Combing through my email for the last few weeks, I've managed to find all manner of execrable essays by various contributors to the likes of the Arab News, the Jordan Times and the Egyptian English language weekly, Al-Ahram. But so far, nothing has gotten my dander up nearly so much as what I'm reading in the English language online version of Ha'aretz - the Israeli paper to which Imshin recently canceled her subscription.
I mentioned one of their nastier pieces last week. Now I've discovered a real doozie, from way back on April 4, by the ever so annoying Ari Shavit. The last time Mr. Shavit put me in this foul a mood was back in January. But in "White Man's Burden," he outdoes himself. Let's take a look.
The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history. Two of them, journalists William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, say it's possible. But another journalist, Thomas Friedman (not part of the group), is skeptical.
Great start. The neocon (a/k/a Zionist conspiracy) cabal in Washington managed to finagle a war with Iraq to suit their own nefarious needs. If you don't get that from this opening paragraph, believe me, you'll get it in spades before you reach the end of the article.
WASHINGTON - At the conclusion of its second week, the war to liberate Iraq wasn't looking good. Not even in Washington. The assumption of a swift collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime had itself collapsed. The presupposition that the Iraqi dictatorship would crumble as soon as mighty America entered the country proved unfounded. The Shi'ites didn't rise up, the Sunnis fought fiercely. Iraqi guerrilla warfare found the American generals unprepared and endangered their overextended supply lines. Nevertheless, 70 percent of the American people continued to support the war; 60 percent thought victory was certain; 74 percent expressed confidence in President George W. Bush.
Oops! Well, it appears events have overtaken Mr. Shavit just a bit. And I guess most of the rest of this article appears so totally ludicrous to me in part because, by the time I read it, his initial premise had already been discredited. But even without the slight drawback of having been proved totally wrong, his presumptions here are so clogged with hubris, so laced with the perpetual sneer of moral superiority that is his trademark, that they offend regardless of their accuracy.
In the course of the past year, a new belief has emerged in the town: the belief in war against Iraq. That ardent faith was disseminated by a small group of 25 or 30 neoconservatives, almost all of them Jewish, almost all of them intellectuals (a partial list: Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Eliot Abrams, Charles Krauthammer), people who are mutual friends and cultivate one another and are convinced that political ideas are a major driving force of history. They believe that the right political idea entails a fusion of morality and force, human rights and grit. The philosophical underpinnings of the Washington neoconservatives are the writings of Machiavelli, Hobbes and Edmund Burke. They also admire Winston Churchill and the policy pursued by Ronald Reagan. They tend to read reality in terms of the failure of the 1930s (Munich) versus the success of the 1980s (the fall of the Berlin Wall).
Are they wrong? Have they committed an act of folly in leading Washington to Baghdad? They don't think so. They continue to cling to their belief. They are still pretending that everything is more or less fine. That things will work out. Occasionally, though, they seem to break out in a cold sweat. This is no longer an academic exercise, one of them says, we are responsible for what is happening. The ideas we put forward are now affecting the lives of millions of people. So there are moments when you're scared. You say, Hell, we came to help, but maybe we made a mistake.
William Cristol. Charles Krathammer. Breaking out in a cold sweat over the possible catastrophe their cleverly manipulated policies may have wrought? Does that sound right to you? I mean, I've been reading and listening to these guys for a long time, and I never detected a whiff of that. And I have a pretty good nose. Nor, by the way, will you detect such trepidation in the "interviews" with these two fellows that follow, except insofar as it's deposited there directly by Shavit. In fact, though the piece is written in quasi-interview style, you won't find a set of quotes anywhere in it. It's impossible to tell what's verbatim, what's paraphrased and what's Shavit's pure invention. Such clever journalism!
The icing on the cake, though, is his capping it all off with an "interview" with Tom Friedman, the pompous windbag who brought us the old and unimproved "Saudi Peace Plan" wrapped in a new pink ribbon. The same Tom Friedman who manages to get it consistently wrong without ever suffering from a noticable lack of credibility in the press. Don't miss this part. It's a classic.
Is the Iraq war the great neoconservative war? It's the war the neoconservatives wanted, Friedman says. It's the war the neoconservatives marketed. Those people had an idea to sell when September 11 came, and they sold it. Oh boy, did they sell it. So this is not a war that the masses demanded. This is a war of an elite. Friedman laughs: I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five-block radius of this office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened.
If you detect a common thread uniting the beginning and end of this story, well, that sums up Shavit's agenda nicely. Nevertheless, for some reason he decided to conclude with a slight backpedal.
Still, it's not all that simple, Friedman retracts. It's not some fantasy the neoconservatives invented. It's not that 25 people hijacked America. You don't take such a great nation into such a great adventure with Bill Kristol and the Weekly Standard and another five or six influential columnists. In the final analysis, what fomented the war is America's over-reaction to September 11. The genuine sense of anxiety that spread in America after September 11. It is not only the neoconservatives who led us to the outskirts of Baghdad. What led us to the outskirts of Baghdad is a very American combination of anxiety and hubris.
I'd suggest that both the anxiety and the hubris belong to Messrs. Friedman and Shavit. But the tin hat ZOG crowd should love this one. It’s right up their alley.
