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Wednesday, November 12, 2003  Forebodings This is not a prediction but a terrible foreboding. I fear that President Bush's imminent state visit to the United Kingdom is shaping up as one of the worst media debacles of his presidency.
President Bush is scheduled to travel Sunday to Britain to spend three days in Buckingham Palace as a guest of Queen Elizabeth. No doubt he and Prime Minister Blair have much to discuss at this critical juncture of the war on terror. Nevertheless, we have to face some unwelcome facts. President Bush is not widely popular in Britain. He will not receive a warm welcome from the larger British public. Meanwhile, a vociferous and often violent minority is planning massive protests in central London.
British police have responded to the threat of unrest by banning demonstrators from the area immediately around Parliament. But the cameras will follow wherever the protesters go, and the images those cameras will broadcast – of enraged masses hurling themselves at barricades to be beaten back by police – will look equally awful whether the protests take place 100 yards or 100 blocks from Big Ben.
For a tourist, three days is a very short stay. But for the President of the United States to spend so long in one foreign country represents a huge commitment of time: It’s as long as a G-8 meeting for example, the most important summit of the year. The president will surely use the time well. But so will the protesters. And the British, American, and global viewing publics will be treated to every screeching minute of those raucous 72 hours.
Presidents always attract protests of course, and no president should ever be deterred from necessary travel. On the other hand, as we move into an election year, the people around the president ought not to be putting him into situations where he is unlikely to look good, except for the very most urgent and pressing reasons. And it’s hard to see what those urgent and pressing reasons might be in this case.
On the other hand, at the risk of sounding paranoid, let me suggest that there might be people around the president who have an interest in making him look bad.
Important sections of this administration’s foreign-policy making apparatus have gone into open revolt against the president and his policies. Until now they have trained their fire on subordinate officials, like Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld. Last week, though, they began aiming higher. Newsweek’s vicious recent cover story on Vice President Cheney was pock-marked with snide comments attributed to unnamed intelligence and foreign-policy officials:
“Top intelligence officials … describe the Office of the Vice President, with its large and assertive staff, as a kind of free-floating power base that at times brushes aside the normal policymaking machinery under national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice. On the road to war, Cheney in effect created a parallel government that became the real power center.”
“[I]nterviews with … a wide variety of sources in the intelligence and national-security community paint the portrait of a vice president who may be too powerful for his own good.”
“‘OVP [Cheney’s office] and OSD [Rumsfeld’s office] turned into their own axis of evil,’ grouses a former White House official, who added that Cheney and Rumsfeld shared the same strategic vision: pessimistic and dark.”
And so on.
Thus far, the CIA/State mutiny has failed to have the desired impact on the president. Bush’s important speech at the National Endowment for Democracy last week emphatically recommitted the administration to a large policy against terror and for liberty in the region. The administration's stand-patters and accommodationists cannot have enjoyed hearing Bush rededicate himself to the ambitious principles that led the United States into Iraq - and that logically lead the United States against Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.
So ask yourself this. Suppose you were a senior State Department or CIA official interested in jolting the president away from the “destabilizing” policies you oppose? You might try to stir up public and congressional against him by carefully placed and timed press leaks. But if those subtle did not succeed, you might be tempted to squeeze harder. And what could hurt an American president worse than plunging him into three consecutive days worth of Chicago 1968 style mass protests? Then, on the planeride home, perhaps somebody might soothingly insinuate that his terrible reception really ought to be blamed on those hawkish advisers of his ....
As I say, I hope these anxieties are all misplaced. But if they are fulfilled, they raise some important questions.
1) The president has committed himself, the Administration, and the nation to a set of policies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the larger Middle East. Whether you approve of those policies or not (and I of course support them wholeheartedly), they are in place and they cannot safely be abandoned now without catastrophic harm to American security – and the president’s re-election hopes. Those officials who are trying to subvert those polices need to feel the firm hand of presidential authority – now. And yet, that hand is evidently not being applied. Why not?
