The Iraq Memorial War Wall

Weekend Bookchat

Patrick Tyler’s A World of Trouble: America in the Middle East surveys the actions of eight presidencies — from Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush — and finds an almost unbroken line of ineptitude, mendacity, bad faith and hubris, from the Suez Crisis to Bush’s lie-driven campaign in Iraq. Tyler draws on newly available archival material and offers some jaw-dropping anecdotes from the history of America’s role in keeping the Middle East ablaze. The sainted Henry Kissinger, who still enjoys a baffling reputation as a master politician and diplomat, comes off particularly badly:

. . . Henry Kissinger, entrusted with a message from Nixon to Brezhnev calling for joint superpower action to end the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and then proceed to a just settlement of the Palestinian question, simply decided, in mid-flight to Moscow, not to deliver it. Nixon’s message, Tyler writes, “threatened to undermine the record Kissinger was seeking to create; that he and Nixon had run the Soviets into the ground and they had protected Israel”. The truth was that the Russian leaders had reacted cautiously and moderately when war broke out, and that Nixon himself had a statesmanlike grasp of what was necessary. But a joint US-Russian initiative “would have thrust Kissinger into the thankless and perilous task of applying pressure on Israel”. So he simply dumped the message. He later encouraged Israel to violate the ceasefire that was supposed to end hostilities so that it could better its military position. With these acts of disobedience – acts which were also, as Tyler says, arguably unconstitutional – Kissinger closed off the possibility that the 1973 war could have been ended on terms which would have left Israel in a less powerful position, making it more amenable to an ensuing push for a settlement by the Americans and the Russians.

Tyler also demonstrates  the problems caused by the ”special relationship” between America and Israel:

Tyler does not go quite as far as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, for whom the Israel lobby lies at the heart of American foreign policy; but he is nevertheless a keen critic of the special relationship between the United States and Israel. Indeed, what is perhaps most striking is the constant American appeasement in the face of Israeli aggression. “Don’t lie to me! I’m sitting here watching it on CNN!” Reagan yelled down the telephone to Menachem Begin in 1982, after the Israeli leader had reneged on a promise not to bombard Beirut. But in typical fashion, Reagan did nothing about it – a pattern that has been repeated, by and large, ever since.

Meanwhile, Tyler writes that Bill Clinton fumbleda one-in-a-lifetime chance to capitalize on  ”a great convergence: the end of the cold war, the advent of Yitzhak Rabin’s premiership and the PLO’s decision to recognise the Jewish state.” By letting himself be manipulated by Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, Clinton tried to force a settlement and had the whole thing blow up in his face. He then blamed Yassir Arafat and everyone except himself for the collapse.

The manifold failures and disasters of the Bush administration have left Barack Obama with one hell of a mess to clear up, but one can only hope he might find time to read Patrick Tyler’s A World of Trouble. He might not be able to improve the situation, but as Tyler makes clear, simply not making things worse will put him miles ahead of his predecessors.

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How did so many public fixtures come to be named after Ronald Reagan? How did so many people come to believe that this dozing fantasist, whose administration was a carnival of corruption and who presided over embarrassing military failures ,  single-handedly defeated the Soviet Union, reduced the size of governmentand revived the American economy through tax cuts and positive thinking?

Why, the  way just about everything else beloved of conservatives, from crackpot economic theories to fake bestsellers, comes into being: a small group of dedicated crusaders with access to wingbucks lobbied for them round-the-clock, then created the illusion they had come about through overwhelming public demand. Will Bunch, in his new book  Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future, chronicles the rise of the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project in 1997, and argues that its rewriting of history (a creation of a fantasy version of a president whose legacy is, at best, highly debatable) is a hindrance to the present and fitire of America

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The memoirs of a renowned editor give us a glimpse of a vanishing era in American publishing — and an amusing look at how a neocon blowhard got wild-man lessons from Norman Mailer. A cultural history of Americans and their automobiles.

Top Ten Iraq Myths

From “Iraqis are safer because of Bush’s war” to “Bush invaded Iraq because of bad intelligence” and beyond, here’s your clip’n’save hit parade of lies and their corrections.

Zbig Fun

Let’s start the last day of 2008 with a bit of lowdown fun as former national security Zbigniew Brzezinski smacks around winger hack Joe Scarborough during a talk about the ongoing horror in the Middle East. Brzezinski, a courtly and diplomatic man, tries to school Scarborough in a gentlemanly fashion, but finally gets tired of the hack’s blowhard spinning and says, “You know, you have such a stunningly superficial knowledge of what went on that it’s almost embarrassing to listen to you.” Scarborough’s petulant response is worth noting as well.

Shooting Fish In a Barrel

When Israel started carpet-bombing Lebanon two summers ago, the Woman Warrior hung up a banner that read KILLING CHILDREN IS NOT SELF-DEFENSE. That Saturday afternoon, we spent a couple of hours arguing with and getting shouted at by people leaving the synagogue nearby, who came up our driveway to call us terrorist-lovers and baby killers. A couple of nights later, some vandals trespassed on our property and cut down the banner.

When we spoke with the rabbi a few days later, he was sincerely upset by the vandalism and the possibility that it might have been the work of some of his congregants. “We can’t look for justice in unjust ways,” he said, a philosophy I can endorse wholeheartedly. I hope it soaks into the heads of some of his congregants.

During those endless, pointless driveway debates in which outwardly intelligent people said the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon was acceptable because the Israelis gave the Lebanese time to clear out before the bombs started raining down, I received an object lesson in the fact that it is more possible to have a rational talk about Israel with Israelis than it is with American Jews.  There are Israelis who are appalled by the generations-long misery of Gaza and the West Bank, by the farcical situation with the settlements, with the double-dealing and the bad faith, but their American counterparts are shouted down by political hysterics who see every situation involving Israel as a replay of Exodus, with Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint holding back the slobbering Arab hordes.

