Today I've been thinking about the issue I wrote about a few days ago in the post entitled 'Who Benefits'. In conversations with people from all walks of life and all political persuasions since that post I've been struck by how all-pervasive the 'complot' (nefarious plot) theory is here in Lebanon.
I'd like to be able to write a few more paragraphs about how totally misguided this propensity is, how inimical to rational political discourse, how disempowering it is to its own adherents. And, in fact, I did say some of that last time, didn't I? And I'm sure I'm right about all of that. More, I'm far from being the first to lecture the 'Arabs' about their suspicious nature and the evils thereof. After all, even Bernard Lewis has done so, so I must be in good company, right?
The problem is: the more I think about it, the more rational "the plot's" contours seem to become. Is it the air? The food? Am I becoming unbalanced from being woken one too many nights at 3 AM by the call to prayer? (It is unbelievably loud. To paraphrase from Spinal Tap, those guys definitely have amps that go all the way to 11.)
Nope, it's none of that. What it IS, is a process of assembling in my mind, like slowly adding bricks to a wall, relevant data, things that have bothered me and niggled, sometimes for years, without ever being analyzed into place.
In my other post I mentioned, in passing, the US invasion of Iraq. Let's take a more careful look. For those of us who opposed, nay despised, the misunderestimated GW Bush, it was easy to take him for a buffoon. I well remember laughing about how he, we were told, began his presidency without knowing what the words Shia' and Sunni signified. Why were we told that? Or, rather, allowed to know that. Boy, did we ever misunderestimate George W Bush!
We knew he was a frontman, yet we were taken in anyway by his act. And from that sprung a whole series of misunderstandings - convenient ones - about US actions and policies in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. By convenient misunderstandings I'm trying to say that we allowed ourselves to be fooled. At least some of us did, and I have to admit to being one of 'us'. For the most part I figured we botched everything from the day we invaded onwards because 'the US is just incompetent, never knows what it's doing and doesn't understand the realities on the ground.' Poor United States, we tried, we got it wrong...and we failed.
What if we didn't fail?
Just a peek behind the frontman in this charade would instantly tell anyone (I did have suspicions, I'll give myself that much) that the incompetence theory was pretty shaky. After all, who was really calling the shots, Georgie? Ha!
A 10 second review of the chain from Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz on down instantly reveals that these were not buffoons, nor were they part-timers. These guys all had spent years in and around the Mideast, its history and its issues. True, Bremer might not have been the brightest bulb on the tree, but anyone who's read Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City understands that Bremer was not the 'decider' in Baghdad. He was, in fact, a flunky.
With all this in mind, let's review in another 10 seconds what actually happened in Iraq. We invaded under false pretenses, toppled the dictator due to our overwhelming military superiority (shock and awe!), completely and utterly failed to stem a tsunami of chaos and violence despite that same military presence, botched what was billed as a fantastic plan to create a US-style democracy in the Mideast, fostered a nightmarish new reality of sectarian hatred and bloodshed that continues unabated to this day, and quite literally gave the country to our supposed worst-enemy-but-one (North Korea was too far away), Iran. Yet, somehow, despite all that, up north we managed to nurture a new Switzerland in Kurdish Iraq, independent in all but name, and - conveniently - very friendly to Israel.
And this was all by mistake?
Today Iraq is essentially three mini-states. Kurdistan is already functioning de facto as a state of its own, while the other two are still entangled, spilling each other's blood while they sort out the mess we left behind.
What are we supposed to draw from this? If you read the mainstream media the message is clear, if not quite so baldly stated: Kurdistan works because the Kurds are more like us, not irrational savages like the Arabs.
Well, hang on...until not too long ago it was the Kurds who were terrorists, endlessly blowing up places and threatening the well-being of sovereign nations! Those who know a bit of history will also remember the role of the Kurds in the Armenian Genocide. I guess it must be the American influence that has wrought this marvelous tramsformation.
Or maybe this is what the Cheney cabal had in mind all along? Maybe the Kurds get their state because they've agreed to make nice with the Israelis, while the rest of the Iraqis, not yet ready for this concession, get thrown to the wolves of sectarian division which will now tear the Arab Mideast to shreds for years to come, leaving it too weak to face Israel militarily and too bereft of moral legitmacy to challenge the idea of a state for and by Jews on land that has been taken by force?
While thinking about Iraq, I recalled something from the invasion of Afghanistan that had always bothered me at the time. Eventually, like all today's news, it moved off the screen and was forgotten, but I bring it up now because it might be relevant to this discussion.
Recall that the invasion of Afghanistan was run by the same not-so-stupid-as-we-might-think group of plotters. Recall that after 9/11 we, as a nation, had only one goal: get Bin Laden. Recall that we decimated any opposition almost instantly. Recall that we quickly cornered Bin Laden, his donkey and his dialysis machine in Tora Bora. Recall that we have the best generals in the world, the best special forces, the best eyes in the sky, the best of everything!
So why did we leave the back door open? Why did we push him up against the wall and then open the escape hatch? I recall how, even from a casual reading of my local non-newspaper it was absolutely clear what was happening. I even recall screaming at Rumsfeld on TV, to no avail. We knew what we knew, or we knew what we didn't know. Or whatever.
Postscript: By the way, just today I ran across Jonathan Cook's Israel and the Clash of Civilizations, which I'd heard of but never cracked open. Looking at the intro, it appears his thesis is along the lines of what I've briefly stated above. Cook is a longtime journalist based in Israel, who's worked for numerous publications but whose natural home is probably the Guardian, where he was previously on staff. Another way of saying that he writes from a 'left' perspective, à la his colleague at the Independent, Robert Fisk.
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