2) Why did the president’s communications team not plead, beg, yell, and scream to prevent this trip? Until recently, this president has been extraordinarily well served by his image-makers. But for the past few months, the communications department seems to have lost its magic touch. The elder Bush was defeated in large party by aides who loved him so much that they could not understand how anybody else would feel otherwise – and who therefore did not take his political troubles seriously until it was too late. I earnestly hope the younger Bush’s administration has not reached the point where it is regarded as defeatist or disloyal to say at a planning meeting: “Look, we all know the president is doing the right thing, and the day will come when those European anti-Bush protesters look just as foolish as the Soviet-inspired anti-Reagan “peace” marchers of the 1980s. But until that day comes, we ought not to be giving those protesters televisual opportunities. If we have work to do with Tony Blair, let’s meet in Bermuda and do it there. But why risk riots by driving around London at this time? Let's postpone this trip until we've caught or killed Saddam. Then we can invite the first democratically elected president in Iraq's histroy to join us - and dare the British left to jeer him."
3) Finally: why didn’t Tony Blair’s people warn Bush away from this visit? They surely can read the mood of the British public. They must know what they have let Bush in for? Is it possible that Blair too wishes to apply some political pressure to Bush? I’m not alleging it. I'm not alleging anything. I’m just asking.
11/12 06:31 PM Hours of Decision Fighting Back
Listen to conservative talk radio, and you’ll hear one complaint over and over again: Why can’t Republicans in Congress do a better job standing up against the savage partisanship of their Democratic opponents? Well, starting tonight, Senator Rick Santorum and the Republicans in the Senate are answering that complaint: They’re launching a 30 hour filibuster of Senate business to dramatize – and retaliate for – the Democrats’ refusal to act on President Bush’s judicial nominations. It’s a big, bold, unprecedented move. It’s bound to attract enormous publicity – and much criticism.
To maximize the impact of this protest – to encourage the Senate Republicans – and to counteract liberal complaints, it would be a generous act if you would take a second to call or email Senator Santorum and let him know that you support him and his colleagues as they battle for judges who respect the laws and the Constitution.
What Are We Going to Do About It?
The Iranians themselves now acknowledge “minor” breaches of the nonproliferation treaty. The truth is that we are daily discovering horrifying new intelligence of the rapid advance of Iran and North Korea to full nuclear status. Yet the more we learn, the more reluctant the International Atomic Energy Authority becomes to admit what is going on. Meanwhile, U.S. allies – and of course the always hopeful U.S. Department of State – continue to indulge the illusion that the Iranians and North Koreans can somehow be sweet-talked into surrendering their nuclear programs. Do they think the Iranians and North Koreans are stupid? It’s only because of those programs that anybody is being sweet to them at all. They know full well that the moment the programs stop, they lose their strategic importance. They will never stop voluntarily – not unless the regimes that govern those countries change radically or (alternatively) until they are made to believe that they face absolutely intolerable consequences if they persist.
Which will it be? So far, worryingly, the answer is: Neither. And so long as that remains true, we are for all practical purposes acquiescing in Iran’s and North Korea’s hopes for weapons of mass murder.
Iraq for the Iraqis
It’s a weird paradox that those Washington bureaucracies that most intensely opposed the war in Iraq in the first place (State, CIA) are now most determined to stay in Iraq as long as possible. The battle being waged in Washington today is over how fast to devolve political authority to Iraqis. State wants to wait until a constitution has been written and a new government elected. Defense wants to involve a provisional government right now (actually they wanted one a year ago) – and let Iraqis preside, obviously with American help, over the transition to an elected government. This is the decision being haggled over during Bremer’s current visit to Washington. One way to ensure that it is made wisely is to accept this rule: Those who have been wrong in the past, as State and CIA have been, should be listened to more skeptically in the future.
