I figured with you being in the wilds of the Philippines, I might not hear from you. (How is the "Roast Monkey" holding out? :^))
Been up in the monkey zone most of the last two weeks, paddling little boats and generally having fun. Didn’t eat any monkey, though we had a bit of fairly chewy venison. You don’t roast monkeys in any event, they’re way too skinny to roast well. Pretty tough meat; edible after prolonged stewing, but I don’t think it will ever make it to a gourmet menu anywhere.
I do hope that Iraq turns out like McArthur's Japan rather than Johnson's "Great Society."
MacArthur didn’t make postwar Japan; the Japanese did. That country is a government’s dream: homogeneous, disciplined, hardworking, reflexively accepting authority. All they needed to “win the peace” was an authority system that pointed in that direction. The notion that MacArthur was some kind of genius because the Japanese reconstructed fast and efficiently is ridiculous: all the elements were in place when he arrived. Let's not delude ourselves into thinking that the same circumstances prevail in Iraq, or for that matter in downtown Detroit.
Gee, Steve, other than that, do you think we are OK? :^)
If we insist on a course that will end with a US proxy governing Iraq, then no, I don’t think we are OK. Too many people are assuming that such a government will be an asset to us in dealing with the rest of the region, an assumption that in my view is without basis and dangerously naïve. I expect that a proxy government will in the long term prove to be an enormous liability, for reasons I’ve explained elsewhere – without response, I might add.
The real breeding grounds for terror, the places that are producing, supporting, and sheltering terrorists, have nothing to do with Iraq or Saddam. They are in Saudi Arabia, in Afghanistan/Pakistan (the border is largely a western construct and only marginally relevant in local terms), in a large and miserable chunk of East Africa, in Palestine. Will a puppet government and a US presence in Iraq improve our position opposed to these problems? A very doubtful proposition.
The situation in Palestine is a different kind of Terrorist. It is really a "Hatfield/McCoy" situation
I don’t know much about the Hatfields and the McCoys, but I do know that the roots of the Palestine situation are both simpler and more complex than they are often supposed to be. They do involve a certain amount of history, always an unpopular discipline, and they involve shedding certain long-prevalent assumptions.
If you want the root of the Palestine situation, you can find it in one word: Judenstadt. That was the original driving goal behind Zionism, the Jewish State, the State that would be, as Chaim Weizman put it, as Jewish as England is English. The Zionists also, of course, issued loud and frequent proclamations that they desired a state of peaceful co-existence with the local population, but that nominal goal was from the start utterly incompatible with the primary goal of a Jewish State. It was clear from the beginning, to any who desired to see it, that peaceful co-existence with a pre-existing non-Jewish local population could never be achieved within the context of a Jewish State. That goal could not be achieved unless the local population were subjugated or removed, and that could not be achieved without violence. Violence, therefore, was implicit in Zionism from the very beginning.
So we have the essential question: does a population of recent immigrants have the right to declare themselves an independent state on terms unacceptable to the local population?
This is not as simple an issue as it may superficially seem. Zionism was incubated in the heyday of colonialism, and in those days the answer to that question was an unambiguous “yes”, as long as the immigrant population was European in origin and the native population was not. When the 13 American colonies declared independence, for example, the desires of the indigenous community were not regarded as a matter of any significance.
The problem in Palestine was that while the Zionist dream grew out of the colonial heyday, the dream came to fruition in a world that had totally and irrevocably changed. In this new world the answer to that same question was an equally unambiguous “no”: statehood cannot in today’s world be declared on those terms, at least not without incurring the eternal opposition of the local population and any supporters they may have in the vicinity.
The tale of who has done what to whom since that time is a long one, and none of the actors come out of it smelling very good. At root, though, there is a very real act of aggression that has gone unredressed. It is of course true that similar acts of aggression were common practice at one time, but that is hardly relevant. It is also true that many acts of aggression throughout the world have gone unredressed and eventually been forgotten, but that’s a moot point if ever there was one: in this case, nobody has forgotten and nobody’s likely to forget.
Would peaceful co-existence have been possible if the Zionists had abandoned the goal of the Jewish State and settled for a secular state? Maybe, maybe not. We don’t know and never will; it was never really an issue anyway, since that goal was not likely to be abandoned.
I don’t think there is any solution that is sure to work. Ultimately, though, I think there are only two options with a chance of providing lasting peace. The first would be ethnic cleansing: drive all non-Jews out of Israel and close the borders. This might achieve temporary peace, but it would hardly be likely to last, and it would incur serious resistance in countries around the world, including the US, upon whose good will Israel depends for its survival. The second option would be a real Palestinian State, not the discontinuous pseudo-state envisioned at Oslo, with its eerie and unfortunate overtones of the South African “homelands”, but a contiguous state with natural endowments equal to those given to the counterpart Jewish State. This would in no way guarantee peace, and it would not be an easy solution. It’s absence, though, effectively guarantees a permanent state of war.
The combination of hindsight and history inevitably produces irony, and the ironies here are abundant. It is hard not to note that the insistence, so logical at the time, that Jews could be secure only in a Jewish State has produced a State in which nobody is ever secure. It is equally hard to overlook the fact that the Jews who elected to remain in Western Europe are far more secure than their brethren who opted for the promised security of the Jewish State. |
