, leading observers to suggest that he should have sought this job in the first place...
...Sadat went to Jerusalem...
...Or rather, what if we don't...
...Like Sadat, he thought that it would create negotiating conditions in which nobody could bend...
...Allah's hand has been revealed though Iran's triumphs...
...Saddam Hussein, Iraq's ruling thug, who invaded Iran a few months back, gave a speech recently in which he declared, "Socialism does not mean the equal distribution of wealth between the deprived poor and the exploiting rich...
...Fallaci asks him if he respects his foes, and he says 'As fighters, and even as strategists .. . sometimes yes...
...Reliable sources report that Iraq is buying British medical kits-10,000 of them—that are apparently for workers in chemical weapons factories...
...That makes things a little easier as you order a general review of foreign policy...
...People will run into Sharon's arms after reading it...
...MITCHELL COHEN is co-editor of Dissent...
...You and your secretary of state agree on the importance of designing the ESC so as to avoid past UN failures...
...Even if this is just propaganda, it makes the Jordanians nervous, because their kingdom, which backs Iraq, is the most plausible path there...
...See Alexander Cockburn, "Stooges Yet Again: You can always tell an objective social democrat," in the Nation, November 32, 1980...
...It was direct negotiations that finally produced something—an end to three decades of war between two countries...
...Then you riffle through a background file assembled by your national security adviser, who also provided a "General Assessment...
...And please remember that the veil has dropped over you and you know nothing of what happens in the world after that month's end...
...Because French Socialists gave the Israelis nuclear technology in the fifties, Chirac the right-winger wanted to correct this 'strategic error' in the 1970s by giving nuclear technology to Saddam.' I heard that some wit renamed Iraq's 56 n DISSENT / Summer 2004 Osirak nuclear site Ochirac.' " "Fortunately, Chirac is no longer prime minister," you respond to the secretary, "now that our friend Mitterrand won the presidential election and there is a socialist government in Paris...
...The Shiites, who make up some 40 percent of the population, DISSENT / Summer 2004 • 57 THOUGHT EXPERIMENT FOR THE LEFT its most deprived sector, have mobilized...
...He once praised Plato as an "essayist" because the Greek philosopher, in his dialogues, made Socrates into a vehicle for his own questions...
...And you want the ESC to help the poor, to feed them, to empower them...
...Lebanon is fractured, but everywhere else there seem to be authoritarian nationalist regimes on one hand and civil societies in which religious fundamentalists are emerging as the most vigorous component on the other...
...The immediate source of conflict is a return to old quarrels, partly over the Shatt al-Arab, a waterway into the Gulf...
...You ignore sniping that his appointment turns your administration into "a grotesque sellout to the priorities of the ruling class...
...But as persons no.'You must concede that Israelis are brave soldiers, says the interviewer...
...Last year, Brzezinski gave a speech on the Afghan border to anti-Soviet Mujahideen in which he urged, "This is your God-given country...
...A UN resolution...
...Better think twice about this...
...Even though the country is still reeling from its disastrous war in Vietnam and seems weakened also by your predecessor's botched policies in Iran and Nicaragua, you know that only wishful thinking—sometimes Soviet, sometimes French, sometimes just naive leftist—will make America's global role dissipate...
...he can also betray his own constituents, the folks who rallied to him for saying he'd make no concessions...
...THOUGHT EXPERIMENT FOR THE LEFT "Intelligence here is always difficult...
...Hard to justify, even if it only means that we will give him satellite intelligence and carefully gauged arms assistance...
...In the aftermath tens of thousands of Kurds were "transferred" by Saddam out of their homelands...
...What to Do...
...If there is a regime able to handle the Muslim Brothers, it is Syria...
...I've always sensed that this fellow is unusually brutal and mendacious, but that cuts two ways...
...Think of his pursuit of nuclear power and those British medical kits he imported...
...You wonder how this professor would explain post-Mao China...
...It is also in the HOP...
...2. Saddam, quoted from a 1980 speech in Committee against Repression and for Democratic Rights in Iraq (CADRI), Saddam's Iraq (London: Zed Books, 1989), p. 104...
...You may ask what I would do were I the president...
...Peace for us means the destruction of Israel and nothing else.' "And read this," you add, "Arafat is supposed to be a Palestinian nationalist leader, but he insists here that 'From an Arab point of view, one doesn't speak of borders...
...Who would have believed that when he defeated the Labor Party in the 1977 elections...
...Remember, he launched this war...
...He wanted them to counterbalance pro-Soviet factions in Egypt, but he did this just as the Saudis, flush with petrodollars, were investing in Wahhabi fundamentalism everywhere...
...How can we find some practical equilibrium between our leftDISSENT / Summer 2004 59 THOUGHT EXPERIMENT FOR THE LEFT wing values and the intransigent realities of the world out there—like the consequence of the aggressive ambitions of either a fascist dictator or a 'fanatical, reactionary, and the bearer of crude prejudices,' to quote Falk...
