The Western Disease - The strange syndrome of our guilt and their shame.

The National Review Online, despite being a right-leaning publication, does and has produced thoughtful, balanced pieces. However, whenever I see this particular author's (Victor Davis Hanson) articles, I shudder but read on anyway. The reasons for this are twofold. One, it is good to expose oneself to opinions and ideas diametrically opposed to one's own, for the sake of intellectual rigour, especially since it's unlikely the whole article will fail to make any valid points. And two, his florid writing is stylistically pleasing.

In 24 months the United States defeated two of the most hideous regimes in modern memory. For all the sorrow involved, it has already made progress in the unthinkable: bringing consensual government into the heart of Middle Eastern autocracy, where there has been no political heritage other than tyranny, theocracy, and dictatorship.
Right wingers like to trump the fact that they're bringing freedom, democracy and righteousness to the world. However, this broad generalisation inevitably masks the truth. In this case, the USA has largely forgotten about Afghanistan in its zeal to pump Iraqi oil, and risks the country - or at least the southern part of it - slipping back into the same sort of mess that gave birth to the Taliban. At the same time, we can see US zeal about democracy fading in Iraq in the face of the difficulties they are facing. The strong democracy they seek to build is already being undermined by the impending US withdrawal. If humanitarianism and freeing suffering hordes is really the driving force of US foreign policy, let's see them free North Koreans from having to eat tree bark soup.

Thus by any comparative standard of military history, the last two difficult years, despite setbacks and disappointments, represent a remarkable military achievement .Yet no one would ever gather even the slightest acknowledgment of such success from our Democratic grandees. Al Gore dubbed the Iraqi liberation a quagmire and, absurdly, the worst mistake in the history of American foreign policy. Howard Dean, more absurdly, suggested that the president of the United States might have had foreknowledge of September 11. Most Americans now shudder at the thought that the former might have been president in this time of crisis - and that the latter still could be.
I suppose alienating the whole world in his single-minded obsession with deposing Saddam, bogging half (?) the US Armed Forces down in Iraq unnecessarily, with a guerrila war being fought more than 7 months after "major fighting" was declared over and fueling the rage of Islamists is not a grave mistake for foreign policy?

Often American and European writers echo the fury of Gore and Dean... He [Paul Kurgman] exclaimed, "In the end the Bush doctrine - based on delusions of grandeur about America’s ability to dominate the world through force - will collapse. What we’ve just learned is how hard and dirty the doctrine’s proponents will fight against the inevitable." Krugman was apparently furious that American taxpayer dollars were going to be used to hire exclusively American and Coalition companies to rebuild Iraq rather than be paid out to foreign entities whose governments opposed the removal of Saddam Hussein.
Bush cannot ensure continuity of policy and political will in the executive for long enough to fulfill the dreams of his doctrine, or at least the ideals of democratic imperialism. And witholding the issuing of contracts to "foreign entities whose governments opposed the removal of Saddam Hussein" is petty, wasteful and misses the point - the companies do not dictate foreign policy.

Bob Herbert assured his foreign audience that "The Republicans are hijacking elections and redistricting the country and looting the Treasury and ignoring the Constitution and embittering our allies." That outside entities and media have confirmed the vote counts of the Florida election, that Congress must approve federal spending and pass laws, that an independent judiciary audits our legislation, and that 60 countries are now engaged in Iraq meant nothing.
Granted - gerrymandering is a an affair cheerfully engaged in by both sides, but at this moment the Republicans are the ones who are more guilty of this crime. But what is converting a generous budget surplus into red ink as far as the eye can see in a matter of years for the sake of reckless tax cuts and an unnecessary war called then, if not "looting the Treasury"? And just because 60 countries are involved in some small ways in Iraq does not mean the rifts are healed. It's called repairing the damage.

A rather refined-looking French self-described expert in jurisprudence was lecturing his audience about the proper legal framework that was "acceptable" to the international community. From his dandified look he appeared a rather different sort from the Americans who crawled into Saddam’s spider hole to yank him out. Soft power I suppose is the glib pontification from the salon; hard power is dragging out mass murderers at night in Tikrit.
This advocacy of vigilante, Texas-style justice is disturbing. I suppose we should cheer if a hitman were to sneak into the White House and take out Dubya, then? International Law is fragile enough already as it is. We do not need rogue nations inflicting their whims on the rest.

Another worried-looking European analyst was raising the specter of a potential oppressed prisoner suffering at "Guantanamo" - in voicing concern for the rights of Saddam Hussein! French trading with a mass murderer, profiting from selling him arms to butcher his own people is one thing; worrying that the same monster fully understands the nuances of Western jurisprudence while in the docket is quite another. Of course, our European humanist never noted that his own country’s pusillanimity over the last decade was responsible for abetting Saddam’s reign of terror even as someone else's audacity was for ending it.
Like the USA had no dealings with Saddam itself in the 80s, after it had used chemical weapons in Iran. Further, to treat your enemy badly just demeans yourself and brings you down to the same level as he. What moral superiority would they be able to claim, then?

