Posted on 04/06/2002 5:48:49 AM PST by Gigantor
(April 5) - More than half a century ago, the British writer George Orwell made a famous statement that can still serve as the beginning of wisdom for anyone trying to unravel the tangled relation between the war against terrorism being waged by the United States and the attitude of the Bush administration toward the war against terrorism being waged by Israel. What Orwell said was that political speech and writing had largely turned into the defense of the indefensible.
In singling out the Bush administration here, I should simultaneously assert in the strongest possible terms that it is less guilty than any government on earth of using speech and writing to defend the indefensible - less surely than a member of Israel's own government like Shimon Peres, or former ministers like Yossi Beilin, the man Yitzhak Rabin once derided as Peres's "poodle." And within the Bush administration, the least guilty of all for the most part has been the president himself.
But this is putting it too mildly. For Bush, after a bit of hesitation following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, achieved a greater degree of moral and intellectual clarity about terrorism than any Western leader before him. Indeed, many of his former detractors were amazed by the acumen and agility he showed in cutting through the poisonous cant on this subject pervading the journalistic and academic communities.
Never, for instance, did he permit himself to be bamboozled by the idea so dear to so many denizens of those communities that "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." Taking the opposite position, he declared repeatedly that terrorism was itself evil, under any and all circumstances. From which it followed that there could be no such thing as a good terrorist.
Nor, so far as I can recall, did Bush ever adopt the media's unregenerate practice of referring to Palestinian or any other terrorists as "militants" - a term that, in painting murderers as zealous strugglers for a cause they considered righteous (and who was to say they were wrong?), nicely illustrates how language is still used to defend the indefensible.
Finally, never did Bush go along with that other trick of language favored by defenders of the indefensible: that the "root cause" of terrorism is poverty or political oppression; or where Israel and the Palestinians are concerned, the "occupation." To Bush (who may not even have realized that 98 percent of the Palestinians were already living under the Palestinian Authority), the root cause of terrorism anywhere and everywhere was, quite simply, the will to do evil. Period; end of discussion.
Admittedly, in discussing the Middle East, Bush was less vigilant in avoiding the term "cycle of violence," which is probably the most common example of how political discourse can become a defense of the indefensible. Conversely, the same term also embodies a failure to defend what deserves to be defended.
A linguistic child of the concept of moral equivalence, the words "cycle of violence" allow of no distinction between terrorist attacks and retaliation against them. They allow of no distinction between the deliberate murder of civilians and the inadvertent harm done to civilians in a military action. And in the context of the "Arab-Israeli conflict" (itself a deceptive label for what should actually be called "the Arab war against Israel"), to speak of a "cycle of violence" is to conjure up a Hatfield-McCoy type of feud between equally irrational parties.
This maneuver is calculated to conceal the crucial fact that Palestinian terrorism is neither a random nor an uncontrollable nor a "senseless" phenomenon. On the contrary: it is a tactic carefully designed to advance a precise objective. And that objective is to wipe the Jewish state physically off the map, just as Israel is erased from the maps of the region printed in the textbooks given to Palestinian and other Arab schoolchildren.
Bush's occasional surrender to the "cycle of violence" clichZ has, in short, marked the limit of his power to resist political speech that defends the indefensible, and befogged the incandescent clarity about terrorism he began to achieve after September 11.
Moreover, the war against Israel has also marked the limit of Bush's fidelity to another of George Orwell's famous dicta: that there comes a point when the primary duty of an honest man is to restate the obvious. Bush admirably fulfilled that duty when he insisted that terrorism was evil, no matter what, and when he appended the codicil that regimes harboring or sponsoring terrorists were terrorists themselves.
But last month, after he had dispatched Vice President Richard Cheney on a quixotic, unnecessary, and humiliating quest for Arab approval of his determination to topple Saddam Hussein, he suddenly lost his ability to see the obvious, let alone to restate it.
He could not see that the goal of the Arab world has always been, and still is, to destroy the state of Israel.
He could not see that Crown Prince Abdullah's "peace initiative" did not represent a renunciation of that goal, but was only a cynical public-relations ploy to counter the bad press the Saudis had been getting in the United States since September 11.
