Tonight is the start of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. It is a time for reflection on the last year and the start of a 10 day period in which Jews repent for past sins and pray to be included in the Book of Life for the coming year. Rosh Hashanah is an intersection of memory, fear, and hope. We remember and consider our last year, fear being judged as lacking, and hope for a good year to come.
Memory is the most impermanent of mental constructs. All that we are depends on our history, yet our memories are as plastic and flexible as the most malleable clay. Current memories depend to a remarkable extent upon the needs of the present. If we need a memory to support a current feeling or thought, we can easily manipulate it to do so; if a memory no longer serves a useful function we can all too easily alter or forget it. This takes place within each of us on a regular basis and within societies on an ongoing, regular basis.
For example, consider an individual who believes that their troubles are the fault of their father, who was distant and cold and never around. When that person finally comes to accept ownership of his own troubles, a different memory becomes necessary to facilitate the forward development. At that point his father, though often not around, becomes a man who devoted himself to supporting his family and despite his emotional limitations, loved his family and sacrificed his own desires for his family. The changed memory allows and assists a changed future for our hypothetical individual.
On a societal basis, we see the battles being fought over ownership of memories daily. The last eight years have been very difficult for America and the last weeks and months have had an extra valence of negativity, as a crisis many years in the making begins to cut at home. Barack Obama offers a memory designed to enhance the future he proffers. All of America's problems are the result of mismanagement by the Bush administration and the change that Obama represents will usher in a new Golden Era in which government works for the little guy, the world loves us again, and the planet can begin to heal. One premise that underlies Barack Obama's appeal resembles the premise that has underlined many human follies through our history. That premise is that conditions in our world have changed in such fundamental ways that past events can no longer be instructive; in other words, everything is new under the sun. The business cycle can be repealed by our magnificent modern society and human affairs are being transformed such that we really can have "Peace in our time".
Just as during the dot.com bubble there were many voices telling us that rising home prices and a booming economy were institutionalized and entrenched developments and that deep recessions were a thing of the past, so too during the real estate bubble prominent voices from the world of business and politics have been soothing us with reassuring words that the new economy was so strong that fundamentals no longer mattered as they once did. What we see now is that human nature has not changed despite the advent of the Blackberry and that the major difference between the present and past crashes is one of scale.
Just so, in the international arena, there have been those, most prominent since the baby boomers have gained their place in the political-industrial complex (to borrow AJ Strata's illuminating terminology) who would have us believe that in the modern world of the '00s, the world would truly be a peaceful, loving place if only the Western powers (ie, America and Israel) were not so wedded to the past.
Just as there are those who say, usually with a world weary sigh, that there is nothing new under the sun, there are also those who say, with a near euphoric certainty, that this time is different. There are two iterations of this belief, one only slightly more realistic than the other and both held to varying degrees by the elite opinion in the Civilized world.
The first, more realistic derivative of the fantasy that the world, and the men who inhabit it, are different, is the belief that we can manage the behavior of our enemies. This is nowhere more apparent than in the arguments that an Iranian atomic bomb is an outcome preferable to an American or Israeli attack on Iran.
Greg Sheridan, Foreign editor of The Australian, notes that the next President will face a crisis that may make the Wall Street meltdown seem quite manageable by contrast:
IRAN is a problem from hell. The next US president, be it Barack Obama or John McCain, is going to have plenty to worry about: the Wall Street financial crisis, the war in Afghanistan, Pakistan's internal crisis, the relentless military build-up of China and the temptation it will soon have of trying to retake Taiwan militarily. But you can be sure of this. At some stage during the next presidency, Iran will blow up into a full-scale crisis that will dominate global politics and that may indeed be more mportant even than the other problems listed above.
The article quotes from a report prepared by a non-partisan committee headed by Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute and Dennis Ross, Barack Obama's key Middle East adviser; the report describes various untoward outcomes of an Iranian (Shiite, Persian) bomb:
"A nuclear ready or nuclear-armed Islamic Republic ruled by the clerical regime could threaten the Persian Gulf region and its vast energy resources, spark nuclear proliferation throughout the Middle East, inject additional volatility into global energy markets, embolden extremists in the region and destabilize states such as Saudi Arabia and others in the region, provide nuclear technology to other radical regimes and terrorists (although Iran might hesitate to share traceable nuclear technology), and seek to make good on its threats to eradicate Israel. "The threat posed by the Islamic Republic is not only direct Iranian action but also aggression committed by proxy. Iran remains the world's most active state sponsor of terrorism, proving its reach from Buenos Aires to Baghdad."
