If you think the news from the Middle East couldn’t get any worse, well, wait ten minutes. This once inconceivable sequence of horrifying events seems destined to rumble on until, well, until it stops. I am generally a fan of finger pointing, but this constant barrage of disasters is, naturally, spawning an orgy of outrage that, for the most part, can and should be ignored. But not entirely.
First up, of course, is Hamas, for its unspeakably cruel and sadistic treatment of helpless civilians, both Israeli and Palestinians, whom they use as victims, pawns, and human shields. The notion that the behavior of these terrorists is in any way “justified” is almost as obscene as they are.
Next, Benjamin Netanyahu needs to be held accountable for coming close to destroying the country he allegedly loves. His compulsive pursuit of power, regardless of any obstacles, including his own criminal behavior, has left his country torn in half politically and alienated American support. Most grievously and most immediately of all, he is directly responsible for the staggering military and intelligence failure that exposed Israeli citizens to such a vicious and unprincipled assault.
Thirdly, anyone who believes that “decolonialization” is something that should be striven for is nothing more than an anti-Semite with an affection for banal, neo-Marxist jargon. The abysmal behavior of the “woke” left on campus will, I hope, significantly damage their credibility—though that’s putting an awful lot of weight on the word “hope”, for how often do I get the things I hope for these days.
Lastly, but without contempt, I want to point a finger at someone whom I take seriously, and often agree with in full (though often not as well), Paul Krugman, whose recent column, The Strange Decline of the Pax Americana, I found seriously disappointing, and, unfortunately, far too “typical” of what I’m reading from other often though not always reliable sources as well, like Noah Rothman, who seems to have pivoted from Krugmanesque liberal to Kristolesque neocon in the twinkling of an eye. Proclaims Krugman (who was the one I was talking about)
[E]ven serious students of international affairs are noting that the world seems to be becoming more dangerous, with many local cold wars turning hot, and suggesting that we may be witnessing the end of the Pax Americana, the long era in which U.S. economic and military dominance limited the potential for wars of conquest.
Well, the “wars for conquest” caveat is a bit of a cheat, because the s0-called “Pax Americana” did see the U.S. engage in the Korean War, the Vietnam War (both more or less defensive, the first appropriate the second not), the very bloody Iraq-Iran War, which we participated in vicariously on Iraq’s side, and then the long series of U.S. initiated wars following the collapse of the Soviet Union, including the Afghan War, the longest war in U.S. history. Thanks to our massive economic and technological superiority, we were able to rain death and destruction on hapless populations for decades with “politically acceptable” losses of American lives. But I guess those don’t count. In fact, there were many bloody wars, in “unimportant” areas of the world, like Africa, that somehow get omitted from the register. And one could also point out that during the Cold War, “peace” in eastern Europe was maintained by Soviet power, not the “Pax Americana”.
Paul unfortunately links to an offensive column by Bloomberg columnist Hal Brands, Hamas Consigns the Pax Americana to History Books, filled with neo-Bloombergian huffing and puffing about the necessity of Uncle Sam doing whatever Bibi Netanyahu tells him to, which, naturally, I don’t appreciate.
Paul’s own answer, which I find a more than a little lame, is that it’s all the Republicans’ fault. They’re doing their best to wreck the American economy, something I totally agree with, and that’s why no one is afraid of us any more, something I totally don’t. I don’t think the world is, seemingly, going to Hell in a handbasket because no one is afraid of us any more. I think the world is, seemingly, going to Hell in a handbasket because we lost the capacity for self restraint.
The big issues that everyone cares about right now are Ukraine and Israel. I have frequently and explicitly declared my conviction that it was U.S. forwardness in eastern Europe—our determination to bring the Enlightenment to Moscow, so to speak—that lit the long fuse that led to Vladimir Putin’s corrupt and ruthless invasion of Ukraine, an invasion for which he is fortunately paying a high price, though for which Ukraine is tragically paying a far higher one.
