The Denial of the Obvious By Reference to the Irrelevant: Center-Left Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics
When Howard Dean was looking like he had a chance in 2004, his flack had to do something to reassure the public that he was only mildly - as opposed to total batshit - crazy. One of the things they did was point out that the Democratic party has a relatively stable foreign policy team, drawn from a relatively stable set of think tanks, that gets appointed no matter what candidate the party selects (see here for an example). This didn't really address Republican attacks on Dean's ability to lead in crisis and it didn't really address Democratic attacks on Dean's delectability as a function of foreign policy credibility, but the argument is basically true. Any Democratic President will have more or less the same politicians and experts playing more or less the same roles. We remember hearing that and thinking that it made us a lot less likely to vote for Edwards than a lot more likely to vote for Dean. It means that no matter who the President is, the people shaping foreign hold Democratic assumptions about the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, Democratic sensibilities about Iran, and Democratic commitments to internationalism. When all the advisers in the room are wall-to-wall believers that "glimmers of hope for reform" in some Muslim country justify holding off on sanctions (half because that's what the desk at Foggy Bottom has been producing and half because that's what someone in Foreign Policy wrote that month), then there's only so much that a President can do.
This isn't some vast conspiracy - it's literally about what's being said in the Oval Office in the 10 minutes when a decision is being made. And this isn't about Democratic foreign policy experts being traitors. Coulterism aside, the vast majority of Democrats really do think that the policies they recommend are more likely to make the world safe than the other side's policies. Center-left foreign policy experts aren't evil, they're just wrong. They're creatures of bureaucratic and educational institutions that are invested in interpreting rather straightforward events in specialist terms that aren't at all appropriate for the context of the Middle East. So Ahmadinejad's speeches that Israel should be wiped off the map are understood in these foreign policy circles as power grabs by domestic Iranian hardliners rather than as declarations that Ahmadinejad will nuke Israel just as soon as he can. Now of course, many experts will concede that it's both - but then they go right on suggesting policy on the basis of this 'sophisticated' insight rather than on the obvious understanding that anyone can take away from the speech (because if you based policy on what everyone can see, why would we need experts?)
During the Clinton years, the assumption of Iranian moderation had center-left foreign policy experts insisting on engagement - the idea was that the Clinton administration would show the Iranian people that the US was not their enemy, and they would in turn win more moderates to their cause by showing that the US is not Iran's enemy. The center-right said that what liberals were calling moderation wasn't moderation – but that even if Khatami was a moderate (which he most certainly wasn't), the mullahs were in control of everything. So according to the center-right, regardless of whatever subtle current elites could extrapolate from the ratio of headlines in Iranian newspapers, the US should act as if the hardliners are going to be in charge for a long time. And of course it turned out that the people emphasizing Iranian fanaticism over moderation were right - Iran used the 90s to build the literal foundation of their nuclear program, then when they were ready engineered an election to put an Islamist face back on the regime.
But the siren call of 'sophistication' is a strong incentive to keep 'decoding' Arab and Muslim statements as something other then their plain meaning. So Hamas's refusal to recognize Israel becomes a result of internal triangulation between West Bank Palestinians, leaders in Damascus, and funders in Iran - as opposed to evidence that Hamas really wants to wipe out Israel. The elitist mistake isn't that the triangulation isn't happening - of course, that's a small part of what's going on. The mistake is in thinking that this dynamic is what's determining the behavior. The mistake (in this case) is thinking that triangulation is what's causing Hamas's refusal – rather than the triangulation being an echo or result of the triangulation. The consequence is that they end up recommending policies that address triangulation by encouraging Israeli concessions, hoping thereby to get to Hamas's refusal. But Hamas's hatred of Israel is ideological not tactical, and so Israel's concessions are pocketed and ignored – to the confusion of insightful experts.
Democratic foreign policy teams played this game with Arafat for a decade:
Arafat is still appointing people who are involved in terrorism to security positions? It's because he is trying to bolster his credibility against Hamas.
Arafat is still talking about redeeming Jerusalem with the blood of martyrs? It's his strategy for holding off opponents in Fatah.
Arafat is still promising refugees they'll be able to march into Tel Aviv? It's because he needs their support.
Arafat is still publishing schoolbooks advocating the murder of Jews? It's because he has to work within the limitations of Palestinian anti-Semitism.
