The prospect of a President Obama fills me with a deep sense of unease. I worry what his left-liberal policy prescriptions will do to our economy, our Supreme Court, and our zeitgeist, yet I expect or democracy will continue to thrive despite his best (or worst, depending on one's point of view) excesses. I also tend to broadly agree with those who suggest that in foreign policy, there is such a weight of inertia supporting a common conception of our national interest that a President Obama will be constrained from committing any particularly egregious acts. Yet I also find reason for worry that President Obama will manage to trump President Carter in setting a course down the wrong trunk of a complex decision tree.
Yesterday Tom Friedman discussed Obama and the Jews in an attempt to be reassuring that President Obama would not alter the longstanding American consensus in favor of Israel:
America today has — rightly — a bipartisan approach to Arab-Israeli peace that is not going to change no matter who becomes our next president. America, whether under a Republican or Democratic administration, is now committed to a two-state solution in which the Palestinians get back the West Bank, Gaza and Arab parts of East Jerusalem, and Israel gives back most of the settlements in the West Bank, offsetting those it does not evacuate with land from Israel.
The notion that a President Barack Obama would have a desire or ability to walk away from this consensus American position is ludicrous. But given the simmering controversy over whether Mr. Obama is “good for Israel,” it’s worth exploring this question: What really makes a pro-Israel president?
While reading the article, I allowed my mind to wonder and what came to mind was revealing in terms of the source of my anxiety about Barack Obama. Consider this piece of dialog from one of the greatest movies of the last 30 years; the scene involves a battle of wits, to the death:
Vizzini: You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is this: never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!
Man in Black: You guessed wrong.
Vizzini: You only think I guessed wrong! That's what's so funny! I switched glasses when your back was turned! Ha ha! You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is this: never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha...
Vizzini: [Vizzini stops suddenly, and falls dead to the right.
Buttercup: And to think, all that time it was your cup that was poisoned.
Man in Black: They were both poisoned. I spent the last few years building up an immunity to iocane powder.
Vizzini's comment about the Classic Blunders set me to wondering about Barack Obama and what I realize is his Classic Blunder.
It may well be true that President Bush engaged in the first Classic Blunder (though I do not think we will know for certain for several years to come) and the second Classic Blunder mentioned by Vizzini does not seem relevant to Obama, I believe he has already, as has Tom Friedman and so many other liberals, already fallen for the third Classic Blunder. For a particularly illustrative example, consider an article from the Huffington Post today in which David Bromwich, in the midst of railing against President Bush and John McCain for implying that Obama would be an appeaser and arguing for greater pressure on Israel to assure a two state solution, likens our enemies in Iran to our former enemies in the Soviet Union:
A Two-State Solution for the United States and Israel
Israel, Munich, and appeasement came up again when John McCain said, of Barack Obama's willingness to speak with diplomatic representatives of Iran, that one must never negotiate with anyone who calls Israel a "stinking corpse." But why should political thought be silenced and action obstructed by the trash talk of a small-time dictator? Demagogues say many things. It is in their nature not to be in a position to mean everything they say.
Nikita Khrushchev spoke for world communism in direr terms than these when he addressed to Americans the words: "We will bury you." Khrushchev went beyond calling his enemy a stinking corpse. He acknowledged that we were still alive, and said we were going to be turned into a corpse, and declared that he would be the one to do it. And Khrushchev actually held the levers of power in the Soviet Union -- something that cannot be said of Ahmadinejad in Iran. Yet President Eisenhower negotiated with Khrushchev, and President Kennedy negotiated with him, too. The idea that all contact with a hostile country that is not war, is therefore necessarily appeasement, is a poisonous offshoot of the Bush dogma which says "If you are not with us you are against us." Palestinians oppressed by Israeli settlers and looking anywhere they can for help are neither with the United States nor against us. If we treat them as enemies, they may well become enemies.
