Great essay from Saul Singer of the Jerusalem Post:
SAUL SINGER's Interesting Times: Happy conservatives, dour liberals
A new year is beginning, so it is natural, particularly during tougher times, to search for a brighter way of looking at it. It used to be that liberals were the natural source of the desired optimism, while conservatives were associate with dourness. If these associations still exist, it is because few have noticed that liberals and conservatives have switched places.
Nowhere is this more evident than in a remarkable and courageous essay by former foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami in this newspaper (today, page B3 jpost.com ). His statement is a tour de force perhaps the most coherent liberal critique of the war on terrorism to appear to date.
Ben-Ami is right on target when he scores the US for toadying to Arab despots, for abandoning democratic forces in Iraq after the Gulf War, and for being taken in by Arab leaders who use the war on terror to solidify their own regimes.
Even when I disagree with him, I must give Ben-Ami credit for intellectual courage.
Unlike American critics of the war, he does not hide behind the skirts of Republican natterers but comes out and says what he believes: "No force of any kind will solve the complex problems of Islam and Muslim societies... An American offensive against Iraq will unleash anti-American and anti-Israeli feelings on an apocalyptic scale."
My view is directly opposite: Saddam's upcoming forced retirement will engender in the Arab "street" the same silent awe that accompanied the fall of the Taliban. Further, the failure to oust Saddam now would be renewed proof of his invincibility, and could well produce the exact Arab uprising Ben-Ami fears.
Ben-Ami, it must be said, is not against ousting Saddam, but advocates doing so by concerted international pressure, including "encouraging and fostering" internal Iraqi opposition. Moreover, unlike his European colleagues who seem to wish the US would simply disappear, Ben-Ami wants the US to be the "pivot of a better world order," and calls its leadership "as indispensable today as it was during the three world wars World War I, World War II, and the Cold War when it saved the free world."
Again, those nods of agreement.
And yet Ben-Ami's blistering pessimism is striking. The US push for democracy is right "in principle," says Ben-Ami, but in practice the "only alternatives [in the Arab world] are secular dictatorships or Islamic democracy, i.e., a fundamentalist regime."
In particular, says Ben-Ami, the alternative to Yasser Arafat is Hamas, and to Hosni Mubarak Egyptian fundamentalism.
BEN-AMI is solidly in the liberal, European mainstream in scoffing at President George W. Bush's vision of democracy for the Middle East. But why is it that the camp that united under the banner of Shimon Peres's "New Middle East" just a short time ago has become the side that believes nothing can change; while "conservatives" whose god is supposedly stability now sound like starry-eyed revolutionaries?
The explanation may be that liberals based their optimism on the basic goodness of human nature on the one hand, and its perfectibility on the other. Evil, and therefore evil people (except perhaps smokers, corporations, and polluters), does not fully compute in the liberal world view.
As Ben-Ami puts it, "A world war cannot, and should not, be conducted against an invisible enemy whose frustration is quintessentially cultural and religious... this enemy must be confronted by improving the global economy, developing cooperation and nurturing the division of wealth by... a social-democratic globalization."
Given their felt need to all but rule out the use of force, it should not be surprising that liberals have become pessimists regarding their vision coming to fruition any time soon. Yet liberals should be cheered by the fact that "conservatives" have become cutting-edge change agents. The fresh champion of the New Middle East is George W. Bush.
And contrary to liberal (and "realist") doubts, Bush's force-backed vision is much more realistic than their talk-backed one.
Though much force may be used between now and then, the world will likely be considerably safer a year from now, and the prospects for peace, democracy, freedom, prosperity and even equality considerably greater.
So cheer up, Shlomo, "conservative" means and "liberal" ends can make for a great combination.
jpost.com |