And all of the explanations that they gave were technically true. Arafat was trying to bolster his credibility against Hamas, he did want to dominate Fatah, he did need the prisoners' support, and he did have to work with Palestinian anti-Semitism. But he was also doing those things because he was on the side of terrorists, wanted to conquer Jerusalem militarily, and intended to see refugees marching into Tel Aviv, and wanted people to murder Jews. Foreign policy elites become invested in the ability to discuss the minutia of Middle East calculations they miss the general tone, direction, and intention of Arab and Muslim leaders and populations. It's not a matter of being mistaken, it's a matter of separating elites from non-elites by their ability to pick up on trivia - and then using the ability to recognize trivia as a sign of elitism. Symptomatic of this collective intellectual back-patting:
SF Chronicle on Arab organizations that want to wipe out Israel: "Hezbollah, which based in Lebanon, and Hamas, based in Palestinian areas, are very different organizations"
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace arms control expert Lee Feinstein on 'Axis of Evil': "These are three very different countries here"
CSIS security expert Daniel Benjamin on 'Islamofascism': "There is no sense in which jihadists embrace fascist ideology... The people who are trying to kill us, Sunni jihadist terrorists, are a very, very different breed".
What Benjamin actually meant is that, based on his in-depth knowledge of Mussolini's fascism and jihadism, he can list hundreds of small differences between the two. And we're quite sure that he can. But of course, there is a very significant sense in which jihadists do embrace fascism: they link the ascent of market forces to the loss of cultural hegemony, insisting that this era was marked by and can only be restored through a renewed emphasis on conquest and honor.
30 seconds on Wikipedia make Benjamin's statement that "there is no sense" in which jihadists are fascists outright embarrassing:
A recent definition is that by former Colombia University Professor Robert O. Paxton: "Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion...
1. a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond reach of traditional solutions; 2. belief one’s group is the victim, justifying any action without legal or moral limits; 3. need for authority by a natural leader above the law, relying on the superiority of his instincts; 4. right of the chosen people to dominate others without legal or moral restraint; 5. fear of foreign 'contamination'"
A year ago, Ahmadinejad gave a speech a relatively typical speech. It's impossible not to line it up, almost paragraph by paragraph, to rhetoric of community decline and humiliation – or to notice his emphasis Islamic crises, his justifications for the annihilation of Israel is justified, his suggestions that Khomeini was a leader whose instincts allowed him to see things no one else could, his glorification of global Islamic conquest, and his characterizations of Israel and the West as contaminating Islamic land and minds .
We are in the process of an historical war between... [the West] and the Islamic world, and this war has been going on for hundreds of years... the Islamic world has been in retreat... Arrogance turned the regime occupying Jerusalem into a bridge for its dominance over the Islamic world...
Today the Palestinian nation stands against the hegemonic system as the representative of the Islamic Ummah [nation]... many people are trying to scatter grains of desperation and hopelessness regarding the struggle between the Islamic world and the front of the infidels, and in their hearts they want to empty the Islamic world...
When the dear Imam [Khomeini] said that [the Shah's] regime must go... people who claimed to have political and other knowledge [asked], 'Is it possible [that the Shah's regime can be toppled]?' [and]... we have, for 27 years, been living without a government dependent on America... [Khomeni] said: 'The rule of the East [U.S.S.R.] and of the West [ U.S. ] should be ended.' But the weak people who saw only the tiny world near them did not believe it [the U.S.S.R. would collapse... [Khomeni] said that Saddam [Hussein] must go, and that he would be humiliated in a way that was unprecedented... today [Hussein]... is now being tried in his own country...
[Khomeini] said: 'This regime that is occupying Qods [ Jerusalem ] must be eliminated from the pages of history'... The issue of Palestine is not an issue on which we can compromise. Is it possible that an [Islamic] front allows another [country] to arise in its [own] heart?... The people who sit in closed rooms cannot decide on this matter. The Islamic people cannot allow this historical enemy to exist in the heart of the Islamic world.
Oh dear people, look at this global arena. By whom are we confronted? We must understand the depth of the disgrace imposed on us by the enemy, until our holy hatred expands continuously and strikes like a wave.
This speech is literally the second hit when you search 'iran president ummah' - you don't even have to know who the President of Iran is. You just need two minutes, Wikipedia, and Google to know that anyone who claims that there is "no sense" in which jihadists are fascists has missed something very essential in the jihadist mentality
Now, there's a slim chance that Benjamin's statement "there is no sense in which jihadists embrace fascist ideology" was restricted to the more specific "Sunni jihadism" that he talks about in other contexts (in other words, he was leaving open the possibility that Iranian Shiite jihadism can be accurately termed Islamofascism). But then it would awfully dishonest for him to imply that Bush was simplistic, since Bush's speech was in the context of both Sunni and Shiite Muslim terrorists and regimes. Besides, it would still be missing the emphasis on the unity of the ummah, on Western contamination, on Muslim humiliation, and on redemption through violence that's prevalent in Sunni jihadism.
