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Posts Tagged ‘Lee Smith’

Chuck Hagel likes Ike, but is he reading history correctly?

by Mojambo ( 148 Comments › )
Filed under Cold War, Egypt, France, History, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, Russia, Syria, UK at January 31st, 2013 - 7:00 am

Although in many ways a fine president, Dwight Eisenhower (as he later admitted and as his Vice President at the time Richard Nixon also said) badly bungled the 1956 Suez War.  All it did was enhance the prestige of the Arab fascist dictator  Gamal Abdel Nasser, and helped drive our allies Britain and France out of the Middle East, (French distrust of America after World War II dates from Suez) all the while helping the Soviet Union consolidate its position in Egypt. Eisenhower learned the hard way (but at least he learned)  that the problem in the Middle East was not the Arab-Israeli conflict but Arab imperialism (now it is Islamic imperialism). I doubt whether Chuck Hagel or Barack Obama are capable of learning those lessons

by Lee Smith

When Barack Obama first came to office, the model bandied about by journalists and academics was Abraham Lincoln. The 44th president of the United States, our first African-American commander-in-chief, was the embodied legacy of the man who banished slavery and unified the country. And Obama, like Lincoln, assembled a “team of rivals”—a Cabinet not of “yes” men, but of prominent statesmen and policymakers in their own right, some of whom had a rocky history with the president, including most prominently his onetime rival, Hillary Clinton.

But now, with Obama’s second term just under way, the focus has turned to Dwight D. Eisenhower. Evan Thomas, author of a recent book on Eisenhower, suggested that Obama might look to Ike’s example for how to get out of Afghanistan and “draw down military spending.” The key lesson, wrote Thomas, is “have the confidence to be humble.” “Obama,” argued one Los Angeles Times editorial, “would do well to emulate [Eisenhower’s] patient pursuit of a peaceful world and productive economy.” And Clinton even bluntly cited the 34th president as a model in the recent 60 Minutes interview with her and Obama.  [……..]

That’s the version of Ike held by the Obama Administration: humble, prudent and patient. A five-star general who led the allies to victory over the axis knew how to corral America’s friends and thrash its enemies, but warning against the “military-industrial complex,” he also knew the limits of military force.

It’s easy to see why this version of Eisenhower would appeal to the president and his new Cabinet picks—especially his nominee for secretary of defense, Chuck Hagel, whom Peter Beinart called the “new Eisenhower,” and who called himself an “Eisenhower Republican.”

According to David Ignatius of the Washington Post, Hagel bought three dozen copies of a recent book about Eisenhower to distribute to Obama and top Cabinet officials, like Vice President Joe Biden and former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Eisenhower 1956: The President’s Year of Crisis—Suez and the Brink of War, is the latest book by Eisenhower scholar David Nichols, who’s also written a book on Eisenhower and civil rights and is working on another about Ike and the supreme court. But Nichols’ recent effort, writes Ignatius, “is a useful guide to how Hagel thinks about American power in the Middle East.”

Not unlike Obama, Eisenhower came to office believing that his predecessor had tilted too heavily in favor of Israel. After all, Harry Truman, the American president who recognized the Jewish state, once boasted that he was Cyrus, the ancient Persian king who saved the Jews from annihilation. Eisenhower believed it was necessary to recalibrate America’s Middle East policy lest it alienate the Arabs and put them all in the Soviet camp. The struggle then was essentially over Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Whoever won the allegiance of the leading Arab nationalist of the day, a man who seemed to capture the collective Arab imagination stretching from North Africa to the Persian Gulf, would win the Cold War struggle for the Middle East. Seen from this perspective, siding too much with Israel was a non-starter.

Accordingly, when Israel, together with France and Great Britain, invaded the Suez Canal after Nasser had nationalized the strategically vital waterway, Eisenhower compelled the three American allies to withdraw. The United States, he believed, should never be perceived to be collaborating with the great European colonial powers, or else the Soviets could rightly portray Washington as complicit with colonialism. Eisenhower’s triumph at Suez then amounted to recognizing when the interests of U.S. allies clashed with our own and putting them in their place.