11/12 07:29 AM Tuesday, November 11, 2003 Heroes and Anti-Heroes Remembrance
If you haven’t read Jonathan Eig’s front-page story in the Wall Street Journal about Captain Harry Hornbuckle, a neglected hero of the Iraq war, find four quarters and do it right away. Then ask yourself: How will we ever win this war on terrorism when even the U.S. Army seems to flinch from acknowledging that soldiers must sometimes, um, hurt other people?
I'll be thinking of this valiant officer at 11:11 today, when I pause for my remembrance of the brave millions who defended liberty through a century of terrible warfare not only by laying down their own lives, but also - and ultimately more decisively - by taking the lives of liberty's enemies.
Lest We Forget
Has it struck anyone else that George Soros actually is what the Clintonites used wrongly to say that Richard Mellon Scaife was? 11/11 07:53 AM Friday, November 07, 2003 Bush and Democracy Michael Barone has compared the Bush admininstration to a pulsar: a star that goes “dark” for long intervals but periodically explodes into sudden bursts of energy. I don’t know that we can describe the past six months as exactly a quiet period: there’s still much hard—but increasingly successful—fighting to do in Iraq.
Politically, however, the Bush administration has lapsed into a peculiar inactivity. Now with President Bush’s speech yesterday at the National Endowment for Democracy, it looks as if that inactivity may be ending.
Yesterday’s speech picks up the themes of February’s address to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. He stressed the connection between Middle Eastern unfreedom and Middle Eastern terrorism—pledged the United States to seek its own security in the region by reforming the area’s tyrannies, just as the United States prevailed in Central America in the 1980s by prodding often reluctant clients and allies away from authoritarian government and exploitive economics.
Along the way, he said some wonderful things, including (if I am not mistaken) the very first presidential condemnation of Robert Mugabe’s thuggish and racist rule in Zimbabwe. I liked the little jibe at those Europeans who have forgotten America’s sacrifices for them—and his stirring evocation of the universality of the principles of human liberty and dignity. Bravo to him too for reaffirming his commitment to Palestinian democracy as crucial to Middle Eastern peace—and for remembering the 300 million or more Muslims who contribute to democracy in India and who are even now defending it in Indonesia.
So far, so good. Now for the cavils:
There was a curiously disengaged quality to the speech’s comments about Iran: “In Iran, the demand for democracy is strong and broad, as we saw last month when thousands gathered to welcome home Shirin Ebadi, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. The regime in Teheran must heed the democratic demands of the Iranian people, or lose its last claim to legitimacy.” No suggestion here that Iranian democracy might also possibly matter to the United States.
And while we all recognize the necessary limits upon presidential candor, there is a difference between diplomatic tact and such clanging unbelievabilities as the president’s comments on Saudi Arabia: “The Saudi government is taking first steps toward reform, including a plan for gradual introduction of elections. By giving the Saudi people a greater role in their own society, the Saudi government can demonstrate true leadership in the region.”
If there is one mainspring to al Qaeda’s terrorism, it is the corruption and backwardness of the Saudi regime. A plan to gradually introduce elections at some future point is hardly consistent with the urgency of the problem—or the eloquence of the president’s main theme: that we live in an age of liberty. More and more it is clear that we will find the Saudi regime constitutes the very core and center of our security problems in the region. It is not too early to begin introducing that idea to the American people. In fact, it is well past time.
Partial Birth II
I said yesterday that while I am not pro-life and do not think it would be wise to try to ban abortion in all circumstances, I welcomed the partial-birth ban as exactly the kind of restriction that would help ease the country’s angry divisions over abortion. (For the record, and to answer those who asked, I think restoring the right of states to regulate abortion would be another helpful measure. Roe v. Wade was not only terrible law but a destructive federal over-reach.) Well! To judge from the mail I received, you’d think I had endorsed infant sacrifice on the Washington Mall.
