Ross Douthat, out on a limb

I have made rather a cottage industry out of ridiculing NYTimes columnist Ross Douthat, descending, to my shame, more than once to the level of referring to him as “Ross Dumb Fuck,” but, well, those times are past. In the past two weeks Ross has turned in columns that place him firmly, even shamelessly, in the category of “conservative dove,” something that you don’t often see in the “big media” these days.

In “Grand Illusion in Syria,” Ross explains politely but firmly just why President Obama’s excellent Syrian adventure is going to go precisely nowhere. “The Middle East’s Friendless Christians” picks up on an issue unknown to anyone but Beltway baseball buffs, Sen. Ted Cruz’s recent appearance before a conference on the plight of Middle Eastern Christianity. Relations between the various Christian communities in the Middle East and Israel range from amicable to, well, terrible, but Ted took the occasion to lecture the assembled Christians on their sacred duty to follow the AIPAC line wherever it took them, whereupon he was booed off the stage, and rightly so.

Ross points out that Cruz displayed precisely zero knowledge and zero sensitivity to the issues at hand, and infinite sensitivity to the fact that the road to the Republican presidential nomination runs through Sheldon Adelson’s¹ backyard:

“If Cruz felt that he couldn’t in good conscience address an audience of persecuted Arab Christians without including a florid, “no greater ally” preamble about Israel, he could have withdrawn from the event. The fact that he preferred to do it this way instead says a lot — none of it good — about his priorities and instincts.

“The fact that he was widely lauded [on the right] says a lot about why, if 2,000 years of Christian history in the Middle East ends in blood and ash and exile, the American right no less than the left and center will deserve a share of responsibility for that fate.”

Afterwords
Ross can perhaps be labeled a neo-paleo-con at this point, meaning that he is explicitly rather than implicitly rejecting the muscular Americanism peddled by the National Review. the Wall Street Journal, and the Weekly Standard, not to mention the mainstream Republican Party. Among the paleos both old and new, it is the fashion to accuse “the left” of outright hostility to the cause of Christianity in the Middle East. Perhaps there is, somewhere, a leftist of some stripe who has ridiculed those unfortunate people, but I’ve never seen the evidence. To the extent that the “left” de-emphasizes American support for an all-powerful Israel, it helps Middle Eastern Christians, because the current linkage between evangelical Christian America and Israel only increases Muslim hostility towards the Christians in the Middle East. The left’s indifference to religious issues is in this case salutary. The only danger comes from the anti-Zionist left, largely in Europe, who effectively support Muslim extremism as a way of getting back at the U.S. by attacking Israel.

Well, let’s take a break from all of that and point out something that I think Ross neglected regarding Syria—the extent to which the president’s decision to extend his anti-ISIS crusade to Syria is intended to cover his ass not with the general public but with the generals, who are busily telling everyone “I warned the president about this last year!” We’re in Syria not really because of ISIS but because a lot of people in the military-intelligence-foreign policy complex, which most definitely includes Hillary Clinton, want to be in Syria. Because we just have to be invading someone. Eventually, we’re going to run out of Middle Eastern countries to fuck up, but, well, we can worry about that when the time comes.