According to Ignatius, that’s the sort of strategic courage that Hagel prizes in Eisenhower. The problem, however, is that since neither London nor Paris have a position in the Middle East any longer, Hagel’s fascination with Suez—his determination that Obama’s senior decision-makers should all learn the same lesson from the same book—tends to underscore his unseemly obsession with Israel. Worse yet for the former Nebraska lawmaker, who once went out of his way to clarify that he was not an “Israeli senator,” is the fact that Eisenhower’s strategic understanding of the Middle East was long ago discredited—by none other than Ike himself.

In fact, Eisenhower came to believe that Suez had been the “biggest foreign-policy blunder of his administration.” In hindsight, it’s not hard to see why. He ruined the position of two longtime allies, effectively driving Britain out of the Middle East once and for all, and without any benefit to American interests. If Eisenhower expected Nasser to be grateful, he was sorely mistaken.

“From Nasser’s perspective, he played the superpowers against each other and came out the winner,” says Michael Doran, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy. “What Ike thought he was doing was laying the groundwork for a new order in the Middle East, a third course between the re-imposition of European colonialism and the Soviet Union.  [……..]”

Doran, a former George W. Bush Administration National Security Council staffer in charge of the Middle East, is finishing a book about Eisenhower and the Middle East that looks at how Eisenhower’s understanding of the region changed over time. “Eisenhower slammed his allies and aided his enemies at Suez,” Doran explains, “because his policy was based on certain key assumptions of how the Arab world worked. The most important of these was the notion of Arab unity. [……].”

Chief among them, Eisenhower and his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles believed, was the Arab-Israeli conflict. They saw the role of the United States then as playing the honest broker, mediating between Israel on one side and the Arab world on the other. If this conceit is still popular today with American policymakers, says Doran, “it’s partly because some Arab officials continue to talk this way. The idea is, to win over the Arabs we have to stop being so sympathetic to Israel.”

But in the wake of Suez, Eisenhower came to see the region through a different lens. He paid more attention to what Arab leaders actually did, rather than what they said. “Between March 1957 and July 1958, Eisenhower got the equivalent of the Arab spring,” says Doran. “It was a revolutionary wave around the region and for Ike a tutorial on Arab politics. There was upheaval after upheaval, in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and then the Iraqi revolution of 1958 that toppled an American ally. All of them were internal conflicts, tantamount to Arab civil wars, and had nothing to do with Israel. With this, Eisenhower recognized that the image he had of the Arab world had nothing to do with the political realities of the Middle East.”

[…….]

In 1958, Nasser was enjoying his heyday, boosted largely by the victory in Suez that Eisenhower handed him on a silver platter. Evidence that Ike came to reject his earlier understanding of the Middle East was his decision to land the Marines in Lebanon in 1958 to protect a pro-U.S. government. “Nasser was monkeying around in Jordan and had stoked a low-level civil war in Lebanon,” says Doran. “The U.S. was aware that its allies, Camille Chamoun in Lebanon, and King Hussein in Jordan, were embattled. Eisenhower had already watched the pro-U.S. Hashemite dynasty in Iraq fall and saw it as a disaster for the West, and a victory for Nasser and the Soviet Union. [……..]”

This Eisenhower—defending allies and vanquishing foes in order to advance American interests—squares with neither the outdated and uninformed version of Ike that Hagel promotes, nor with Hagel’s own policy prescriptions. Hagel is against sanctions on Iran and even voted against designating its Revolutionary Guards Corps as a terrorist organization, and wants to engage other terror outfits, like Hamas.  […….] Because, by all indications, he has thus far been pushing an account of history more than 50 years out of date.

Read the rest  – Eisenhower’s new fans

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Posted in Cold War, Egypt, France, History, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, Russia, Syria, UK | 148 Comments »

Why Rachel Corrie wound up in Gaza

by Mojambo ( 117 Comments › )
Filed under Leftist-Islamic Alliance at September 6th, 2012 - 12:20 pm

A provocative examination of the mind set of a Rachel Corrie who represents the phenomenon of  being a “tourist to hotspots” where  they face little danger from the nations (such as Israel) whom they are trying to help overthrow (she was killed due to her own foolishness) because they know that these nations are essentially humane countries who believe in the rule of law. A Corrie would not last very long in Syria if she tried to protest the Assad sponsored massacres. T.E.Lawrence also saw his own society as being without meaning, boring, predictable, without the fervor that the Arab World had to offer. The author mentions that Corrie was not the only foolish adventurer, middle class “tourist”  into the Middle East/Central Asia conflicts –  John Walker Lindh was another one who has paid for his recklessness.

by Lee Smith

Last week an Israeli court dismissed the civil lawsuit brought by Rachel Corrie’s parents, ruling that the March 2003 death of their daughter was accidental and that the state of Israel bears no responsibility for her death. Working as an activist with the International Solidarity Movement, the then-23-year-old college student from Washington state was killed when she stood in the path of an Israeli Defense Forces bulldozer to protest against Palestinian home demolitions. “She did not distance herself from the area, as any thinking person would have done,” said Israeli Judge Oded Gershon. “She consciously put herself in danger.”