He could not see that in making the "right of return" of the Palestinian refugees a condition of any settlement, the Saudi "vision" amounted to nothing more than the assurance that if Israel were to cease being a Jewish state, the Arab world would graciously cease objecting to its existence.
Blinded by the Saudi mirage - and no doubt with a little additional wool pulled over his eyes by his secretary of state, Colin Powell - Bush lost his way to the extent of characterizing the actions taken against terrorism by Israel under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as "unhelpful."
Fortunately, the president got back on track after the series of suicide bombings in March that culminated in the Passover massacre in Netanya. Reversing himself once more, Bush now dropped his reproaches of Sharon, and instead expressed sympathy for the efforts the prime minister was making to root out the terrorist infrastructure in Ramallah and elsewhere.
At the very moment Bush was voicing approval of these efforts, however, his representative at the UN was voting for a resolution condemning them, and the State Department was happily going back into the old business of cautioning Sharon to exercise "restraint." Meanwhile, Bush called for "a united front" in the region against terrorism.
Behind this call lay the evidently unshakable delusion that Arafat himself, not to mention the Saudis, who had been inciting and harboring and financing suicide bombing all along, were actually opposed to it and to terrorism in general. Thus, Bush kept asking Arafat to do "a better job" of cracking down on and denouncing terrorism, as though this was what Arafat dearly wished to do. What was even more startling, the president seemed to think that Syria and Iran could be persuaded to participate in a regional "united front" against terrorism.
Yet just as the American vote for the UN resolution contradicted Bush's endorsement of Sharon's latest and most forceful military move against the terrorist infrastructure in the territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority, the president now contradicted himself from the other direction. That is, he authorized Donald Rumsfeld, his Secretary of Defense, to denounce Iran, Iraq, and Syria for aiding and abetting the terrorists operating out of the Arafat's own regime.
Sounding like Bush when he had been at his best, Rumsfeld declared: "Murderers are not martyrs. Targeting civilians is immoral, whatever the excuse. Terrorists have declared war on civilization, and states like Iran, Iraq, and Syria are inspiring and financing a culture of political murder and suicide bombing."
Rumsfeld went on "to make it clear to sponsors and supporters of terrorists that being a friend to terrorists, and by implication an adversary of the United States, is not in their best interest." And he specifically stressed the arms that Iran and Syria were sending to Palestinian terrorists through Lebanon, as well as the stipends of $25,000 that Saddam Hussein was paying the families of suicide bombers.
It was also left to Rumsfeld to restate the obvious at a moment when Bush himself was coming close to defending an indefensible position. Asked by a reporter why he persistently refused to denounce Arafat as a terrorist and the PA as a terrorist regime when they qualified fully under his own definition, Bush answered that, unlike the others, "Arafat has agreed to a peace process," and that "he has negotiated with parties as to how to achieve peace."
Then, a few hours later, Rumsfeld, without explicitly naming Israel, and again sounding like Bush at his best, answered a similar question by in effect likening Sharon's current military moves to those of the United States: "When the United States is hit by terrorist attacks, you have a choice. You can say, 'Gee, that's too bad,' or you can go try to find the terrorists and do something about itÉ We cannot afford as a country to not seek out the terrorists and the countries that harbor terrorists."
As a Jew, I tremble for the harm that may come to Israel through President Bush's loss of clarity - and with it his ability to restate the obvious. But as an American who believes with all his heart and soul in the necessity of my country's war against terrorism, and in the justice of our cause, I also worry about the moral and intellectual and strategic damage done to that cause by the refusal to face the plain truth that the despots who tyrannize over most of the Muslim world hate the United States, "the Great Satan," even more than they hate Israel, "the Little Satan."
One can only hope and pray that Bush's recent confusions will turn out to be a temporary "bad patch" (as Robert L. Bartley of The Wall Street Journal has called it), and that he will set himself firmly back onto the course he so bravely took in the wake of September 11.
If he does, he will recognize that there is no moral difference between the terrorists operating out of the PA and the al-Qaida network.
He will recognize that to sponsor the establishment of a state run by the thugs and murderers of the PA would be tantamount to putting the Taliban back into power in Afghanistan.