Many letter writers seized on my statement that I think abortion ought to be legal in the first trimester and generally illegal thereafter as arbitrary. I suppose it is. But any abortion compromise short of absolute prohibition or absolute affirmation will have a whiff of arbitrariness about it. But while the absolutist positions on abortion have the merit of clarity, they have the very considerable demerit of ripping the country apart. The absolutist pro-abortion regime imposed on the country in 1973 has summoned a vast national pro-life movement into being—a movement that has pummeled liberal legislators and politicians for three decades. In my view, an equally absolutist prohibition would have an equal and opposite effect, with ultimately catastrophic consequences for conservatives generally and the pro-life movement in particular.
Much better, it seems to me, to work case-by-case on restrictions that eliminate abortions that offend the conscience of all, that reduce the total incidence of abortion, and that decentralize decision-making so that states follow policies that reflect the moral values of their people. I think it’s good and right to try to persuade unhappily pregnant women away from abortion. Such efforts at persuasion can have positive effects: the number of abortions in the United States has already dropped from some 1.5 million a year to 1.2 million a year, and the proportion of Americans who disapprove of Americans has risen by about five percentage points over the past decade. There’s every reason to hope and expect that these trends will continue into the future. Most of us who do not favor an abortion ban would nevertheless applaud an organized national education campaign to try to drive the number down dramatically further—to say half by 2010.
However, I cannot lose sight of this fact: No matter what the legal regime in place in the United States, many hundreds of thousands of American women will continue to have abortions every year. It would be hugely dangerous—politically, socially, morally—to treat these women as criminals, which is what a true ban would effectively do.
Many NRO readers said they were affronted by my claim that I had thought about abortion as hard as they had. Obviously they are right that I cannot look into everybody’s head and assess the quantum of thinking that each individual has done. But I would ask of those who tell me that they have thought harder (and, as they further point out, more clearly) than I have about this issue: What <would they do with the women who break the laws they would like to see imposed?
11/07 08:58 AM Thursday, November 06, 2003 Births and Deaths Partial Birth
Now let me say right off: I am not pro-life. I think abortion ought to be legal for the first 12 weeks of a pregnancy and available to protect the health of the mother during the weeks thereafter. I don’t see this as a matter of fundamental human rights, so much as one of accommodating reality. I can’t defend Roe v. Wade as a legal decision, and I would be very glad to see abortion become much more rare than it now, but if the law attempts to suppress abortion entirely, it is the law that will fail, rather than abortion that will disappear. Please don’t email me about this: I have thought about this issue just as hard as you have, and I’m not going to change my mind.
But precisely because I believe in accommodating the realities of abortion, I think those on the pro-abortion side need to acknowledge that the no-concessions approach of the organized abortion lobby is catastrophically mistaken. Abortion rights would be much more secure if they were confined within reasonable limits that squared better with the conscience of the nation.
For that reason, I for one welcome the ban on partial-birth abortion – not only because of the grisliness of the procedure, but even more for exactly the reason that so offends the procedure’s defenders: precisely because it is a way to back into greater restrictions on abortion in the later stages of pregnancy. NOW and NARAL should understand: These restrictions are not the first steps toward a total ban on abortion. On the contrary: They are the first steps toward avoiding such a ban.
Dean’s Money
It will be very interesting to see whether Howard Dean’s almost-certain decision to reject public money for his presidential campaign elicits much liberal criticism. If (as I suspect) it does not, then the whole system – ailing through the 1990s – can be considered quite dead. One question for supporters of McCain-Feingold: If the presidential candidates can have back their right to fully free political speech, can the rest of us regain our rights too?
11/06 07:33 AM Thursday, October 16, 2003 Self-Blogging I have an article on conservatives and same-sex marriage in the Wall Street Journal today. You can read it here.
10/16 12:13 AM Thursday, October 09, 2003 Giants In Memoriam
There has never been a media tycoon quite like Israel Asper. In scarcely a quarter of a century, and beginning with a single North Dakota television station, Asper built the largest media conglomerate Canada had ever seen. By the end, he had built a television network of his own and acquired the country’s largest newspaper chain. Not bad, as the punch line of an old Canadian joke goes, for a boy from Winnipeg.