[…….]

Judging from Corrie’s letters, it is clear that she desired to help the persecuted. “Many people want their voices to be heard,” she wrote to her friends and family in February 2003 about the Palestinians she was meeting in Rafah, “and I think we need to use some of our privilege as internationals to get those voices heard.” But if Corrie sought to help the downtrodden, she might have gone to many different parts of the world; communities even here in the United States would have benefited from her talents and energies. Instead, she went to the Middle East.

In many precincts of the American and European left, it is a piece of conventional wisdom that the Arab-Israel conflict is one of the central moral dilemmas of the age. Even the bloody, intra-Arab strife coursing throughout the region hasn’t derailed the notion that the conflict in the Holy Land is the most significant conflict in the Mideast: It remains useful as a reflecting pool for a well-known variety of Western narcissism. From this perspective, solving the Palestine question is an important step in righting the sins of the West.

Groups like the International Solidarity Movement, then, act as a sort of tour agency for a particular kind of Western adventurer, searching for a level of raw political engagement and ideological commitment that simply doesn’t exist in the United States. The obvious advantage that Israel offers is that, compared to the rest of the Middle East, it is relatively safe. Corrie herself implicitly acknowledged this fact when she walked into the middle of a war zone to mount a protest. No sensible person could similarly assume the mercies of, say, the Syrian regime were he to walk into the middle of that war zone to complain of government atrocities.

Nonetheless, Corrie had indeed put herself in harm’s way—a wager that culminated with her losing her life.

One way to understand Corrie’s story is as part of a longstanding tradition of adventurous, generous, and sometimes vain Western travelers to the Middle East. Among these crusading spirits, the most famous example is perhaps T.E. Lawrence, who saw in the band of Arab tribesmen and former Ottoman officers he led against the Turks an opportunity to serve the underdog and tie himself to a larger cause. Along the way it appears that Lawrence, embracing local customs and dress, recognized that the Arab Revolt also offered him a staging ground for a kind of charismatic search for the authentic self that had the flavor of salvation.

[……….]

Consequently, it seems that these new selves must also come to stand in opposition to their cultures of origin. For instance, Lawrence faulted Britain (his homeland) and France when he came to believe that the Sykes-Picot Agreement dividing the region between the Great Powers had cheated the Arabs of their due. Now many who have followed in his footsteps offer themselves as living critiques of the Western societies they come from.

These critics are not entirely wrong in identifying a malaise in a culture much too comfortable with consumerism and reality TV. Indeed, if you are only looking at surface phenomena, nothing could be more of a contrast to the virtually conflict-free political system of the United States than Arab politics—and perhaps this is what Corrie was drawn to. But this is to be misled by appearances. The unhappy fact is that by standing in the path of an IDF bulldozer tasked to demolish structures that were being used to smuggle weapons to Gaza-based militants or conceal Palestinian fighters shooting at Israeli troops, Rachel Corrie was helping not the wretched of the earth but well-armed terrorists.

Unfortunately, this is not an atypical trajectory for those who’ve followed the sort of political path that Lawrence pioneered. From Taliban member John Walker Lindh to al-Qaida spokesman Adam Gadahn, a number of young Americans have crossed lines to side with U.S. enemies, or, in Corrie’s case, the enemies of American allies. Then there is a much larger contingent of middle-class, educated Westerners—academics, journalists, and politicians—that does not actively participate in anti-Western causes but still lends its sympathy to them and their representatives.

I’ve written before about why so many Western intellectuals and journalists are attracted to the region’s hardest and bloodiest men—why the peace activists, NGO workers, and U.N. employees fill the bars of Beirut and Jerusalem where they advocate the positions of Hezbollah and Hamas over beer. It’s not enough, or even entirely accurate, to say that they’re anti-Israel, or anti-Semitic, since their positions also put them at odds with those segments of Arab societies that seek to embrace Western political norms.

