Three Pillars of Wisdom
Finding our footing where lunacy looms large.
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
February 3, 2006
Public relations between the so-called West and the Islamic Middle East have
reached a level of abject absurdity. Hamas, whose charter pledges the very
destruction of Israel, comes to power only through American-inspired
pressures to hold Western-style free elections on the West Bank. No one
expected the elders of a New England township, but they were nevertheless
somewhat amused that the result was right out of a Quentin Tarantino movie.
Almost immediately, Hamas's newly elected, self-proclaimed officials issued
a series of demands: Israel should change its flag; the Europeans and the
Americans must continue to give its terrorists hundreds of millions of
dollars in aid; there will be no retraction of its promises to destroy
Israel.
Apparently, the West and Israel are not only to give to Hamas some breathing
space ("a truce"), but also to subsidize it while it gets its second wind to
renew the struggle to annihilate the Jewish state.
All this lunacy is understood only in a larger surreal landscape. Tibet is
swallowed by China. Much of Greek Cyprus is gobbled up by Turkish forces.
Germany is 10% smaller today than in 1945. Yet only in the Middle East is
there even a term "occupied land," one that derived from the military defeat
of an aggressive power.
Over a half-million Jews were forcibly cleansed from Baghdad, Damascus,
Cairo, and other Arab cities after the 1967 war; but only on the West Bank
are there still refugees who lost their homes. Over a million people were
butchered in Rwanda; thousands die each month in Darfur. The world snoozes.
Yet less than 60 are killed in a running battle in Jenin, and suddenly the
1.5 million lost in Stalingrad and Leningrad are evoked as the moral objects
of comparison, as the globe is lectured about "Jeningrad."
Now the Islamic world is organizing boycotts of Denmark because one of its
newspapers chose to run a cartoon supposedly lampooning the prophet
Mohammed. We are supposed to forget that it is de rigueur in raucous
Scandinavian popular culture to attack Christianity with impunity. Much less
are we to remember that Hamas terrorists occupied and desecrated the Church
of the Nativity in Bethlehem in a globally televised charade.
Instead, Danish officials are threatened, boycotts organized, ambassadors
recalled - and, yes, Bill Clinton steps forward to offer another lip-biting
apology while garnering lecture fees in the oil-rich Gulf, in the manner of
his mea culpa last year to the Iranian mullacracy. There is now a pattern to
Clintonian apologies - they almost always occur overseas and on someone
else's subsidy.
Ever since that seminal death sentence handed down to Salman Rushdie by the
Iranian theocracy, the Western world has incrementally and insidiously
accepted these laws of asymmetry, perhaps due to what might legitimately be
called the lunacy principle, (" Those people are capable of doing anything
at any time") itself and quite another for others. It asks nothing of its
own people and everything of everyone else's, while expecting no serious
repercussions in the age of political correctness, in which affluent and
leisured Westerners are frantic to avoid any disruption in their rather
sheltered lives.
Then there is "President" Ahmadinejad of Iran, who, a mere 60 years after
the Holocaust, trumps Mein Kampf by not only promising, like Hitler, to wipe
out the Jews, but, unlike the ascendant Fuhrer, going about the business of
quite publicly obtaining the means to do it. And the rest of the Islamic
world, nursed on the daily "apes and pigs" slurs, can just scarcely conceal
its envy that the Persian Shiite outsider will bell the cat before they do.
The architects of September 11, by general consent, hide somewhere on the
Pakistani border. A recent American missile strike that killed a few them
was roundly condemned by the Pakistani government. Although a recipient of
billions of dollars in American aid and debt relief, and admittedly
harboring those responsible for 9/11, it castigates the U.S. for violating
borders in pursuit of our deadly enemies who, while on Pakistani soil, boast
of planning yet another mass murder of Americans.
Pakistan demands that America will cease such incursions - or else. The
"else" apparently entails the threat either to give even greater latitude to
terrorists or to allow them to return to Afghanistan to destroy the nascent
democracy in Kabul. American diplomats understandably would shudder at the
thought of threatening nuclear Pakistan should there be another 9/11, this
time organized by the very al Qaedists they now harbor.
The list of hypocrisies could be expanded. The locus classicus, of course,
is bin Laden's fanciful fatwas. Oil pumped for $5 a barrel and sold for $70
is called stealing resources. Tens of millions of Muslims emigrating to the
United States and Europe, while very few Westerners reside in the Middle
East, is deemed "occupying our lands." Israel, the biblical home of the
Jews, and subsequently claimed for centuries by Persians, Greeks,
Macedonians, Romans, Byzantines, Franks, Ottomans, and English is "occupied
by crusader infidels" - as if the entire world is to accept that world
history began only in the seventh century A.D.
