Leverage

The Lebanese lesson is even more dire: American speech and action since Israel began retaliating for Hezbollah’s prisoner grab announces that democracy gains an Arab state exactly no leverage when Arab and Israeli interests collide.

Jim Henley, tellin' it.

Jim also points out that "People would, literally, rather be in Syria. It’s where everyone from Lebanon that can afford to leave is trying to get." And there ain't no beaches in Syria.

This morning, I walk into the office and grab the paper. Teaser on A-1 takes me to a quick squib on Pennsylvania's Own Rick Santorum, a man about to suffer the truly ignominious fate of losing an election to America's lamest political dynasty, the Pennsylvania Caseys, in which we find our First-Trimester Don Quixote joining the chorus now singing the Great Mass in World War III (or, as others noted, IV, or V, or, if you count the French-Indian-7-years-what-have-you, possibly even VI!).

With William Lind already writing columns entitled "The Summer of 1914," that is poor terminology indeed.

Historical memory has never exactly been the great strength of the American mind, in part, I suspect, because exceptionalism tends to wither before the realization that while there's surely some novelty in this world, nothing is unprecedented. (Except, of course, in Washington, where "unprecedented" is the adjective du jour tous les jours.) So, for instance, World War signifies to your basic lumpen Senator or New Republic editor only World War II, and only the good parts. In this version of the struggle, 20 million Russians did not expire in the snow; Americans alone saved European Jewry; Winston Churchill patrolled the skies on a balloon with a megaphone, making extraordinary speeches at each moment of need, like a Tolkeinian King reciting bloody accentual verse to his horsemen before battle. Against the armies of the West broke Naziism like a wave; the walls held; the wave was swallowed up by the wine-dark sea. It's all very poetic. And raising the specter of such war makes victory both totally necessary and also totally inevitable, a stake-raising without actually raising the stakes. It's the eschatology of the Zoroastrian cosmos: good and evil battle titanically, but don't worry, good is a-gonna win.

Of course, this "World War" promises ambiguous results and unintended consequences, more First World War than Second, more Thirty-Years War than that. What the militarists seek through this World War rhetoric is an image of a conflict whose ultimate outcome will be unambiguous: a victory for one side (ours! we hope!), a loss for the other. But there are never just two sides, and the results are never unambiguous. Even WWII ended with ambiguity: Germany divided; the USSR victorious, and soon, nuclear; European colonial empires smashed, with more wars in their wake for the next sixty years, continuing to this day. The result of WWII was not only victory over Naziism, but also the Cold War; also Korea; also Vietnam. It was, in truth, no less ambiguous than the end of the First World War. Nor yet was the end of the other WWIII, né The Cold War, so unambiguous a victory for Freedom and Light. As it turns out, our proxy armies have largely turned back on us. Afghanistan and Iraq were both bulwarks against Communism. Now look at them. The stability bribes paid to our oil-rich autocracies meanwhile were turned back on us, radicalism focused on the decadent west to prevent domestic disturbances.

So while it may strike the War Party as wise to erect a single tent over their various conflicts and then call Victory a civilizational imperative, it is not. What warmongers never learn is that victory is not a state, but a moment. Afterward: Consequences. All of them at least in detail unforseen.

The Expiration Date of the State

Gregory Djerejian at The Belgravia Dispatch weighs in again. The piece is very worth reading, not the least for its Menckenian dishing on the rapturous, neocon, thin-chested, wannabe-Alexanders sucking the Washington teat these days. But I want to add my two cents to Djerejian's dismay at the state of policy, or the lack of a state of policy, these days.

It's now common to lament the Bush administration's "lack of a foreign policy." That phrase isn't usually meant to suggest that the dauphin, his interlocutors, and his armies aren't mucking about in the world, but rather that they're doing so reactively, randomly, without direction, without a plan. At the same time, as Djerejian points out, even journals like the Financial Times are now writing openly of a "radical wing" in Washington. I'm not certain radical is the proper term, but certainly it's clear that there are many in and out of the government participating in an ongoing, albeit unsuccessful, restructuring of the United States government as principally a warmaking machine. Which brings us full-circle to the "lack of a foreign policy." The policy, it seems, is an after-action addition to the current governing premise, which is that the war machine is antibiotic in nature. And as we all know, Americans love their antibiotics, take them for whatever ails them, demand them even from reluctant doctors who try to explain that no, your cold is caused by a virus, and antibiotics won't work. Well, we've always enjoyed cure-alls in this country; the snake-oil salesman should probably replace the snake on the "Don't Tread on Me Banner."