Like many Canadian journalists, I had my innings with Asper. Just this past spring, I resigned my column in his flagship paper, the National Post, to protest the firing of its editor and my friend, Ken Whyte. Yet again like almost everyone who had ever met Izzy (a nickname he apparently detested – and never escaped), I was always charmed by the man himself. A wisecracking, sad-eyed man with absolutely zero illusions, he had a gift for simplicity that won your confidence – even as he was outwitting and outmaneuvering you.
There were no loose pennies rolling around Asper’s businesses. People who wrote for his papers would repeat – with a kind of awe- stories about the squeaking cheapness with which the papers were run. Yet this tough boss was the most generous of philanthropists. He could have lived anywhere, but he never outgrew Winnipeg and he never forsook it. It’s estimated that he gave away $100 million in just the past four years, most of that money in his own home town.
Asper’s parents fled to Canada to escape antisemitic pogroms in the Ukraine. He remained grateful to the end. He was a man of big ideas and big ambitions. He succeeded on a huge scale, and he shared that success unstintingly. He set an example of achievement and generosity for a country where people too often settle for smaller dreams. He was a Canadian patriot, a devoted supporter of the state of Israel, and a firm friend of the United States. Honor to his memory.
More Departures
At the beginning of October, Charles Moore resigned as editor of Britain’s Daily Telegraph after eight years of hard service, six days a week. For Charles, the editorship meant unremitting toil and the sacrifice of his own writing, including the commission he undertook to write the authorized biography of Margaret Thatcher. For everyone who worked with Charles, however, his departure is a crushing blow. Charles is the sort of editor for whom a writer will do anything. I remember one request from him that arrived on the first day of the Republican convention in Philadelphia in 2000. I was eating lunch when my cellphone rang. It was Charles. “Hello David,” he said pleasantly, and we chatted for a moment or two.
Then he asked whether I would consider writing something from Philadelphia for the Telegraph.
I said I would be delighted.
He sketched out an idea.
Fine, I said – when would you need it by?
Oh, he said with elaborate casualness, how about 45 minutes from now?
You would have laughed at anybody else who asked such a thing. For Charles, you just did it. And because so many people did just as Charles asked, he raised first the Spectator (which he edited in the late 1980s and early 1990s) and then the Telegraph into two of the finest periodicals in English.
To me, though, Charles always stood for something even more important than good journalism. He represented the best of English conservatism. That was odd at first because by hereditary, Moore was descended from prominent English Liberals – but then, English conservatism at its best has always had something Liberal about it. Moore is a champion of what he termed the English spirit of conservative reform, and when he fights to preserve English traditions, it was never in a spirit of reaction, but always with an eloquent appreciation of what England’s ancient ways could contribute to the modern world. I could never share his enthusiasm for hunting. But I could share his horror at what the encroachments of the European Union would mean not only for English nationhood but for British democracy. I’ll miss his last-minute phone calls – but I’m cheered up the anticipation of much, much more of his writing both in magazines and in his books to come.
10/09 01:44 AM Wednesday, October 08, 2003 Arnold’s Cal-ee-fornia O.K. that was a decisive win. 53% of California voters rejected Gray Davis; 3.3 million votes for Arnold; almost twice as many votes cast for Arnold & conservative Republican Tom McClintock as for Democrat Cruz Bustamante.
Some scattered post-election notes:
FIRST: Arnold now has a huge political choice to make. He can try to govern in the same way he campaigned—as a quasi-independent in the Jesse Ventura mold. Or he can make himself a party leader and renovate and lead the California GOP. The Ventura model may seem safer to Arnold, who may feel he has enough troubles without also tangling with the state’s dominant Democratic party. But precisely because the Democratic party is so dominant, he faces a very real risk of being dismembered and devoured if he tries to meet them on his own. Unlike Ventura, Schwarzenegger will want a second term. He has no hope of winning it unless he rebuilds and strengthens the California Republican party first.
