Some interesting Eye on the Media notes from Bret Stephens:
SPEAKING OF TASTE, veteran Washington Post writer Mary McGrory offers a revealing glimpse of how heavily her thinking on strategic questions is influenced by its acceptability in polite company.
In her column of February 6, "I'm Persuaded," McGrory writes that she had "resisted the push to war against Iraq because I thought George W. Bush was trying to pick a fight for all the wrong reasons - big oil, the far Right - against the wrong enemy. The people who were pushing hardest are not the people whose banner I could follow."
She continues: "Among the people I know, nobody was for the war. All of us were clinging tightly to the toga of Colin Powell.... We wished Powell would oppose the war, because it seemed like such a huge and misdirected overreaction to a bully who got on the nerves of our touchy Texas president."
Then too, "when the protest crowds came to Washington, full of scorn for the commander in chief and his Cabinet cohorts, they made an exception of Colin Powell."
So when Powell made his case against Iraq at the UN Security Council - well, what's a nice girl to think? Powell's voice, McGrory swoons, "was strong and unwavering." By the time he was done, "I had heard enough to know that Saddam Hussein, with his stockpiles of nerve gas and death-dealing chemicals, is more of a menace than I had thought."
Now McGrory, who won a Pulitzer prize for commentary in 1975, is a smart Beltway insider; The evidence Powell offered at the UN could not have come as a surprise to her, even if the sophistication with which it was gathered was impressive. What's amazing is the candor, or insouciance, with which she allows that the prime criterion in her thinking wasn't the objective merits of the case, but rather that it was Powell who made it. The idea of war with Iraq having thus been sanitized by her kind of guy, McGrory signs on.
Good thing she retains her fierce independence of mind.
McGRORY'S MENTION of the "protest crowd" brings me to something even more extraordinary: the appearance of Rabbi Michael Lerner's byline in the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal.
To say that the WSJ and Lerner, who edits Tikkun magazine, rarely find themselves on the same side of an argument would be to understate by several orders of magnitude. Yet politics makes strange bedfellows - and so does anti-Semitism. Lo, the good rabbi has discovered that the circles in which he has long traveled aren't exactly friendly to the Jews.
Lerner begins by boasting of his credentials as a man of the Left. "I have been an outspoken critic of the proposed war in Iraq," which, he says, "will fuel American fantasies of world economic and political domination." Yet that apparently was not enough for ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), an antiwar outfit that has forbidden Lerner and his cohorts from joining them in a San Francisco demonstration because they do not want pro-Israeli views represented on their stage.
That Lerner is considered "pro-Israel" by ANSWER says a lot about the antiwar movement generally. By Lerner's own account, he believes in "an end to the occupation, the creation of a Palestinian state and reparations for Palestinian refugees." But he also calls on Arab states to extend reparations to Jews who fled their countries, and for Israel's admission into NATO "to give the Jewish state genuine security."
And this, apparently, was too much for ANSWER.
In truth, it's no surprise that ANSWER has dealt this way with Lerner; it's a neo-Stalinist group (it supported, inter alia, the Chinese crackdown at Tiananmen Square in 1989) which Reuters quaintly describes as a "coalition of anti-war groups."
More significant, as Lerner points out, is that other anti-war groups acquiesced in his blackballing. "Fellow progressive Jews," he writes, "some anxious to speak at these rallies, have urged me to keep quiet about anti-Semitism on the Left. After all, they say, stopping the war against Iraq is so much more important."
I confess Lerner surprises me - in two ways. On the one hand, I'm grateful that this quintessential product of Berkeley has the honesty to expose the anti-Semitism that now exists primarily in the ranks of his fellow demonstrators. On the other, it's incredible that he would still seek to share a stage with them at all. If ANSWER were to change its mind, would Lerner still want to join in? Apparently so: "Tikkun will bring thousands of our supporters to the demonstration Sunday," he writes.
Then again, what's the choice? The antiwar movement is not only beyond shame, it's beyond parody. At antiwar rallies one sees placards reading "The Difference Between Bush and Saddam Is That Saddam Was Elected" and "I Want YOU To Die For Israel. Israel Sings Onward Christian Soldiers."
Who marches to these banners? Well, there's the Transsexual Vegan Lesbian Epidemiologist Punk For Peace. There is also - kids, stop reading here - a group called "Masturbate for Peace" (www.masturbateforpeace.com) which advocates "using self-love to end conflict." At first I thought this was some kind of bogus group - a nasty little trick concocted by The Federalist Society to discredit the antiwar movement - but apparently not. According to a report in The Independent, the group has collected almost 10,000 signatures on the Internet from 82 countries. Among their slogans: "Whack your sack, not Iraq."
Clever dicks.
LASTLY, and more seriously, there is The Economist. Its January 25-31 cover features a tight-lipped Ariel Sharon next to the portentous headline "After the election... After Iraq... Can Sharon make peace?"
As one reader points out, the headline itself betrays the bias. Why is it Sharon's task to make peace, and not that of the Arab leaders? Wouldn't a more appropriate cover feature portraits of Syria's Bashar Assad, Lebanon's Rafik Hariri and Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abudullah?
No less mysterious is why The Economist would even bother asking its question about Sharon in the first place. Its judgment of the man is plain: "Mr. Sharon," it writes in a report, "is a disaster because he does not accept the central land-for-peace equation."
As for Arafat, he is a disaster "because he has lost control and drifts with the tide of events."
In other words, Sharon is a hardline antagonist to the only viable solution to the conflict; Arafat, for his part, is a bit of a ditherer.
Still, the magazine holds out hope. The essence of the conflict, it writes, "is blazingly simple: two peoples fighting over a patch of land that would surely be shared." The negotiations at Camp David and Taba were not failures, it argues, but near-successes. What stands between war and peace is mainly a lack of trust on both sides, and the exaggerated influence of a few odd extremists. "Palestine contains Jews who still want all the land, and Arabs who still hope to wipe Israel from the map."
Would that it were so. The genius of Oslo is that it attempted to transform an existential conflict - and a zero-sum game - into a border conflict, which is always amenable to compromise. Against all evidence of the past two-plus years, The Economist still thinks it remains a border conflict. As for most Israelis, they've drawn different conclusions.
To its credit, The Economist's treatment of Israel has improved in recent months - gone are the caricatures of Sharon as Israel's "uglier face" prone to "calculated brutality," with cover stories on "Sharon's Israel, the World's Worry."
When in future they run the same headline, only substituting the name "Arafat" for "Sharon," I'll be ready to take this otherwise excellent magazine seriously.
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