baghdadskies2
Thursday, December 15, 2005
It is always good to revisit ideas of facts if they help to clarify things:
The 2003 Atlantic Monthly
The Dark Art of Interrogation
The most effective way to gather intelligence and thwart terrorism can also be a direct route into morally repugnant terrain. A survey of the landscape of persuasion by Mark Bowden falls into this category as the meja turn incessantly to the business of extraordinary rendition. We cannot help thinking also of the words proxy and war, turning back to the days of South and Central America in the 70s and 8s, when even the death of innocent nuns stirred few politicians enthusiam as the the business of ensuring no Left-leaning governments took power and therefore control of business with the States. The attitude of some in the States to Chavez is another way to relive the ruthless way America dealt what it perceived to be threats to its economic activity in those days.
The big question is: Has America's intense preoccupation with its economic supremacy led it away from its supposed role as a beacon of freedom and democracy. Though everyone knows America did not join in the war against Nazism solely because it wanted people to be free: it also felt it might have its means of earning a living threatened too.
Have various people around the world a justification to hate and disrupt Amrica's way of life? Certainly its massive porn industry, its violent films, its junk food are nothing to be proud of exporting to the rest of the world. It would be an insane person who proudly showed you one simple fine object in a corner of his living room and asked you to judge his charecter, temperatment and values on that rather than on the it and the sum total other items of inexcrable taste with which he furnished his room.
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There can be a tendancy to revert to the old sides in these issues. This is not always a good idea. It is much better to be carefully reasonable is assessing what is going on and why. If we take the way the U.S. has responded to the threat from international terrorism in recent years we might fall into simply discussing its methods. This would be a grave mistake if we wanted to completely grasp what makes Americans tick.
Using the threat from its south in the 70s and 80s as an example, we can now look at the draconian way it set about dealing with what it perceived to be its enemies from a more balenced viewpoint. Begin by asking what they might have asked. What sort of a threat is this to us? Logic will have dictated two choices: a slow and measured response or a hard-hitting one. The various pressure groups withing the U.S. will have bombarded the government with requests to deal with it quickly because of the various companies fears for their profits. A natural reaction.
A government presented with such demands might see it to be more sensible to hit first and ask questions later rather than patiently build up an answer to the question : What sort of threat is this? Is this a big threat or a little threat? The American government had as its example the Russian involvement in Cuba (malign) and the knowledge that Left ideas were being spread into greater South and Centrall America (Ché killed while on a doomed expedition) and into Africa if we remember how many Cubans were sent to fight the various proxy wars going on in Africa a tthe time.
it was simpler to destroy the Left in South and Central America in case they were a threat to Americans interests than wait to see exactly what sort of threat it was. The price of this was long standing anti-Americanism. But it must have been considered and deemed a price worth paying. The very reactive anti-Americanism which is so commonplace in today's world has its roots in th way the U.S. has operated to protect its interests (ruthlessly) since the second world war. This is not to say that Britain, France, Netherland, Belgium, when top-dogs, didn't behave as ruthlessly against people and countries it though threats to their empires, big or little.
In the current debacles ranging from terrorism through Afghanistan to Iraq and the rumblings in Iran and Syria, the same swift method has been employed: round up possible enemies , treat 'em mean, find out the degree of threat. The fact that many people are being secreted around the world to be interrogated and tortured is not a sign of America's strength but its weakness: it is a demonstration of how much it fears what degreee of threat is out there.
A less fraught attitude might be to say that it is unlikely that international terrorism, however effective, is going to completely disrupt America and other western countries trying to go about their everyday activities. Leaders frequently make speeches saying they believe this. But their real beliefs are exposed by their acts not their words. They do not know what this hatred and violence is going to amount to. So they chose to act very harshly just in case it is a very serious threat.
The Israelis have always used the same logic. It has proved successful, but piled up further hatred of them. This ought to have told the Americans a more slow and measured approach to the threats to it might have been more effective in the long term. But they have been unable to repress the fear and anxiety of waiting and watching. They chose to hit out hard and it will in the end create more problems than the original threat. Of course all countries who feel a threat continue to use diplomacy of sorts while hitting back hard at the same time.
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You would need to be very stupid to believe the resources of the richest country in history could be beaten by the piece-meal donations of millions of disaffected people from the Third World and the millions handed out by mischevious Arab states. Though in a sense these resources might in the end become larger and larger as the disaffection grows. But how do you stop people handing over a few crumpled notes to a charity when they probably know it ends up helping terrorists? Bend over backwards to be nice and kind to them? Help them to get out of the poverty which fuels their hatred of the rich and powerful. And how do you do that? Export more capitalism? Or do you work harder to give away more of your taxes to make them love you for being kind?
¶ Thursday, December 15, 2005 0 Comments
With the Iranian president descending into the gutter of his own prejudices and fantasies it is quite important to take the story of Israel from within, i.e. how the Israelis are dealing with their problems among themselves as much as through the eyes of the Palestinians.
Zionism in Crisis by Meyrav Wurmser in MEQ goes into the history of Zionism, always an instructive exercise. Though the idea that Israelis "did it all by themselves" is patently false, in the sense that though they fought their own battles they did it with ample supplies of western arms, this article is a place from which to ask if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is simply mad or applying another part of a long-term Iranian strategy to "drive the Jews into the sea" : the phrase they used to use in the early days of the conflict. Since they are not Arabs, though Muslim, one wonders why they are the biggest [or big...] champions of the Palestinian cause.
Perhaps the threat of an elected government in Iraq is driving our 'bare-foot' Iranian president crazy and he is taking out his anger on a third party?
More likely is the well known principle of "an untrue insult having the effect which a genuine political argument cannot achieve": check Schopenhauer on how to win an argument. By telling the Israelis to decamp to Germany (or America) - ony the European ones or the oriental Jews and sabras too? - the land of their greatest persecution, and to deny the Holocaust, one sees the sheer desperation of the peeved bully who has taunted and beaten up his prey but has not got the snivelling prostation required of his victim.
The Iranian president's remarks, let us be honest, are being made in the knowledge the Israelis will act militarily against Iran, as they did against Osirak, if they think the Iranians are near achieving nuclear weapons. Israel would not do it for a number of reasons, including its sophisticated notions of how it fits into the wider world and because it is being restrained by the international community in some respects, but you can image a nightmare scenario where the victim decides enough is enough and goes into over-kill mode: laying waste the land of 160 million people between India and the the Arab Statesfor the greater peace of the world as a whole. Why don't we do that all over the world? Lets have a irradiated waste land of central America and between Russia and the small states it is bullying, and so on?
¶ Thursday, December 15, 2005 0 Comments
Monday, December 12, 2005