He will recognize that the PA is another one of the regimes that will have to be toppled if the war against terrorism is to be won, and he will encourage Israel to do this job in our mutual interest.
He will recognize that only if a space is thereby cleared can decent alternatives to such regimes get a chance to emerge (including among the Palestinians, who might then indeed form a state that would be willing to coexist peacefully with Israel).
And he will recognize that only under such circumstances will it become possible for a corresponding process of reform and modernization to take hold within the realm of Islam, which would in consequence no longer serve as a breeding ground of terrorism.
Once he comes to recognize all this, Bush will understand that Israel is involved in the same war he himself is waging, and against the same enemy. He will understand that negotiating with Arafat or his henchmen can no more result in security for Israel than the United States can protect itself against future attacks by negotiating with Osama bin Laden or any other anti-American terrorists.
Recognizing and understanding these things, Bush will be granted an even greater power than he had before to resist any forms of political speech that defend the indefensible, together with a wonderfully enhanced ability to restate the obvious.
Accordingly, the ghost of George Orwell will smile down upon him, and he will bask in the assurance reinforced by that smile that he is helping to create the conditions out of which a better and a safer life will almost certainly emerge for millions upon millions of people.
(Norman Podhoretz was editor of Commentary magazine from 1960-1995, and is the author of several books, the lastest being My Love Affair With America: The Cautionary Tale of a Cheerful Conservative.)
I especially enjoyed Podhoretz's first book after he quit the ranks of the liberal intellectuals. He saw, earlier than many, what it was all leading to. He was like Horowitz but ten years earlier.
In other words, as long as the defender defends, there can be the so-called 'cycle of violence'. And, no matter how long it continues, there will always be the assaulter and the defender!
Introductory Remarks and Presentation of Boyer Award
James Q. Wilson
American Enterprise Institute
Annual Dinner and Francis Boyer Lecture
Washington, D.C.
February 13, 2002
In Woody Allen’s movie, Annie Hall, Woody observes that two magazines, Dissent and Commentary, have merged, resulting in a new magazine called Dysentery.
It was an implausible idea. Dissent represented a particular view of American political culture. Commentary not only represented a different view, it helped change that political culture. It did so because it was led by Norman Podhoretz, who changed commentary because he had changed.
Norman Podhoretz grew up in a poor Brooklyn family where Yiddish was more common than English and then moved to the relatively un-Yiddish world of intellectual Manhattan. He got a scholarship to Columbia University even though its quota for Jews was a mere 17 percent. He then went to the entirely non-Yiddish world of Cambridge University, where he became, as he had been at Columbia, one of its most distinguished students.
But achieving these successes was nothing as compared to surviving the political and moral hazards of “The Family,” that contentious group of writers in Manhattan each one of whom devoted his or her life to justifying their variety of leftist politics as against that of rival leftists.
It was as a part of that world that Norman became editor of Commentary magazine. There he found that he had to reconcile his own intellectual liberalism with the nastier—Norman later said “snarling”—politics of the New Left. It was no contest. The New Left lost, and not long thereafter the old left lost as well.
Perhaps the change might be attributed to Norman’s time in the army. As a pitiful young soldier trying to endure the rigors of basic training at Fort Dix, he noticed that the platoon sergeants were remarkable men: “tough, erect, competent, and . . . physically strong.” Norman knew he was smart, but he could not do what these men did. And then he realized: he had gone overnight from being a contributor to a magazine published by The Family to an exhausted and inept soldier, but there was never a chance that the good soldiers around him would ever write for the Partisan Review. “How come,” Norman later wrote, “I had to go from there to here, when they never have to go from here to there?”
He ends his book My Love Affair with America with this secular version of an ancient Jewish hymn of thanksgiving: This nation gave to him the English language, and not content with that went on to admit him into a great university that his parents could not have afforded, and not content with that gave him a fellowship to study in England, and not content with that allowed him to become the editor of a great magazine, and not content with that allowed him to use that magazine for ten years to attack almost everything about America, and not content with that asked for no apology when he changed and defended the country with which he had fallen in love. And not content with that saw to it that he was awarded the Francis Boyer Award of the American Enterprise Institute.
Ladies and gentlemen, Norman Podhoretz.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.