There is something terribly wrong, something terribly amoral with the Western intelligentsia, most prominently in academia, the media, and politics... thousands of the richest, most leisured people in the history of civilization have become self-absorbed, ungracious, and completely divorced from the natural world - the age-old horrific realities of dearth, plague, hunger, rapine, or conquest.
I'd counter that some people are too intoxicated with the thought of their inerrancy and righteousness.

Indeed, it is even worse than that: a Paul Krugman or French barrister neither knows anything of how life is lived beyond his artificial cocoon nor of the rather different men and women whose unacknowledged work in the shadows ensures his own bounty in such a pampered landscape.. Neither knows what it is like to be in a village gassed by Saddam Hussein or how hard it is to go across the world to Tikrit and chain such a monster.
Like this writer knows what it's like being such? Or even a prisoner, possibly innocent even, in Guantanamo Bay, devoid of almost all rights, including that to a fair trial with a recourse to appeals and access to a lawyer

Both Western pontificators and the mob in the Middle East feed off each other. Paul Krugman would rarely write a column about how abjectly immoral it was that thousands mourned the death of a mass murderer when one can say worse things about an American president who chose not to use American dollars to hire French companies to rebuild Iraq. Bob Herbert can falsely rant about a Florida election "rigged," but seldom about an election never occurring in the Arab world.
Granted, but the writer is guilty of the same crime, albeit in another way.

It was the genius of bin Laden, after all, that he suspected after he had incinerated 3,000 Westerners an elite would be more likely to blame itself for the calamity - searching for "root causes" than marshalling its legions to defeat a tribe that embraced theocracy, autocracy, gender apartheid, polygamy, anti-Semitism, and religious intolerance. And why not after Lebanon, the first World Trade Center bombing, the embassies in Africa, murder in Saudi Arabia, and the USS Cole? It was the folly of bin Laden only that he assumed the United States was as far gone as Europe and that a minority of its ashamed elites had completely assumed control of American political, cultural, and spiritual life.
Perhaps the willingness of the "elite" to examine the reasons for events is more prudent than running into a fight, gun barrels spinning - to invade a country at the slightest provocation, as the writer suggests, and attacking symptoms, not causes. Be that as it may, I seem to recall the very same people who shrilly denounce Clinton for not taking action against Al-Qaeda earlier equally shrilly denouncing him a few years back when he bombed Iraq in 1998 and sent cruise missiles into Sudan. Besides which, the Taliban were able to arise thanks to the very same people who later spearheaded the drive to invade Afghanistan, a fact the writer conveniently leaves out.

Hatred of Israel is the most striking symptom of the Western disease. On the face of it the dilemma there is a no-brainer for any classic liberal: A consensual government is besieged by fanatical suicide killers who are subsidized and cheered on by many dictators in the Arab world. The bombers share the same barbaric methods as Chechens, the 9/11 murderers, al Qaedists in Turkey, and what we now see in Iraq.
And irrational unmitigated support for it, motivated by the Jewish and Evangelistic Christian lobby, is the most striking symptom of the Right-Wing Republican disease. The "consensual government" so beloved of the writer regularly engages in policies designed to persecute and exterminate the Palestinians as a people, just as the Jews themselves were persecuted for so many centuries.

When Europe frets over the "Right of Return" do they mean the over half-million Jews who were sent running for their lives from Egypt, Syria, and Iraq? Or do they ever ask why a million Arabs live freely in Israel and another 100,000 illegally have entered the "Zionist entity"? Does a European ever ask what would happen should thousands of Jews demand "A Right of Return" to Cairo?
What's past is past, and two wrongs do not make a right, unlike what the writer seems to think. Perhaps so many Arabs live in Israel precisely because they have despaired of the intransigence of the Israeli government every being softened. It's called desperation, not gleeful acquiescence.

Instead, the elite Westerner talks about "occupied lands" from which Israel has been attacked four times in the last 60 years
One could make a similar argument about the USSR and its satellite states.

Perhaps the most pathetic example of this strange nexus between first- and third-world Western bashing was seen in mid-December on television. Just as the United States government declared a high alert, one could watch a replay of the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy trashing America to a captivated, near-gleeful audience in New York. Her dog-and-pony show was followed by pathetic pleading from her nervous interrogator, Howard Zinn, not to transfer her unabashed hatred of the Bush administration to the United States in general. Mimicking the theatrics of American intellectuals - Roy’s hands frequently gestured scare quotes - she went from one smug denunciation to another to the applause of her crowd. Little was said about the crater a few blocks away, the social pathologies back home in India that send tens of thousands of its brightest to American shores, or Roy’s own aristocratic dress, ample jewelry, and studied accent. All the latter accoutrements and affectations illustrated the well-known game she plays of trashing globalization and corporatization as she jets around the Western world precisely through its largess - all the while cashing in by serving up an elegant third-world victimization to guilt-ridden Westerners.
And now he makes absolutely no sense, at least about Arundhati Roy and America.

Such invective only reveals the writer's xenophobic, US-centric view of the world. Thankfully, not all Americans are similarly delusional. The National Review should really get more balanced writers. Or maybe they keep him for the same reason the New York Times keeps William Safire - shock value and cheap populism.


Oh, yes. And Happy New Year too. If you've made it this far :)