[……..]

From Nietzsche through Foucault, a significant thread of Western philosophy has laid out its complaint with liberal democracy and the slave morality it fostered by granting the bourgeois the same political privileges as artists and intellectuals, the aristocrats of spirit. What these philosophers wrote about is not some footnote of intellectual history: It’s a subject that touches every individual to the core. What are the causes you are willing to sacrifice everything for? What would you die for? What would you kill for?

Some of the West’s livelier spirits—from Nietzsche and Lawrence, to Foucault and perhaps Rachel Corrie—thought that these questions no longer mattered to those in the West and that they had to search elsewhere to answer them. The truth is that they remain our questions, too.

The difference is that Western societies long ago struck a clear divide between the political and spiritual realm—a struggle that many killed and died for—so that the individual, rather than the community, would be empowered with the right to answer these existential questions as he or she chose. The necessary tragedy of liberal democracy is that some of our own, born free to choose their lives as they will, do not answer it well.

Read the rest –  Why Rachel Corrie went to Gaza

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Posted in Leftist-Islamic Alliance | 117 Comments »

The Rise of Anti-anti-Islamofascism

by Mojambo ( 203 Comments › )
Filed under Islam, Islamic Terrorism, Islamists at November 15th, 2010 - 6:30 pm

Remember when we went from anti-communism to anti anti-communism? Well the author makes the point that what we have now is anti anti-Islamism. Witness the fact that a reactionary, terror supporter named Yusuf Islam (fka Cat Stevens) who supported murdering Salman Rushdie and is a Hamas supporter who was put on a “no fly” list by the Bush administration,  was allowed to perform at Jon Stewart’s “Rally for Sanity” – there is nothing sane about Cat Stevens or any Islamist.  Sadly we have seen this all before. There were scores of pseudo intellectuals who throughout the Cold War or even during the Stalinist Terror of the 1930’s, claimed that the stories of Communist atrocities were outright lies or over blown – and that the real threat was capitalism and/or the United States. They formed “Peace Groups” which were for “peace” only if it assured a Soviet victory.

by Lee Smith

When Cat Stevens was introduced at Jon Stewart’s recent “Rally to Restore Sanity,” the musician also known by his Muslim name Yusuf Islam was greeted with warm applause and howls of approval. It was a strange reception coming from a culturally savvy, mostly twentysomething audience, for while Stevens’s songs are a staple in the 1970s schlock-folk canon, he is best known these days for having supported Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa demanding the execution of novelist Salman Rushdie.

Stevens has tried to whitewash his record over the years, without ever acknowledging or apologizing for his comments, including his response to a British interviewer’s question as to whether he would attend a demonstration to burn an effigy of the writer; Stevens answered glibly that he “hoped that it’d be the real thing.”

“I don’t know why no one in that crowd booed Stevens, or heckled him when he was introduced,” says the British author Nick Cohen, who was in contact with Rushdie after the rally. “Rushdie phoned Stewart, who said he was sorry if it upset him, but it was clear Stewart didn’t really care.”

Presumably what mattered to Stewart and the rally’s cosponsor Stephen Colbert was less Stevens’s willingness to join in the bloodlust of the Islamic Republic of Iran (the fatwa has been reaffirmed by Iran’s current supreme leader, Ali Khamenei) than the fact that Stevens/Islam had been put on a no-fly list by the Bush administration. Never mind that the folk singer had been identified as having donated to a Muslim charity with ties to Hamas; anyone considered unfriendly by Bush is an ally.

Stewart may be just a comedian, as he himself habitually justifies his excesses, but that gives even more reason for concern. It means the rehabilitation of a terrorist sympathizer has now hit the mainstream. What we’re seeing is something akin to the Cold War-era phenomenon of anti-anti-Communism. The anti-anti-Communist left, comprising large sections of the press, academy, and even federal bureaucracies, was simply incapable of understanding that the defense of American civil liberties did not depend on the uncritical defense of the rights of Communists. Call this latest manifestation of liberal illogic anti-anti-Islamism.

[…]

Read the rest here: Anti-Anti-Islamism

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Posted in Islam, Islamic Terrorism, Islamists | 203 Comments »