...Best not to mistake a design, however grand, for reality, and then divide the world according to who fits it...
...You meet your national security adviser and your secretaries of state and defense in the Oval Office...
...130-35...
...Remarkably, you win the election and become the country's first woman—and first truly leftwing— president...
...You assemble a broad center-left political coalition against the Republican nominee, Ronald Reagan...
...3. William B. Quandt, Camp David: Peace Making and Politics (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1988, p. 241...
...HOP situates you in the Year of Our Relativity, 1981...
...It reads: These two lands have a long, difficult history between them...
...Saddam, already Iraq's strongman for some years, consolidated his own power in July 1979, a month after he officially became Iraqi president, by executing a third of the Baath Party's leadership...
...She left disillusioned...
...Perhaps "totalitarianism" shouldn't provide a totalizing explanation of the country in the first place...
...Go and liberate it in a Holy War against the godless Communists...
...That would squeeze 'ern both...
...While they are not all of a stripe, and while they tend to be Iraqi nationalists— Iraq's ground troops in the war are heavily Shiite—they are also not so pleased by Saddam, whose Baath power base is mainly Sunni and tribal...
...So the crucial question is, should we tilt to Iraq...
...It's worth noting that Rabin, who was Israeli prime minister when Carter came into office and who said back then that he didn't care if he had to visit the West Bank with a passport, also resisted Carter's international 54 n DISSENT / Summer 2004 conference idea...
...He died under bizarre circumstances after a trip to Libya in 1978...
...We have some presence in Baghdad through our interests section in the Belgian embassy...
...That's right," says the national security adviser, "did you read in the file I prepared that New York Times op-ed piece from February 1979 by Richard Falk, the professor of international law at Princeton...
...Speak to our friends in the Swedish Social Democratic Party...
...As I construct it, you will perceive readily that HOP entails fantasy as well as events that occurred that year and before...
...The TV news shows the assassins and their collaborators behind bars screaming fundamentalist slogans...
...Arafat says to her, 'The end of Israel is the goal of our struggle and it allows for neither compromise nor mediation . . . revolutionary violence is the only system for liberating the land of our fathers . . . The purpose of this violence is to liquidate Zionism...
...UN Secretary General U Thant stuck to international legalisms and the result was war...
...Nineteen seventy-nine created a dramatically new era there because of the EgyptIsrael treaty and the Iranian revolution...
...They are clashing constantly with the PLO ministate that was established in southern Lebanon after Arafat was expelled from Jordan...
...Anyway, nobody who has paid attention to Khomeini or Saddam can believe that either will knuckle under an embargo, not to mention the demands of international law or the UN...
...A UNcoordinated oil embargo against both sides...
...Still, imagine Shiite fundamentalist regimes in Tehran and Baghdad concurrent with a fascist regime in Damascus, energized Shiism in Lebanon, and invigorated Sunni fundamentalism in an uncertain, postSadat Egypt...
...No!,' replies Arafat, `No they're not...
...The veil you wear is not one of Khomeini's choosing, but a historical one: you don't know any post-1981 history...
...Socialism...
...Some of your friends are amazed when you say this, but you reason that a gerontocracy can fashion the future for just so long...
...It is very worrisome...
...The Democrats sweep both houses...
...I do have a view about this— one that I don't like...
...Even if one argued— it is a legitimate claim—that we are imperious outsiders, especially given our past support for the shah, that brutal megalomaniac, the consequences would be dreadful...
...We need a left foreign policy that is free, really free, of cognitive dissonance...
...It bought more and more from France, which became its second major weapons supplier— about 40 percent of Iraq's arms—by the time of the attack on Iran...
...Saddam's illusion may have been encouraged by evaluations he received from Iranian exiles who fled to Baghdad after Khomeini's revolution...
...Doesn't Sharon say that...
...Even belligerent Ariel Sharon, champion of the Sinai settlements, called Begin during the negotiations at Camp David to say he'd yield them for a peace treaty.' It will be interesting to see if Sharon actually takes charge of tearing them down...
...Iraq is importing howitzers from South Africa, cluster bombs from Chile, and weapons from Argentina's junta...
...They are usually too busy condemning Israel for something real or something imaginary) Then there is Lebanon, where a transformation is also underway...
...Why do some people think third world tyrants are liberators?, you wonder...
...There are a few key issues, all linked: What are the consequences if we do nothing...
...9. Richard Falk, "In Iran, a 'Balance of Hopeful Signs" (Letter to the Editor) New York Times, March 28, 1979...