The article is an example of the Third Classic Blunder, of what Richard Landes calls Liberal Cognitive Egocentrism:
The projection of one’s own mentality or “way of seeing the world” onto others, e.g., the teenager who is obsessed with sex, and assumes the same about everyone else. In the current situation of globalization, cognitive egocentrism has its greatest impact in the political relationships between people coming from civil societies and those raised in prime divider societies. Since the basic political principle of Prime divider societies is “rule or be ruled,” “do onto others before they do onto you,” political actors from those cultures assume the same zero-sum, domineering intentions in their opponents (the “enemy”). Since the basic political principles of civil societies is “I’ll give up trying to dominate and trust you to give it up as well,” “if I’m nice to you, you will be nice in return,” assume positive-sum attitudes in their opponents (the “other”). The current situation testifies to a dangerous mis-apprehension that works to the distinct disadvantage to civil society. The media, in particular, as the representative of civil society, emphasizes its role as empathizer, often failing to defend civil society, even exposing it to danger.
Bromwich assumes that he understands what motivates people like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his ilk. He would assure you that such people are rational actors who are interested, just as we are, in assuring their security and preserving their way of life. This is a dangerously misguided assumption. Most Western liberals cannot fathom that we have enemies whose way of life depends on forcing anyone not of their tribe or religion to bow down and submit to them. They are not interested in co-existence. Further, and in the most important aspect, the leaders of radical Islam, in a way not shared by the leaders of the Communist Soviet Union, value their (religious) ideology more than their life. When the Soviets could no longer avoid recognizing that they could not "bury us", that their economy was being buried by ours, they valued their lives and comforts too much to risk losing both by attacking us directly. Our Islamist enemies have shown time and again that they would rather die in a cataclysm than question the "truth" of their religious ideology.
Barry Rubin offers a particularly trenchant summary of the true Nakba that has befallen the Palestinians.
It's become fashionable to match the celebration of Israel's founding (part of the media can't even admit that Israelis are celebrating) with Palestinians' marking of their 1948 "nakba," or catastrophe.
Yet whose fault is it that they didn't use those six decades constructively? And who killed the independent Palestinian state alongside Israel that was part of the partition plan? Answer: The Arab states and Palestinian leadership themselves.
The mourners were the murderers.
You can read details in my book, The Arab States and the Palestine Conflict. A summary: The key point is that in rejecting partition, in demanding everything and starting a war it could not win, the Arab side ensured endless conflict, the Palestinian refugee issue, and no Palestine. It wasn't murder - it was suicide.
Or in the words of General John Glubb, commander of Jordan's army: "The politicians, the demagogues, the press, and the mob were in charge... Warnings went unheeded. Doubters were denounced as traitors."
Briefly, the British tried to help the Arabs win; the Americans to assist them in finding a last-minute way out; and the soon-to-be Israeli Jews were ready to have a Palestinian state alongside Israel if their neighbors had accepted it.
Read it all and if you are a person who has bought the meme that Israeli intransigence is all that has prevented the Palestinians from achieving their dream of statehood, you might actually learn something. Israel and the Arabs started out 60 years splitting a tiny piece of ground, filled with desert and swampland. Why has Israel been able to absorb a million Jewish refugees from Arab lands while the surrounding Arab nations have been unable or unwilling to absorb a similar number of Arab refugees? Why have the Arabs not been able to use their fantastic wealth to build a successful society in Palestine? You must argue either that the Jews are super-human, able to build a new nation out of the ashes of the Holocaust while at the same time preventing 250 million Arabs from advancing into the modern world, or that the Arabs are incredibly inept; an alternative is that their culture prevents them from succeeding as they can only succeed at death rather than life.
In some very significant ways Arab culture is not at all like Western culture and those who grow up in such a culture do not think the same way those who grow up in Western culture do. This is the rationale for my Arab Mind series and no amount of multi-cultural ideology can obscure the reality.
[For an update on how Arab culture impedes our attempts to succeed in Iraq, see The Secrets of Arab Success. Then ponder the fascinating observation that those who insist our attempts in Iraq are doomed are often the same people who insist that by surrendering to those who impede our success in Iraq we can somehow succeed in Palestine.]
My greatest concern about Barack Obama is that he is more blinded by his Liberal Cognitive Egocentrism than most. For such people, when their prescriptive policies fail they increase the intensity of their efforts and end up reinforcing the very worst tendencies of those who use them so skillfully to advance their own perverse agendas. Barack Obama, despite his travels, is a provincial with extremely limited experience. His unique upbringing has left him particularly prone to the third Classic Blunder and his election would put a great many people at risk.
[Update: Ed Morrissey provides a succinct summary of the arguments concerning the distinctions between our dealings with the Soviets and with Iran. It should be clear and self-explanatory, but too many people refuse to see: Iran not a “serious threat”?]
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