SECOND: The very reforms California instituted to protect the people from special interests have made the state the plaything of … special interests. Schwarzenegger won’t be able to change California unless he changes the way in which California is governed. For starters, the governor and the legislature have to take back responsibility for the budget.
Right now, any citizen with a bright idea for spending the public’s money can, with a bit of political energy and a lot of money, get his idea onto the ballot as a constitutional amendment. Forever afterward, these constitutionally protected programs take priority over everything else the state does, including things that are less glamorous but more important. Nobody will ever write a constitutional amendment requiring the state to speed up building permits or to invest in the latest anti-crash technology on the highways. And as a result, those projects end up taking back seats to the voracious demands of the state’s education lobby.
Schwarzenegger knows this well: after all, he entered politics with his own poll-tested budget proposal, one that required the state to fund after-school programs for children. California will never get its books in order until it resumes making budget decisions in a coherent way, after due debate, without some decade-old constitutional amendment imposing yesterday’s priorities on today’s taxpayers.
That may taken yet another constitutional amendment—so be it.
THIRD: There are important lessons to be learned from this election about the right way and the wrong way to talk about the immigration issue. For a decade we’ve been hearing that Proposition 187—the initiative that cut off state benefits to illegal immigrants in 1994- destroyed the state Republican party. Yet Schwarzenegger just won despite or because of his own opposition to driver’s licenses for illegal aliens. Why? It helped that Arnold is an immigrant himself. But much more important was Arnold’s tone and calm. All too many of the immigration reformers breath an ugly spirit of animosity toward Mexico and Mexicans. In a state where just about everybody has contact with Mexico and Mexicans—and can see first-hand that the ultimate cause of illegal immigration is the simple, ordinary, and completely understandable desire of people born in a poor country to find work and a better life for their families—animosity is going to give offense way beyond the Latino community.
Arnold never developed much of a position on immigration. But the one issue he did take on—driver’s licenses for illegals—he addressed in a spirit of calm and practicality.
10/08 09:22 AM Tuesday, September 30, 2003 Oh Canada Home Sweet Home
The Canadian chattering class is much delighted by this week’s Economist cover: a moose in surfer glasses beneath the headline: “Canada’s New Spirit.” Now that will sell magazines!
I haven’t read the issue yet, and anyway the story is not available on line, but I hope it is an improvement over the Economist’s last Canadian cover, in the summer of 2000. The writer of that survey managed to travel thousands of miles, talk to dozens of people, and (apparently) put tens of thousands of dollars on his expense account without absorbing a single idea beyond the weary clichés of what the great Mark Steyn has called “Trudeaupia”: ie, Canadians are gentler, more compassionate, and all around nicer than Americans, and if the Canadian economy malfunctions and young people flee the country, that is the price of Canada’s superior virtue – and Canadians are happy to pay it.
The New York Times last week also succumbed to a nasty bout of Canadian clichés. Reporter Clifford Krauss observed that while same-sex marriage and the recent social changes imposed by Canadian courts and federal governments are bitterly controversial, they have somehow provoked little public protest in Canada. Krauss attributed this lack of response to the “compromise, consensus, and civility” that characterizes Canadian political life.
Um, not exactly. Canadian political life is hardly characterized by “compromise.” The rules of the Canadian political system have allowed one party – the Liberals – to hold near-absolute power for almost 75 of the past 100 years, even though they have seldom won more than 44% of the vote. Since the prime minister appoints judges at his sole discretion, political power has translated into judicial power – an important fact in a country that in 1982 adopted a strikingly open-ended Charter of Rights. Until last month’s vote on same-sex marriage in the federal House of Commons, virtually none of the gay-rights advances that so impressed Krauss was enacted by a legislature – all were imposed by the courts.
So why did Canadians keep so quiet? It could be Canadian culture at work. It could also be that Canadians who do not keep quiet are liable to be hauled before an administrative tribunal, prosecuted without benefit of jury, and fined.