...But Voice of Palestine reported on July 7, 1979, that after meeting with Austrian chancellor Bruno Kreisky, 'Brother Abu Ammar [Arafat's nom de guerre—EDs.] reiterated the PLO's refusal to hold any dialogue with the leaders of the Zionist entity.' According to Tehran television on August 1, 1979, Arafat sent a telegram to Khomeini declaring, 'We will continue on the path of jihad and sacrifice until God almighty bestows final victory on us.' And PARS, Tehran's domestic news service, reported on August 6, 1979, that Arafat sent a telegram to Iran's foreign minister declaring, The nation of Palestine and the Arabs support the holy Islamic revolution in Iran and are determined to continue their fight and armed confrontation to recapture Palestine and free the Holy-land from the claws of the Zionists.' Our European friends seem to take Arafat at his word to them while ignoring the rest of his sentences...
...Can a foreign policy of the left tilt to a regime like Saddam's...
...We cannot invent choices that are comfortable to us and then choose between them...
...If we do nothing, if we don't 'tilt' to Saddam, the regional and then global consequences are likely to be catastrophic...
...No intelligent person, no matter how antiimperialist, however much he despises Western oil companies, can imagine that it would be good for religious fanatics and their allies to control this region of the world, not to mention the West's oil supply—just as no intelligent person could be happy about Saddam marching into Tehran, with his fascist regime asserting control over oil and the Gulf on behalf of a pan-Arab chauvinism...
...Let's call these circumstances the Historical Original Position, or HOP for short...
...It does seem to get people jobs, indeed even tenured jobs, but mostly in the first world...
...I have it over here...
...For every Israeli settler who crosses the '67 borders, we deduct some aid money to Israel, and for every Palestinian terror bombing, we restore it...
...Tehran has declared that it will fight back until there is a regime change in Baghdad...
...The ESC will war against global poverty and illiteracy...
...this would be too inflexible...
...What is our latest evaluation of Khomeini?," you ask...
...Sadat understood that this had to fail, and that is why he is the real strategic hero...
...By the end of my presidency, labor law will be reformed in order to bolster trade union organizing...
...The war against Iran is a war against Islam,' declared Ayatollah Khomeini himself...
...It is the border between the two countries for some of its route...
...It is amazing," you observe to the secretary, "that an old fanatic like Menachem Begin agreed to a total Israeli pull-back from Sinai...
...Sixty percent of Iraq is Shiite...
...nobody ever found him...
...You inhale deeply and say, "Here is what I think we must do...
...After all, the hostages were released after 58 n DISSENT / Summer 2004 we won the election...
...Let's now go forward to December of the same year...
...What influence do we have...
...Can we achieve anything positive...
...At least these two Supreme Leaders, Saddam and Khomeini, agree on something, the vast influence of Zionists...
...Look at how he speaks about terrorism...
...You call up the national THOUGHT EXPERIMENT FOR THE LEFT security adviser, and secretaries of state and defense and tell them you want to meet by the week's end to consider policy options...
...We want war, victory...
...We began some trade again in the mid-1970s, and it increased in late '79...
...If I allow myself these liberties, please remember that the grand design is mine, I have invited you into my thought experiment and presumably, if you are still reading this, you accepted...
...France has been selling Iraq very advanced weapons and Mitterrand has made it clear that this will continue...
...Except we won the election, and we already reoriented policy with the long term in mind...
...See Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, "Why Totalitarianism is Objectively Undemocratic but Authoritarianism is Subjectively Liberal," Commentary, Thermidor, 1979...
...France's investment in Iraq grows by leaps and bounds, much to Iran's chagrin...
...Iran has now launched a massive counterattack...
...Both are part of the Arab nation.' So he agrees with Golda Meir that there are no Palestinians...
...Most important, have some long conversations and then ongoing consultations with democratic socialists and trade unionists in Latin America, Africa, the Mideast, and Asia...
...It will simply dispatch them, no questions asked, and there will be no condemnatory resolutions passed by the UN or the Arab League...
...Remember that he initially had a completely mistaken strategic concept for the region—one that many of our European friends applauded...
...Khomeini is proclaiming that the march to Baghdad will lead eventually to Jerusalem...
...You recently read an article in which a neoconservative academic, who was thought to have had a future in a Reagan administration, distinguished totalitarian regimes from authoritarian ones...
...Also, Syria's dictator, Hafez al-Assad, who backed Iran against Iraq, he, too, is a closet 'Zionist,' says Saddam...
...There's more," says the national security adviser...
...Shouldn't this guy have to take a driver's test before they give him diplomatic license...
...Moscow and Paris are too invested...
...Actually, you think that Soviet power may decline...
...Socialism is a means to raise and improve productivity...
...The regional context makes matters more jittery...
...It's had a rough time, fighting the Communist Party's 'revolutionary consciousness' with 'trade union consciousness...
...Moscow is angry at Saddam for attacking Iran without the consultations Baghdad promised in the Iraqi-Soviet Friendship Treaty of 1972...
...4. "Yasir Arafat," in Oriana Fallaci, Interview with History (New York: Liveright, 1976), pp...
...6. For some details I have drawn from Stephen R. Grummon, The Iran-Iraq War: Islam Embattled (New York/Washington: Praeger/Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1982), esp...
Vol. 51 • July 2004 • No. 3
