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March 15, 2005
The Catastrophe That Bears Good Fruits.
When President Bush spoke of the Iraq war and its aftermath as a "catastrophic success" he was excoriated by the press and his critics for uttering another Bushism and showing himself to have a faint grasp of the hell that his actions had unleashed in the Middle East.
Truly, in many ways the months after the fall of Baghdad could have gone better and the refusal by senior Administration officials to talk plainly about the struggle put to the military in some small part contributed to losses in the polls at home, doubts from long standing supporters of the war and a general impression that at times, those in charge in the Administration were making things up as they went along.
Wars often become case studies in the practice of planning and contingencies and more than one historian has rightly pointed out that a battle plan typically gets thrown out with the first shot.
There have been mistakes. No rational person would either look at the last two years in Iraq and pronounce it an unqualified success or dwell so loudly on the setbacks that the greater perspective is lost. The key here is the notion of a rational person. Bush's critics-- at least those who refuse to acknowledge that any good can spring from the mind of the supposed simpleton commander-in-chief-- tend to drift and then dive head first into irrational waves of anti-Bush rhetoric when asked to make a fair assessment of the reality in Iraq and in the Greater Middle East.
How many times have we heard that, contrary to pre-war intelligence and public statements of officials from countries other than those in the coalition, that there never, ever were any prohibited weapons in Iraq? It is not necessary to go over that argument again, of course, because if you are convinced that Saddam had them, you still believe that the protracted run-up to the war allowed him to spirit them out of the country.
Conversely, if you believe that Saddam never possessed those weapons after the First Gulf War and the subsequent IAEA work, then you are unlikely to be convinced even should a gigantic cache of centrifuges and uranium show up somewhere in the Bekaa Valley. Indeed, if such materials are found and linked to Saddam, the critics will use the new evidence to point out not that the president was right, but that he is a huge screw-up who allowed Saddam to spread his deadly arsenal throughout the region. The irony will be lost on those making the argument, but you get the idea.
Abu Ghraib has become another black mark on the American war effort, though I would contend that it's more like a shade of gray. Again, critics will use the prison scandal as a metaphor for what they see as a corrupt, wasteful and illegal provocation perpetrated by a group hellbent on global domination and the subjugation of the non-Western world while supporters will point out that those responsible have or will be tried, and if convicted, punished.
The word "torture" has been so loosely thrown about that many Americans are now unable to distinguish the difference between panties on the head and electrodes on the genitals. Such has become the wailing of the far left that they have reduced true torture to its lowest possible level so that the impact of the word and the understanding of the practice has diminished so as to become virtually meaningless.
Even now we hear of attacks from terror forces almost two months after a successful election while a seemingly endless supply of so-called insurgents are arrested or killed and weapons caches are discovered.
But what is all of this if it turns out that the president's "catastrophe" has turned the decades-long Middle East paradigm arse-over-tincups and put into motion a tumbledown of democratic reforms not seen since the fall of the Berlin Wall? If in fact we are witnessing the flowering of the Arab Spring, it will mean that this president's actions will come to be seen as the impetus to the greatest unveiling of human freedom since the end of apartheid, and one with far greater reach.
Still, we will yet be met with arguments that no matter how well the whole things ends up, it was and still is a poor excuse to have gone to war. Those that hold this position will find some way of rationalizing; some will quietly retire to a neutral corner while others will insist that, like that of the ex-Soviet Union and its satellites, Middle East dictatorships had been teetering for years and the reforms we are seeing are just the results of despots coming to terms with the inevitable.
In an otherwise sensational and positive Washington Post article, Youssef M. Ibrahim states today that
Bush may feel inspired by the example of President Ronald Reagan, who told Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall" in Berlin, but the Middle East may more closely resemble 1989 Beijing than 1989 Berlin. While communism collapsed largely of its own weight in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union without U.S. intervention, pro-democracy demonstrators in China were squashed. What will U.S. policy in the Middle East look like if the autocrats, princes and religious fundamentalists make a stand against the voices of freedom?
Mr. Ibrahim repeats the canard that Ronald Reagan and the United States had absolutely nothing to with the defeat of communism. It is not worth the trouble to try to convince anyone otherwise at this late date. In fact, I am not so sure that Mr. Ibrahim really means what he says here, or that he feels obligated to write his disclaimer before going on to describe what he sees happening in the Middle East - and hears in the cafes of Dubai - as a "magical and perhaps lasting power."
