I was waiting until after Yom Kippur
to share something else with you, but now I see there’s this NY Sun
business. I only wrote one piece for The Sun and I wrote it as a
liberal who hated Saddam’s brutal totalitarian regime. I wrote it prior
to the UN Security Council vote
against military action. The Sun never wanted to publish me again; and
definitely not after I had decided that the invasion was a bad idea
because it lacked international support and legitimacy. The Sun was
never my “employer.”
Personally, I’m pleased that Hitchens has broken with the most
egregious elements of the isolationist and anti-American left,
especially to defend the rights and lives of the mostly Muslim victims
of the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. I respect his stand regarding Iraq, but believe that he goes too far in acting as an apologist for reckless and flawed foreign policy decisions by the Bush administration.
But to me Iraq was, at its worst, a blunder; more precisely, the
invasion was a mistake because it failed to persuade a wide
international consensus for intervention. It was certainly not a moral
shortcoming to overthrow the particularly odious regime of Saddam, but
it has been badly handled politically, and badly executed on the ground
– allowing an initial period of chaos to descend into a
full-blown insurgency spearheaded by Saddamist hardliners and
Al-Qaeda-inspired Jihadis.Hitchens makes no apologies for his enthusiastic support for the
intervention, despite its bloody downturn amidst a series of bad or
questionable policies. Galloway, on the other hand, makes no apologies
for the terrorists who lead the insurgency. He calls them the
“resistance” and makes no bones about supporting them without
reservation. …
This is a more complete representation of how I felt about
the war. It bears no resemblance to that of Doug Feith, an
enthusiastic backer of the policy and a bureaucratic player in its
implementation. I don’t claim to have backed the anti-war movement, but
my position is uniquely my own, having nothing to do with neocons or
with Israel. I
don’t know that anybody on the Meretz USA board knew about it or shared
my view; this crowd didn’t read the Sun. I respect the “liberal hawks,” but as indicated in my criticisms of Hitchens, I drew away from their position.
long hoped for an effective international intervention which will force
both sides to move toward a reaonable peace. I happen to be an admirer
of Samantha Power,
who has promised (as has Obama) an energetic US effort for Israeli-Arab
peace from day one. I hope that Prof. Power finds her way back into a
policy role with an Obama adminisration; you will recall that she
resigned from the Obama campaign after being quoted in a Scottish
newspaper that Hillary Clinton was a “monster” who would not stop at anything to win the nomination — nothing to do with her policy advice.
2004. If you had quoted further, your readers would see that I
advocated an intervention in the Israel-Palestine conflict back then as
a better policy than the invasion of Iraq:
…
the killing of Sheikh Yassin is a reminder of one place where the
United States should have invested more political and possibly even
military capital. It’s not that Israel
is the main cause of Arab and Islamic jihadism; Bin Laden’s original
quarrel was with the Saudi ruling family, and the roots of unrest among
Islamic countries in general are their own internal failings. But it’s
no accident, in this new age of pan-Arab television networks and the
Internet, that the running sore of Palestinian suffering has been
embraced as an Islamic cause and is a major factor in the recruitment
of jihadists.I shed no tears for this loathsome Hamas “spiritual” leader, who
habitually advocated the mass murder of Israeli civilians, but his
death is emblematic of an ethnic conflict that increasingly knows no
bounds; Israel is much too small and vulnerable to be assured of
victory in such an all-out battle. What if instead of 150,000 to
200,000 US and British troops invading Iraq,
ten to 20 percent of that number had been sent to Gaza and the West
Bank to safeguard civilians on both sides, to replace Israel’s military occupation,
and to oversee a reconstruction of destroyed Palestinian physical and
social infrastructure? If successful, this could have served as an
antidote to international terror by taking away the propaganda value of
the Palestine issue; and it would have concretely aided both Israelis
and Palestinians hopelessly mired in their bloody struggle. Such a
mission would surely have been difficult and risky, but possibly less
of a challenge than the massive nation-building project we’ve embarked
upon in Iraq.
Weiss again: Ralph, OK, fair enough, you are giving more and different context to your remarks. Wish I’d interviewed you then, when I was demonstrating and you were getting a check from the Sun.
I have one big crit of what you say. You say your stance had “nothing to do with Israel.” I find this intellectually/emotionally astounding. I should think your feelings re Iraq had a lot to do with Israel, which you love, which has been attacked repeatedly by Iraq, which has been engaged with the Arab world for a long time, which your thoughts revolve around (as mine do too these days).
I had a conversation with Norman Finkelstein right after Walt and Mearsheimer’s LRB paper came out where he murmured that W&M could unleash some “ugly” feeling. He meant specifically: the fact that so many Jews were in the Bush war-braintrust when relatively few Jews are in the armed forces (something, yes I have since reported on, given my intense sociological interest in What it means to be Jewish in the US of A). I blurted to Norman, “Well, a lot of these guys may feel, We gave at the office.” I know I’m patting myself on the back, but I think it’s an important statement. It is all about dual loyalty, and the political feeling that so many Jews have and I believe you have too: that the U.S. and Israel are in the same war, against radical Islam. Israel is on the front lines, we are doing our part too. And all the kids there serve in uniform against the Nazis, I mean Arabs, while we go to fancy colleges and write essays. As we all know, that’s a part of Jewish psycho-sociology too: the displacement on to Israel of militant Jewish post-Holocaust feeling.