The only mystery is not how bizarre the news will be from the Middle East,
but why the autocratic Middle Easterners feel so confident that any would
pay their lunacy such attention.
The answer? Oil and nukes - and sometimes the two in combination.
By any economic standard, most states in the Middle East - whether
characterized by monarchy, Baathism, dictatorship, or theocracy - have
floundered. There are no scientific discoveries emanating from a Cairo or
Damascus. It is tragic and new developments: the suicide-bomb belt and the
improvised explosive device.
Even here there is a twofold irony: the technology for both is imported from
the West. And the very tactic arises out of a desperate admission that to
fight a conventional battle against a Westernized military without the cover
of civilian shields, whether in Israel or Baghdad, is tantamount to suicide.
Meanwhile, millions of Africans face famine and try to inaugurate
democracies. Asia is in the midst of economic transformation. Latin America
is undergoing fundamental political upheaval. Who cares? - our attention is
glued instead on a few acres near Jericho, the mountains of the Hindu Kush,
the succession patterns of Gulf Royals, and the latest ranting of an Iranian
president who seems barely hinged, and who without petroleum and a reactor,
would be accorded the global derision once reserved for Idi Amin.
So take away the States, and the billions of petrodollars the world sends
yearly to medieval regimes like Iran or Saudi Arabia, and the other five
billion of us could, to be frank, fret little whether such self-madrassas,
Syrian assassination teams, or bought Western apologists wished to remain,
well, tribal.
The problem is not just a matter of the particular suppliers who happen to
sell to the United States - after all, we get lots of our imported oil from
Mexico, Canada, and Nigeria. Rather, we should worry about the insatiable
American demand that results in tight global supply for everyone, leading to
high prices and petro billions in the hands of otherwise-failed societies,
who use this largess for nefarious activities from buying nukes to buying
off deserved censure from the West, India, and China.
If the Middle East gets a pass on its terrorist behavior from the rest of
the world, ultimately that exemption can be traced back to the voracious
American appetite for imported oil and its effects on everything from global
petroleum prices to the appeasement of Islamic fascism.
Without nuclear acquisition, a Pakistan or Iran would warrant little worry.
It is no accident that top al Qaeda figures are either in Pakistan or Iran,
assured that their immunity is won by reason that both of their hosts have
vast oil reserves or nukes or both.
The lesson from all this is that in order to free the United States from
such blackmail and dependency, we must at least try to achieve energy
independence and drive down oil prices - and see that no Middle East
autocracy gains nuclear weapons. Those principles, along with support for
democratic reform, should be the three pillars of American foreign policy.
Encouraging democracy is still vital to offer a third choice other than
dictatorship or theocracy - especially when we now recognize the general
Middle East rule: the logical successor to a shah is a Khomeini; a Zarqawi
wishes to follow a fallen Saddam; a propped-up Arafat ensures Hamas; and a
subsidized Mubarak will lead to the Muslim Brotherhood. Puritanical zealotry
always feeds off autocratic corruption - as if lopping hands and heads is
the proper antidote to military courts and firing squads.
And we also know the political blame game at home: past realist failures at
propping up dictators are post facto reinvented as sobriety, while the messy
and belated democratic correction is derided as foolery. Even the election
of Hamas and the honesty it brings are welcome news: support the process,
not always the result, while stopping the subsidy and dialogue if such
terrorists come to power. Let them stew in their own juice, not ours.
In the meantime, until we arrive at liberal and consensual governments that
prove stable, there will be no real peace. And if an Iran, Saudi Arabia, or
Syria obtains nuclear weapons, there will be eventually war on an
unimaginable scale, predicated on the principle that the West will tolerate
almost any imaginable horror to ensure that one of its cities is not nuked
or made uninhabitable.
Yet if billions of petrodollars continue to pour into such traditional
societies, as a result they will never do the hard political and economic
work of building real societies. Instead their elites will obtain real
nuclear weapons to threaten neighbors for even more concessions, as they buy
support at home with the national prestige of an "Islamic bomb." Saddam
almost grasped that: had he delayed his invasion of Kuwait five years until
he resurrected his damaged nuclear program, Kuwait would now be an Iraqi
province and perhaps Saudi Arabia as well.
In the long-term, democratization in the framework of constitutional
government has the best chance of bringing relief. But for the foreseeable
future the United States and its allies must also ensure that Iran, and
states like it, are not nuclear, and that we wean ourselves off a petroleum
dependency - to save both ourselves, the addicts, and even our enemies, the
dealers of the Middle East.
C2006 Victor Davis Hanson
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