Lately I have been impressed with the quantity of columns getting published in bigtime newspapers that have all the appearance of homework assignments. They just seem like the authors were tasked with writing an essay on some subject, and without anything particularly insightful to say, they went through the motions of fulfilling their responsibility. Paul Berman’s essay today on radical Islamism is a case in point. He tells us that before the invasion of Iraq, he was tireless in warning that war would solve no more than 10% of the problem posed by radical Islam. I wonder why he didn’t expend his time telling us that war would do less than nothing to solve the problem and would in fact make the problem immeasurably worse.
He gives us a truncated and uninsightful recent history of American foreign policy in the region.
Extremist movements have been growing bigger and wilder for more than three decades now, during that period, America has tried pretty much everything from a policy point of view. Our presidents have been satanic (Richard Nixon), angelic (Jimmy Carter), a sleepy idiot savant (Ronald Reagan), a cagey realist (George H. W. Bush), wonderfully charming (Bill Clinton) and famously otherwise (George W. Bush). And each president’s Middle Eastern policy has conformed to his character.
In regard to Saddam Hussein alone, our government has lent him support (Mr. Reagan), conducted a limited war against him (the first President Bush), inflicted sanctions and bombings (Mr. Clinton, in other than his charming mode), and crudely overthrown him. Every one of those policies has left the Iraqi people worse off than before, even if nowadays, from beneath the rubble, the devastated survivors can at least ruminate about a better future — though I doubt that many of them are in any mood to do so.
If Berman thinks what he has just described is ‘pretty much everything from a policy point of view’ then he’s a willful idiot. The last thirty years have seen America pursue a policy of tacit support for Iraq’s ill-fated invasion of Iran in 1980, Israel’s ill-fated invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and Saddam Hussein’s ill-fated invasion of Kuwait in 1990. It has seen America do nothing more than voice dissatisfaction as Ariel Sharon launched a policy of settling the occupied territories of Palestine, and those territories filled up with Jewish zealots intent on staying at all costs. It has seen America trumpet democracy and human rights in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Far East, while doing nothing about democracy in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. It has seen the United States get bogged down in a containment policy of Iraq, and then seen America invade Iraq under false pretenses and occupy the country for five years.
These are all political acts committed by America that are opposed by the majority of Arabs and the majority of Muslims. A sophisticated analysis of radical Islam would look at the fertile ground of grievance that they have to recruit their adherents. But Berman can do no better than this:
I notice a little gloomily that I may have underestimated the extremist ideologies in still another respect. Five years ago, anyone who took an interest in Middle Eastern affairs would easily have recalled that, over the course of a century, the intellectuals of the region have gone through any number of phases — liberal, Marxist, secularist, pious, traditionalist, nationalist, anti-imperialist and so forth, just like intellectuals everywhere else in the world.
No attempt is made to explain why each of these phases started or why each ended in failure. Some of the early liberal tendencies were crushed by authoritarian regimes and economic and political stagnation. The nationalist phase ended in the twin losses of the 1967 and 1973 wars. The Marxist phase ended with the fall of the Soviet Union. The secularist phase died with the failure of the Oslo Accords and the corruption of the Yassar Arafat’s Fatah Party. The current phase is mixed into the pious (Hamas, al-Qaeda, Hizbollah, the government of Iraq), the traditionalist (prominent in Turkey and Egypt), and the anti-imperialist (widespread, but the main political goal of al-Qaeda).
None of these phases have much potential to solve the most pressing issues facing the Middle East. The Middle East has three broken states: Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine. In all three cases there is a divide that piousness and traditionalism are more likely to exacerbate than resolve. And anti-imperialism is more of a pipe dream than a potential resolution. No one has the power or the will to fix the problems of Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine. Berman’s analysis seems almost childish in this context.
In today’s Middle East, the various radical Islamists, basking in their success, paint their liberal rivals and opponents as traitors to Muslim civilization, stooges of crusader or Zionist aggression. And, weirdly enough, all too many intellectuals in the Western countries have lately assented to those preposterous accusations, in a sanitized version suitable for Western consumption.
Once again, liberal ideas cannot put broken countries back together again. That’s not a prejudice against liberal ideas…Marxist ideas cannot put broken countries back together, either. But Berman acts as though we have a problem with radical Islam because western intellectuals are not harsh enough in their condemnation of traditional Arab culture and politics.
But instead of enjoying the unstinting support of their non-Muslim colleagues, the Muslim liberals find themselves routinely berated in the highbrow magazines and the universities as deracinated nonentities, alienated from the Muslim world. Or they find themselves pilloried as stooges of the neoconservative conspiracy — quite as if any writer from a Muslim background who fails to adhere to at least a few anti-imperialist or anti-Zionist tenets of the Islamist doctrine must be incapable of thinking his or her own thoughts.
I hear conservatives make this argument all the time, but how have the elections (the grand liberal experiment) of Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq turned out? They were a disaster in each country. Their effect was actually destabilizing (in Palestine it actually resulted in two mutually antagonistic governments).
So, what is Berman saying? What does his column in the New York Times really amount to? It doesn’t tell us why we have radical Islamists, it doesn’t tell us how to diminish their influence, it doesn’t provide any introspection about our own responsibility for this situation. All it does is lay some kind of vague blame on western intellectuals for being insufficiently supportive of the types of Muslim liberals that encouraged the neo-conservative fantasy that elections can solve problems in the ethno-religiously insane nation-states of the Middle East.
But this kind of crap of this low quality gets published with increasing frequency in the pages of our papers of record.