Bias
In the US, right and left argue over whether the media is biased for or against them. Not in Canada, where the case is open and shut. From the front page of this morning’s Globe & Mail report on the California recount:
“After two weeks of entertaining mayhem, Californians awoke yesterday to learn that it’s very likely that the world’s fifth largest economy will end up being run by a monosyllabic bodybuilder, chosen by a tiny percentage of the population. The reaction sounded a lot like panic.
“ ‘Up to now, I just worried that this would look stupid, but it mostly seemed fun,’ Maria Sobiya, a worker at a Los Angles Starbucks said. ‘But now I’m starting to get really scared.’”
Presumably some of the large plurality of Californians now poised to vote for Schwarzenegger are unpanicked – maybe even delighted.
Of course, noticing that would require reporter Doug Saunders to surrender some of his prejudices – and maybe interview somebody other than the girl who sells him his morning latte.
09/30 09:17 AM Monday, September 29, 2003 Edward Said Probably the best that can be said of the late Professor Edward Said, who died Thursday, is that there was a part of him that ardently loved and sincerely appreciated art and beauty. Under different circumstances, he might genuinely have become the great literary critic that his admirers falsely make him out to be.
On the other hand, under different circumstances, any one of us might have turned out to be much better or much worse than we in fact turned out to be. We can only be judged against the circumstances we actually encountered – and by that standard, Said does not deserve the many accolades that will surely now be showered upon him.
Said is best known for his 1977 book Orientalism, a book that may well rank as the single most influential academic study of the past quarter-century – and as the most disastrous. Orientalism has, as the Straussians might say, both an exoteric and an esoteric meaning. The exoteric meaning is that it is wrong to study a foreign culture as if it were, well, foreign: That the act of recognizing something as “other” somehow violates the integrity of that culture. In the esoteric reading, however, Said allowed one escape from the grave charge of “orientalism”: it was permissible to study a foreign culture provided that one fully embraced the political demands of the most radical and anti-western members of that culture.
Orientalism was intended (among other things) as an attack on the life and work of Bernard Lewis. Lewis replied with an absolutely devastating essay, “The Question of Orientalism,” which can either be read here (for a fee) or in Lewis's collection of essays, Islam and the West.
“Imagine,” Lewis asked, “a situation in which a group of patriots and radicals from Greece decides that the profession of classical studies is insulting to the great heritage of Hellas, and that those engaged in these studies, known as classicists, are the latest manifestation of a deep and evil conspiracy, incubated for centuries, hatched in Western Europe, fledged in America, the purpose of which is to denigrate the Greek achievement and subjugate the Greek lands and peoples. In this perspective, the entire European tradition of classical studies—largely the creation of French romantics, British colonial governors (of Cyprus, of course), and of poets, professors, and proconsuls from both countries—is a long-standing insult to the honor and integrity of Hellas, and a threat to its future. The poison has spread from Europe to the United States, where the teaching of Greek history, language, and literature in the universities is dominated by the evil race of classicists—men and women who are not of Greek origin, who have no sympathy for Greek causes, and who, under a false mask of dispassionate scholarship, strive to keep the Greek people in a state of permanent subordination.”
But if Lewis won the intellectual battle, he lost the academic war. Said’s disciples went on to reshape the entire discipline of Middle Eastern studies. In his timely and important book, Ivory Towers on Sand, Martin Kramer describes how professors imbued with Said’s ideas blinded themselves to the rise of Islamic extremism – that is, when they did not volunteer their services as apologists for it.
Kramer quotes Said: “During the 1980s, the formerly conservative Middle Eastern Studies Association underwent an important ideological transformation. … What happened in the Middle Eastern Studies Association, therefore, was a metropolitan story of cultural opposition to Western domination.” In plain English: largely thanks to Said’s influence, those American academics who once devoted themselves to the scholarly study of the Middle East were replaced by a new cohort who devoted themselves to the denunciation of the United States and the celebration of America’s enemies.