The atrocity being committed right now in Gaza has no basis in morality, practicality or even long-term Israeli self-interest. It is a naked exercise in force wielded by a nuclear-armed regional superpower in the name of fighting an enemy it created decades ago in order to undermine the power of other Palestinian groups. I would like to see the propaganda nonsense about targeting only Hamas operations, with any civilians casualties a matter of regret, get the contemptuous treatment it deserves, but that’s as pointless as hoping for a reduction, much less an end, to the American subsidies lavished on the biggest economy in the eastern Mediterranean. This is shooting fish in a barrel, and it ends whatever claim Israel may have to the moral high ground.

So, like the good people at 3 Quarks Daily, I’m running the flag of Palestine to offer some gesture of sympathy, however ineffectual, with the innocents being subjected to this terror. At least this is one banner those self-righteous creeps won’t be able to cut down.

Verdict with Cheese

So, as far as I can tell, the jury in the pizza jihadi trial has determined that five men were conspiring to kill American soldiers at Fort Dix, but that they didn’t really mean to hurt anybody.

Do I have that right? If you convict the accused men of conspiracy but acquit them of attempted murder, where does that leave us? If they were gathering up weapons and preparing to strike Fort Dix, that implies an intent to do something more than inconvenience the soldiers, right? But they weren’t guilty of attempted murder? Weren’t we told last year, when these men were arrested, that the feds had narrowly averted a bloody strike on an American military target? No wonder the jury asked the judge to read a statement saying, “This has been one of the most difficult things that we have ever had to do.” Maybe that’s so, but that’s nothing compared with the work the jurors have created for anyone trying to make sense of the logic of this verdict.

This case has smelled bad right from the start and the outcome stinks. We are left with an ambiguous verdict against five “terrorists” who invited a Philadelphia cop to join them on one of their “training sessions,” who were blatantly led into making provocative moves by a paid FBI informant, and who were leery of the guy egging them on.

Something tells me this case will spend the next few years unraveling in the appeals process.

Ignatius in Orbit

Have you been lying awake at night all excited at the thought of having one of the presidential debates in Dubai? Neither have I, but WaPo’s David Ignatius thinks it would be just the keenest thing:

Yes, I know: This is America’s presidential campaign, not a traveling roadshow to be shared with foreigners. And if the candidates can’t even agree on a schedule of town meetings out in the American heartland, why should they travel to a sheikdom that’s 7,000 miles from Washington — and a short boat ride from Iran?

But the idea of a Dubai debate is appealing, not least because it would link the epochal 2008 campaign with a world that cares passionately about where America is heading. The United States is unpopular abroad these days in part because of a perception that we’re arrogant — that we don’t care what the world thinks. An overseas debate would help change that perception.

The idea is appealing to Ignatius because he’s a rich, out-of-touch media drone who would be perfectly happy to live under a religious dictatorship as long as the shopping was good and the air conditioning never cut out.

As for the sheiks, they can afford the fuel to fly out to America. Not many of us are in the position to return the favore these days.

Reading the War

The only thing more confusing than the events in Basra is the jumble of nonsensical assumptions reporters are bringing to their coverage.

Another Breakthrough in Iraq

E.coli conservatism marches on. A deadly form of malaria not previously seen in Iraq (milder forms are found in the marshy southern portion of the country) is spreading across the country, so far unchecked by any government action. Because of its proficiency at killing Iraqis, doctors have nicknamed it “Blackwater fever,” in honor of the Bush administration’s favorite security firm.

Good News From Iraq

The guy from the Los Angeles Times went looking for good news in Iraq. Really, he tried to find some, but reality and his military handlers kept getting in the way.

First he wanted to go check out that reopened bank branch in Amiriya. Refurbished by the Army at great expense and staffed by the Finance Ministry, it was being touted as another sign of the success story that is Iraq:

Within weeks, I heard back from the military regarding Amiriya. The bank was no longer something the military was willing to highlight.

“The unit operating in the same area as the bank doesn’t categorize the bank operations as a top priority because they don’t directly affect the good of the community of Amiriya,” an Army spokesman, Maj. Mark Cheadle, wrote in an e-mail. “So, the bottom line is they would rather not sponsor an embed or visit for something they don’t deal with on a regular basis.” My request for a follow-up “embed” was denied.

I tried to arrange a visit that would not involve the military, but the neighborhood is surrounded by checkpoints that were judged too dangerous for us to pass. Without being accompanied by soldiers, there was no way for me to tell the story.

Cheadle proposed that I instead write about a videoconference that allowed schoolchildren in Baghdad and Texas to ask questions of each other. I declined.

Okay, so the bank story didn’t go so well. But what about the Chinese restaurant in Baghdad’s Karada district? The one opened by three laid-off steelworkers from China’s Hubei province — the first food joint to be owned and operated by someone from outside the Middle East (and outside the employ of Halliburton) in years. How come the liberal media wouldn’t talk about that, huh?

Whoops:

A few days later, the restaurant employees said they had changed their minds about the interview. They were too scared to raise their profile through a news story. And a Chinese Embassy spokesman said his office had persuaded them to return home, although they were still operating in recent days. “The situation is far too dangerous for them to work here,” the spokesman said.

Because of such fears and the inefficiency that pervades the capital, these “good news” stories evaporated before I could tell them. After only a month in Iraq, I once again left having filed mostly “bad news” stories.

Ah, the hell with it. Let’s put out another press release about the schools that got painted. In another 10 months Bush will be able to slither out of the White House and leave this mess for a Democrat to clean up.