The common error of premise in Washington, among so-called Liberals as much as among so-called Conservatives, grows from Washington's character as, in Djerejian's words, "a small, somewhat provincial one-industry town." If you know any Washingtonians, particularly the adoptive governing class, from the tit-sucking Ezra Kleinian, Matthew Yglesian puppies to the geriatric David Gergens to the whole of the Washington Press Corps, the branches of government, the lawyers, the think-tankers, ad inf., then you know they consider Washington to be not only the center of the country, but the center of the universe. They consider culture as essentially reflective of government. And from this error proceed the fallacies and follies of virtually all our policies: that by supporting governments, or toppling governments, or talking to governments, or reforming governments, we might affect change, presumably positive, in this world. In Afghanistan, we would do so by toppling the Taliban "régime" and installing a "democratic goverment." Likewise in Iraq. In the Israeli war on Lebanon likewise, some government or other must always "crack down" on some quasi-government or other.

I read somewhere the other day, "Where is the shuttle diplomacy?" A lament . . . to what end? Shuttle between whom? If you look at Lebanon and Israel's impotence (albeit the most deadly of impotencies, the most callous, the most cruel), you see the folly of such talk. There is no government. There is no state actor.

What you see in the world today is the State attempting to reassert its monopoly on all force. What you see in the world today is the State's utter failure, compounding daily.

It will be a strange and dangerous new world, but not necessarily a worse one.

Rhetorical Questions with Real Answers

“Is this the price we pay for aspiring to build our democratic institutions?” he asked in a bitter and emotional speech. “Can the international community stand by while such callous retribution by the state of Israel is inflicted on us?”

Yes. Yes.

Tip the brim to Jim, who invented the form.

Fear

Via Billmon, whose many takes have been invaluable, I see that William Lind has a new column appropriately entitled "The Summer of 1914." His conclusion:

If Israel does attack Iran, the “summer of 1914” analogy may play itself out, catastrophically for the United States. As I have warned many times, war with Iran (Iran has publicly stated it would regard an Israeli attack as an attack by the U.S. also) could easily cost America the army it now has deployed in Iraq. It would almost certainly send shock waves through an already fragile world economy, potentially bringing that house of cards down. A Bush administration that has sneered at “stability” could find out just how high the price of instability can be.

It is clear what Washington needs to do to try to prevent such an outcome: publicly distance the U.S. from Israel while privately informing Mr. Olmert that it will not tolerate an Israeli strike on Iran. Unfortunately, Israel is to America what Serbia was to Russia in 1914. That may be the most disturbing aspect of the “summer of 1914” analogy.

Billmon, in the first above-linked post, takes issue only with Lind's closing comparison, and I tend to agree:

Lind closes with an historical analogy of his own, arguing that "Israel is to America what Serbia was to Russia in 1914." But here I think Lind's Germanophilia is showing. Under the circumstances, it seems more accurate to say that Israel is to America what Austro-Hungary was to the Second Reich -- a reckless ally bent on vanquishing a weak but troublesome neighbor, whom Kaiser Wilhelm foolishly allowed to start a chain reaction that no one, him least of all, could control.

But in a sense that's quibbling around the edges, and playing into the game that militarist agitators employ upon hearing any given colonial war compared to any other: "But, but! Vietnam was in a jungle! Iraq is in the desert, see. And also, the Viets weren't Muslims, see." In other words, arguing over which actor fits which role misses that broader point that both operas are playing in the same theater, following the same doomed, if occasionally comic, plot.

To any rational observer, Israel's actions seem insane. I hate to use the clinically euphemistic term "disproportionate," as its principle use is to obscure Israel's murder of hundreds of Lebanese civilians and its displacement of more than half a million in under two weeks, but I will anyway, not only because the death toll of ariel bombardment by Israel's American military so far exceeds any damage inflicted on Israel, but also because the logic of the Israeli response is entirely disconnected from any hope of stability, let alone real peace. It's as if instead of taking their penalty kicks and winning the World Cup, the Italian soccer team had rushed onto the field and torn Zidedine Zidane limb from limb. Literally. Adults understand proportion; a sense of proportion is the fundamental difference between an adult and a child. A person who throws tantrums or employs sudden and sundry violence to solve disputes isn't an adult. A nation that throws tantrums and employs such violence (on a greater and more terrible scale) is a very dangerous child.