This hubris, of course, was the product of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and after the U.S.S.R. went belly up, the U.S. approached closer to “absolute power” than any nation in history. We were led into eastern Europe by the best and the brightest—idealistic scholars like Anne Applebaum, whose idealism led them to make absurd compromises with the truth in order to enable their own wish fulfillment, regardless of the actual human cost, insisting, for example, that a pointless bloodbath like Afghanistan was both noble and doable. We can’t be wrong, because we’re good!
Our involvement with Israel, of course, goes back much further, thanks the political power of the Israeli lobby, exemplified by the American Israel Political Affairs Committee, a relationship that has corrupted both countries substantially. Andrew Sullivan, who can be very smart when he isn’t giving a good impression of a gay Catholic Blimp,1 gives a good overview of a tragic situation.
As far back as the Clinton era, I came to the skeptical conclusion that “peace” in the Middle East was impossible because neither side desired it. Both sides believed that time was on their side. Once the Bush people came in, of course, the whole notion of “compromise” went out the window. Who needs that kind of limp-wristed sissy shit? Real men kill for a living!
Well, Bush went out in 2009 but Benjamin Netanyahu came in, as prime minister of Israel, after previously serving from 1996 to 1999, following the assassination of Yitzak Rabin, and immediately set out to make Bush look like a sissy. Netanyahu loathed Obama, of course, and was a long-time supporter of the “classic” neocon meme that Barack “retreated” from the Middle East, a lie for which I have a particular dislike, because it is so common and so earnestly believed in by almost everyone on the “Right”, even those who detest Donald Trump.
Obama did not “withdraw” from Iraq. Instead, he complied, as he had to, with the U.S. Iraq Status of Forces Agreement signed by President George Bush in 2008 requiring the removal of U.S. forces by 2011. We didn’t leave Iraq because we wanted to. We left because the Iraqis wanted us to. We were, in fact, kicked out, because they couldn’t stand us any more.
I certainly can’t say if President Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran had been allowed to stand that “none of this would have happened”. I can’t say that President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, despite the fact that, for most of its existence, Jerusalem has been an Islamic city,2 something that about 0.01% of the American people are cognizant of, was the “cause” of the invasion. I can’t say that the Biden administration’s aggressive push to achieve a “peace treaty” between Saudi Arabia and Israel caused the invasion. What I do know is that, for decades, Israeli policy has been to treat the Palestinian people with ruthless contempt, with no “end game” other than to make them so miserable that they would “self execute”. Peter Beinart, a Jew who dares to be sensible about all this, and who knows infinitely more about both the Middle East and Judaism than I do, has an excellent interview up on Slate that is well worth reading, as is his substack site The Beinart Notebook. Yuval Noah Harari, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has a column in the Washington Post today offering an analysis far more informed, but similar in its conclusions, to my own. Want more painfully honest reading? Try Lawrence Freedman’s Israel’s Strategic Crisis and Fred Kaplan’s What Is Israel’s Strategy Now?.
These are not happy times.
1. “Colonel Blimp” is the apocryphal apotheosis of British arrogance, ignorance, and insularity regarding the “lesser breeds without the law,” in Kipling’s fortunately no longer so well known cliché. Sullivan is on record, repeatedly, as believing that black Africans are, on average, less intelligent than other humans, for genetic reasons, and, as an immigrant here himself on these shores, tends to be impatient with his fellows if they didn’t go to Oxford.
2. All of the actual “holy” sites in Jerusalem are Islamic. As many Jews, but few non-Jews, know, the Romans destroyed all of “Jewish” Jerusalem in 70 CE, with the exception of three towers, which they left standing as a monument to their wrath, the event a result of the second Jewish revolt. The Romans won a complete victory and murdered or expelled all the Jews who lived in Jerusalem, building a “new”, Roman Jerusalem in its stead. Jerusalem switched from paganism to Christianity after the emperor Constantine made Christianity the “preferred” religion throughout the empire after 316, before the Moslems took over in 636. The Crusaders conquered the city in 1099, but then the Moslems took over again a few centuries later, holding it until Great Britain conquered (more or less) the Ottoman Empire during the course of the First World War.