Many will recoil from the possibilities listed and will then fall back to a second iteration of the fantasy that what we are seeing is new and different, that man is new and improved in the early days of the 21stcentury. For those who believe that if only we understand and compromise with Iran and by finding a way to address their legitimate grievances, we will have peace in our time, I commend you to Richard Landes's post, in which he discusses Appeasement Yesterday and Today: Fishman reflects on the 70th anniversary of Munich:
Joel Fishman, an American-born and -trained historian living and thinking in Jerusalem and whom I am pleased to call a friend, has an excellent meditation on the 70th anniversary of the “Munich Agreement,” the prime example of the folly of appeasement in Western history. It is a sad tale of liberal cognitive egocentrism, moral arrogance, and, as Fishman puts it, “lack of imagination [for evil]” that drove Chamberlain not only to pursue a(n effectively) suicidal policy, but to silence anyone who disagreed with it and keep “his” public in the dark. The interesting thing is that not only are those who forget history condemned to repeat it, but especially those who refuse to learn from history… And therein lies our curious paradox: why are our leaders – even, here below, George Bush – so intent on denying the lesson Munich offers.
Richard Landes and Joel Fishman focus on Iran, the country most likely to represent an existential thereat to the state of Israel and most likely to precipitate mass slaughter in the near future, but Iran's version of Shia radicalism is not the only danger the world faces from Islamic psychopathy. Dexter Filkins, who remains one of the few New York Times correspondents who can write a story with a minimum of political pedantry, discusses a nuclear armed nation, riven with fundamentalist fanaticism, in possession of nuclear bombs and the ability to deliver their devices, which is facing devolution:
The Long Road to Chaos in Pakistan
The chaos that is engulfing Pakistan appears to represent an especially frightening case of strategic blowback, one that has now begun to seriously undermine the American effort in Afghanistan. Tensions over Washington’s demands that the militants be brought under control have been rising, and last week an exchange of fire erupted between American and Pakistani troops along the Afghan border. So it seems a good moment to take a look back at how the chaos has developed.
It was more than a decade ago that Pakistan’s leaders began nurturing the Taliban and their brethren to help advance the country’s regional interests. Now they are finding that their home-schooled militants have grown too strong to control. No longer content to just cross into Afghanistan to kill American soldiers, the militants have begun to challenge the government itself. “The Pakistanis are truly concerned about their whole country unraveling,” said a Western military official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the matter is sensitive.
Radical Islam is incompatible with the modern world. The Islamic fanatics can use and subvert modern technology but cannot create anything except death and destruction. They famously "worship death" and aspire to nothing so much as to murder the infidel while being martyred for Jihad. In the absence of convenient Jews or Americans, they will gladly murder Europeans or Indian Hindus, and in a pinch, can always turn upon their co-religionists who fanatically believe versions of Islam that fail to reach the levels of purity demanded by their fanatically held beliefs.
Dealing with an adversary who is committed to your destruction can only be done through a position of strength. All of the various aspects of radical Islam share certain points of view which includes murderous hatred of the infidel and a zero sum approach to the world. For such people, there is no compromise. They will cede points only when convinced they will lose and never out of some misguided Western notion that a compromise that pleases no one completely is wisest. Whether Shia or Sunni, Islamic psychopaths can only compromise temporarily. In making the case for negotiations with Iran, Robert Baer, a former CIA case officer and author of the just-released "The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower," inadvertently underscores just why negotiation cannot work with Iran:
Israel knows that international diplomacy against Iran up until now has been a farce. Iran called Bush's bluff, ignored sanctions and continued its nuclear program with impunity. And if the Israelis needed another psychological kick in the pants, last week North Korea announced that it is back to building a bomb, likewise with impunity.
Finally, Israel has to calculate that American influence around the world is on the wane. Americans are tired of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And now, after the war in Georgia, Russia is opening up its flow of weapons to Iran.
Couple all of this with Israel's suspicion that Iran is within only a few short years of having a nuclear bomb, and Israel knows time is not on its side. It is starting to believe that it has no choice but to change its fortunes with arms.
This much is certain. Whether the President is named Bush, McCain or Obama, he will either have to prepare for war in the Gulf or find a way to bring Iran back into the nation-state system. The day of reckoning is near.
I myself think a deal can be cut with Iran. During the last 30 years, Iran has gone from a terrorist, revolutionary power to far more rational, calculating regional hegemon. Its belligerence today has more to do with a weakened United States and Israel than with any plans to start World War III.
The question is what price Iran would exact for a settlement. Or more to the point: Would we prefer to take our chances with an Israeli surprise?
Baer offers no evidence that "during the last 30 years, Iran has gone from a terrorist, revolutionary power to far more rational, calculating regional hegemon" but whether or not he is correct, his follow up is instructive. A weakened United States and Israel and a feckless world community that has its own reasons for disregarding Israeli existential concerns (a topic worth a post of its own) offers very little incentive for Iran to forego their greatest desires. Sadly, there is no evidence that the Iranians value getting back into the international community more than they value the hegemony that they believe the bomb will attain for them in their neighborhood.
And so, as the new year dawns for the Jewish people, they once again, as they have in every generation, face the threat of genocide. If the American people abandon Israel, I fear that the verdict of our memory, like the verdict of Europe's institutionalized memory of complicity in the Holocaust, will end up destroying us as surely as Europe continues to commit demographic suicide.
Recent Comments