But Israel's behavior can't be fully accounted by broad analysis of the national psyche (if such a thing exists). The State of Israel--its politico-military rulers--are responding to a serious anxiety, which has very little immediately to do with Hezbollah or Lebanon and has everything to do with the United States. Recently, in a post on a separate matter, I made passing reference to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as "two failed colonial rear-guard maneuvers against the waning of our 'influence' in parts of the world notable for their geostrategic importance, which is to say, their proximity to oil and gas resource infrastructure." The fact of American weakness (contra the "national will" conservatives, such weakness isn't merely perception; it is fact) is noted by allies and enemies alike.

Israel is the most powerful nation in the Middle East. Talk of existential danger is a lie in the service of many brutal policies. Yet Israel is a paraiah nation, and it exists securely only through the grace and under the aegis of the United States, whose internal domestic politics and tendencies toward Biblical-millennarian ninnyism uniquly align with the right--no, the necessity of a greater Israel. That is to say that it is American dollars and American hardware alone that give Israel the warmaking edge. How then can Israel rest easy? Looking back on Roma Mater can't be very comforting these days. The Barbarians aren't yet at the gates, of course, despite the more hysterical reactions to "the events of September 11," but they're nipping around the far borders. America moved into more restive areas and promptly . . . stopped. The limits of our military capacity are brutally evident in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Israel's own Mini-Me military, fighting the same State-on-State conflicts with the same dead ideas, sees a blown-up image of itself muddling around the desert, neither winning nor losing, but creating new enemies all around, and smashing all it touches. So the Israelis apply more force, hopelessly. For you good Liberals in this country who argue that what we really need in Iraq is more troops, the failure of overwhelming force as applied by Israel should be a pretty good goddamned lesson.

Military capabilities aside, Israel must see a damned decadent protector, bathing in a petroeconomy even as the primary driver of that economy slips from grasp. It's got to be discomforting in the extreme to see your protector wallowing in spendthrift debt, mortgaging itself again and again in order to finance increasingly unsuccessful expeditions to the well.

Bref, Israel looks back across the Atlantic and sees America as a ponderous, stupid, religiously incoherent, vastly indebted, ossified, fractious nation headed by a marionette-moron whose pupeteers haven't learned anything since 1961, when, as any Frenchman could've already told 'em, everything they knew was already wrong. Israel sees this, and that colors its every interaction with its neighbors and unwillingly-occupied occupants. It strikes out because it fears that it must destroy its enemies now, and utterly, or else lose the chance forever. It acts brutally to insure a fear-and-blood-induced buffer. These measures are sure to fail; they're sure to produce precisely the opposite of the desired ends. Israel has climbed the gallows in order to get a better shot.

At the bottom of it all, of course, it's wrong. A half a million displaced in Lebanon! Tikkun olam indeed.

Hillary C.

If you previously doubted that Hillary Clinton intended to run for the presidency, you may now put those doubts to rest. In the comedia dell'arte of presidential politics, she has now made one of the more important prescribed gestures: "solidarity and support" for Israel. Hillary whips her audience into the sort of frenzy that Jews my age reserve for a Matisyahu concert, and she extends a suppositional metaphor to its improbable conclusion by suggesting that Israel's situation is no different than a hypothetical series of rocket attacks on Rochester and Lake Placid from the radical elements of al-Canada. "We would defend ourselves!" she booms. Personally, I'm unfamiliar with a Salafist element within the desicated remains of the Vive Québec libre! crowd, but let us, in the spirit of Democracy, take it "seriously." Certainly the various rightwing terror- cowards of these United States have raised the specter of al-Qaeda infiltration into Canada. Presume that is true. Presume that some "cell" of disaffected, unassimilated muslims lobbed rockets at the gentlefolks of Albany, or wherever. Would the United States "respond"? Yes, presumably. Would we bomb Toronto for a week?

Unlikely.