If the reforms talked about and hoped for become a reality, Mr. Ibrahim, at least, will not be able to backtrack and claim that George Bush had nothing to do with it:
Not a single Arab ruler is a willing participant in democratic reform. Their regimes are festooned with opportunists attached to their financial and political privileges. And while the Arab media have changed, these regimes still possess the same coercive instruments that have proven effective means of control in the past.
There can be no serious argument that this great impulse of democratic ambition has come about purely organically. Yes, absolutely, the yearning to live free and dignified lives has been pounding in the Arab chest for decades, but if it comes to fruition, it will have been because a Christian infidel has performed the surgery necessary to allow it to grow. Arab and Muslim leaders in the Middle East are scrabbling to catch up to their people and risk being trampled by the multitudes whom they have oppressed and enslaved.
The West is culpable here, also. For too long post-colonial powers have conspired with a too-often cynical United States to support despots in the region out of a combination of the necessity to counterbalance Soviet influence and the desire to keep some type of control over what was seen as no more than teeming masses. The United States and its allies tended to hold the tacit view that democracy was either out of the grasp of the mainstream or else too upsetting a concept for such a vital area of the world. Even today, as we watch hundreds of thousands-- millions even-- march to demand representational government and against the continued honoring of suicide bombers we still have to pretend to take seriously the question of whether the Muslim Arab world is ready for or compatible with democracy.
It is probable that had bin Laden not decided that he had had enough of pussy-footing around with a bomb here and a bomb there in favor of a really big show of mass murder, we would not now have the United States make it its policy--and its practice-- to spread democracy where heretofore it had been unthinkable. Those who sneer at the notion that the US is not committed to its principles only witness the different tactics it employs in the service of such a policy: invasion in Afghanistan and Iraq; multi-lateral diplomacy with respect to North Korea; UN resolution and coalition building in Lebanon and Syria; support for free and open elections across the wide spectrum of formerly tyrannical regimes.
The lack of what passes for nuance in the first Bush go-round has blossomed into a veritable tool box of tactics and strategy. Yet, each tool is wielded by a president who has little patience for the niceties of dictatorial politics and refuses to shrink from what he sees as his fundamental purpose: ensuring US security through the dissemination of freedom and representational governance. Boy Assad must wonder if his gamble to get rid of Lebanon's most prominent reformer will come to be seen as his own bin laden-like blunder. Now matter how many Hizballah and Syrian guest workers rally in Martyr's square, people across the Middle East are listening more and more to the puppet in the Great Satan's Big House when he tells them that the United States stands beside them in their fight for freedom.
As Mr. Ibrahim writes, this new feeling of "Kifaya" or "enough" has become the widespread slogan of the people's revolt:
It's a word that is both emphatic and vague enough to be all-encompassing yet effective: enough of autocrats, enough corruption, enough occupation, enough repression.
Yes, "enough" is a very good word because not only does it signal intent to stop the rise of another generation of tyrants, but also puts the present group on notice that their time is just about up.
Mr. Ibrahim can be expected to and forgiven for worrying whether the present moment will turn out to be Berlin 1989 or Beijing 1989. After all, we have been told before that peace was at hand or that justice would be done. And we have seen Western countries make costly mistakes. But keep in mind that this so-called Second Iraq War is merely the continuation of the first. It has taken us perhaps too long to get around to finishing the job that we told ourselves we had set out to do. However, not to seize this grand moment as the reflowering of an ancient and great civilization would be to turn our backs on the cradle of our own civilization. One gets the impression that what we have is our one great, last chance to get it right.
The warm breeze that blows through many cafes in Middle East capitals can surely turn very quickly to the fires of hell. But nothing grows without warmth and a little fire can be a good thing indeed.
Mr. Bush's so-called catastrophe may in fact turn out to be the shock that brings forth good fruit.
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Comments
Indeed! Remember after Bush's inauguration speech, how the State Department backed off and tried to play-down what Bush was saying?
They have a history of doing that, because they are overconcerned with diplomacy and appeasement. They same thing happened with Reagan and his Berlim Wall speech. When the State Department was going over the speech beforehand, they totally revised it down and told him that it shouldn't be so, you know, forward.
Well, in the car on the way to where he was to speak, he showed his own rewriting of the speech to the man sitting next to him (the name escape me) and said something to the effect of, "The boys a
