Saturday, October 1, 2005
Fischer remarked that, after September 11, the American officials could have come to Europe (meaning France and Germany) and proposed a vast strategic campaign to transform the larger Middle East, beginning with Afghanistan, and proceeding to Iraq, and including a Palestinian-Israeli settlement. If the Americans had proposed such a thing, and if they had seemed honest and aboveboard, the Europeans might have responded by saying, no, let’s do Afghanistan first, and Palestine-Israel second, and Iraq later on. And if the Americans had insisted on Afghanistan first, and Iraq second, the Europeans–well, they might have gone along. –Paul Berman reporting on conversation he had with Germany’s foreign minister, Joscha Fischer in his book Power and the Idealists.
What if Al Gore had been elected, and what if his administration had developed a comprehensive strategy for dealing with the insanity of the Middle East along the lines suggested by Fischer in the quote above? What if he worked hard to get a strong multinational coalition on board–not just France, Germany, and England, but Russia, China, India as well. Would this have been easy to do? Would it have resulted in a flawless strategy and execution? Not likely. Maybe it wouldn’t even have been possible. But the point is that a stable Middle East is in all these nations’ self interest. It’s in the interests of the sane majority of Muslims throughout this region as well.
If something like that happened, I might have got behind it, my Burkean reservations about huge social engineering projects notwithstanding. I’m not certain I would, but I would have been more open to the idea of it. Maybe some kind of proactive intervention in the Middle East could have helped. Maybe an effective strategy for such an intervention could have been developed. I think that I would have had to have been convinced that there was a reasonable chance that the kind of disaster that we have in Iraq now would not have been the only possibility. Sometimes there is simply nothing you can do without making matters worse.
Perhaps with more competent management, an intervention in Iraq could have been pulled off in a way that moved the region toward greater stability. But never did I ever think that the bully-boy mentality behind this administration’s policies to be capable of developing such a strategy. It would have been better if these fools did nothing. And it would have been better if Kerry were elected because he would have had a better chance of rebuilding the international trust and goodwill that the Bush administration destroyed in the same way it destroyed our budget surplus. Kerry may not have succeeded, but he would have had a chance. Bush has no chance.
This administration is such a disaster on so many levels, I think we have only begun to fathom how awful it is. And it still has over three more years in office. Just think about the enormity of that fact for a moment. If there were only some way of locking them in a closet where they could do no more harm for the remainder of the term. That was essentially the GOP strategy for Bill Clinton in his second term–tie him to a chair with an impeachment. No possibility of that here, though.
So think of it. Three years and three months more the world has to suffer this level of world historical bungling and cronyism. With no controls or oversight from a complicit congress and a complicit corporate media. I am not for leaving Iraq in chaos, but I am for getting these people in the administration as far away from making policy there as possible. They have the capability only to make things worse. Maybe pulling out is the only realistic option now. It’s all so disheartening.
I am not a multiculturalist, if being one means that I think it’s ok in some cultures to stone women who are caught in adultery. I’m not one if it means that the people in that culture are subjected to any form of abusive power by their governments. All abuses of human rights need to be loudly condemned, and I’m ok with intervention in the affairs of those nations where the abuses are particularly egregious.
The world should have intervened in Rwanda; it should have intervened as it did in the Balkans, and in the early nineties, it should have intervened in Iraq when Saddam was massacring Kurds and Shiites. My opposition to the invasion and removal of Saddam was not so much a matter of principle so much as it was the idea of the arrogant unilateral neocon strategy for doing so. You don’t invade countries willy nilly just because you have the power to do so. That’s what shocked the world about the wild-west vigilantism behind the way the Bush administration went into Iraq. Sure there was probable cause, but he broke in to make his arrest without a warrant.
We don’t allow the police to invade our homes at their whim. But when there is good reason to do so, such a thing is permitted in a country of laws when a judge grants a warrant. The same thing should be true on the international level. So who then is the judge that gives the warrant? It has to be done through some mechanism like the U.N.
Assuming we don’t destroy the planet one way or another, we are headed toward some form of global social organization. There is no stopping it. Traditional cultures do not have a future. That’s simply a price that will have to be paid, and the pain and identity loss that comes with that is something the globe will have to suffer through. The old ways do not give up without a fight. We went through it during our own Civil War, and every society has to work through it in its own way. But traditional societies as we have known them for the last thousands of years are all doomed to extinction.
We cannot look back with regret or nostalgia; that leads to LWS–Lot’s Wife Syndrome. The symptoms of LWS are pillars of salt, the lifeless systems and dead thinking that we find in all formalistic traditionalism, and in fundamentalism and dogmatism. We must find a way to look forward in anticipation of something new. Already a process of retrieval and fusion is beginning which I believe is the energy that will produce the new thing, and it’s there where hope lies. The loss of "given" traditional societies does not mean the irretrievable loss of the gifts those many cultures have to offer the world. The task now is to preserve them and integrate them into something larger.
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