If the United States was caught unawares on 9/11, Edward Said’s name belongs high on the list of those responsible.
Said based both his academic work and his political advocacy upon his identity as a Palestinian refugee. He often told the story of his birth in Jerusalem and his family’s loss of its house in that city during the war that began (as Said seldom mentioned) when six Arab armies attacked Israel after it declared its independence in 1948.
Said’s claims turn out to be less than fully true, as Justus Weiner demonstrated in a lengthy article in the September 1999 issue of Commentary. Said’s family’s principal residence was Cairo, and it was in that city that Said was born and raised. Said’s wealthy father, an American citizen, sometimes sent the young Said to Jerusalem to visit relatives, and Said may even have attended school there for a time, but the image Said created for himself as (in Weiner’s phrase) the “avatar of Palestinian suffering” was almost purely bogus.
(Weiner’s whole article can be purchased
here – or you can read
here a reply to his critics that restates many of his principal findings.)
Said and his friends rallied after Weiner’s piece. Said’s reponse to Weiner is no longer available online, but Christopher Hitchens joined the battle with a
piece that is better argued than anything Said was able to say on his own behalf. (And you can read
here a very touching obituary by Hitchens that generously omits mention of how ill Said repaid Hitchens’ friendship in the cantankerous professor's final years.)
Said’s defenders cannot quite deny the facts of Said’s life or Said’s long habit of lying about them. Instead, they point out that Said offered a more truthful account in his 1999 autobiography. And they protested that the technicality that Said never lived in Jerusalem for more than a few weeks at a time should not invalidate Said’s claim to be a Palestinian refugee.
Given the widely prevailing animus against Israel now loose in the world, there may even be people out there who will be convinced by these arguments. Nevertheless, not even Said’s most vehement friends can cope with what to my mind is the most important and suggestive part of the story. For fifty years, Said put his passion and his intellect at the service of his grievances. And yet, when you look again at the details, you see something very strange: By far the greatest catastrophe to afflict the Said family was not the loss of a single house in Jerusalem, but the destruction of their family fortune in Egypt – first by mob attacks against their store in 1952, then the following year by outright confiscation by the Nasser government. Said was indeed the victim of dispossession by a tyrannical and bigoted state. Only, the state that dispossessed him was not Israel, but Egypt; and the grounds for his dispossession was not his Arab ethnicity, but his Christian religion.
Yet in all Said’s long life thereafter, he could never (as far as I am aware) bring himself to address this core truth. I used to read Said's column in the online edition of Al-Ahram, the state-controlled newspaper of the government that ruined his family. Somehow, the normally vituperative Said never quite found occasion to mention what Egypt had done to him. All his fury was concentrated on one target: the Jews.
Is this not a microcosm of everything that is wrong with so much of analysis of the Middle East, both in the West and in the region? Said’s personal and individual lie – that he was born into a Middle Eastern paradise that had been spoiled only by the intrusion of an alien Zionist serpent – is the collective and political lie that has distorted all our understanding of the region.
One last thought. Said served for many years on the Palestinian National Council – the theoretical government of the Palestinian national movement. As such, he was at least formally implicated in Yasser Arafat’s three-decade-long terrorist crime spree. Nor did Said flinch from his responsibility: He may not have liked Arafat much as a man or leader, but he excused and condoned Arafat’s atrocities. Yet ironically, the same Islamic intolerance that has unsuccessfully sought since 1948 to drive the Jews out of Israel lay at the foundation of the larger campaign to drive Christians like the Said family out of the whole Middle East. The thugs and murderers to whom this embittered exile lent his strength were the same thugs and murderers who had exiled him in the first place. And the only people in the region who championed the humane, liberal, and democratic values that Said praised but did not practice were the very Israelis to whose extermination he sacrificed both his vocation and his integrity.
09/29 08:15 AM |
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