The problem with center-Left foreign policy elites is that they're so professionally, academically, and personally invested in the utility of decades of specialized study that, when policy-making time comes, they overemphasize the utility of that knowledge. And so they're not unaware of what everyone can obviously see and hear - they just tend to put too much emphasis on their own, more specific domains of expertise. And so making generalizations based on surface appearances is ridiculed as 'simplistic' (one more Google search: Juan Cole's site on "simplistic": 50 hits. Want to bet how many have to do with conservatives missing differences between different Muslim sects that don't really make a difference?) The crucial point - the point where conservatives differ from liberals - is that often the obvious surface appearances are what determine the direction a situation or crisis will take.
So while it's true speeches about the honor and glory of attacking Israel, given to adoring Arab and Muslim crowds, sometimes involve subtle signals to diplomats sitting in obscure post-national European cities. But it's also true that those speeches are about the honor and glory of attacking Israel - and policy should be based on the latter, not the former. Similarly, the existence of subtle signals embedded in a speech doesn't change the brute reality that a crowd responded to that speech with wild cheers of "Death to Israel" - and similarly, policy should be based on the latter not on the former. Just because everyone can see the threats and the cheering doesn't mean that they aren't the most important things to notice - very famously, the Arabs aren't Arabists. They aren't communicating with the West by coded telegram, where a Hamas leader screaming "we will liberate all of Palestine" is suddenly a sign of moderation because yesterday a different Hamas leader declared "we will liberate all of Palestine from the river to the sea". And if you don't believe that foreign policy elites think that way, go back and read the newspapers from right after the Palestinian elections - when some of this country's best minds were desperately trying to find any possible justification for why the Palestinian public was open to peace with Israel.
At the risk of sounding trite, decisions on foreign policy really are made by the people in the room. When someone asks 'is there any reason why we shouldn't pressure Israel to give Hamas concessions', there has to be someone in the room who believes that a majority of Palestinians elected Hamas because Hamas wants to wipe out Israel. And there has to be someone that thinks that, in light of this, the peace process is hopeless and Israel can only be safe if they go in and physically degrade terrorist infrastructure. If the 6 or 7 people in the room all think that Hamas was elected because Palestinians were fed up with corruption and poverty, then no one speaks up and twenty minutes later the Israeli Prime Minister gets a call that more or less links US aid to Israel halting an anti-terrorism operation. Play that out in your mind again, but this time instead of Israel giving Hamas concessions make it the US giving Iran time to negotiate on nuclear inspections (not to worry - we're sure that 'the students' will attack Iran's Heavy Water Reactor for us).
One last time: this isn't an issue of intention, it's an issue of how ideology and sensibility effects what information foreign policy elites think is relevant. Democratic Presidents, Senators, and Representatives get their information and recommendations from people who genuinely believe that Palestinian terrorists are blowing themselves up because of a 'cycle of violence'. They therefore recommend that Israel cease being violent, on the assumption that it will break the cycle. This is not just a misunderstanding of Palestinian intentions - it is a symptom of a flawed approach to figuring out the motivations of people who are seeking nuclear weapons to detonate in the heart of Western cities.
UPDATE: We really can't keep up. We've been referred to this article by Virginia Tilley that attacks people who suggest that Ahmadinejad wants to wipe out Israel. The lede is...
In this frightening mess in the Middle East, let's get one thing straight. Iran is not threatening Israel with destruction. Iran's president has not threatened any action against Israel. Over and over, we hear that Iran is clearly "committed to annihilating Israel" because the "mad" or "reckless" or "hard-line" President Ahmadinejad has repeatedly threatened to destroy Israel But every supposed quote, every supposed instance of his doing so, is wrong.
... which is weird, cause we were pretty sure that the speech we quoted was clear:
The issue of Palestine is not an issue on which we can compromise. Is it possible that an [Islamic] front allows another [country] to arise in its [own] heart?... The people who sit in closed rooms cannot decide on this matter. The Islamic people cannot allow this historical enemy to exist in the heart of the Islamic world
But apparently he was talking about "the government of Israel and its system of laws". Clearly, that's what he was talking about ("Death to Israel" = very subtle). Believe it or not, though, that's not the best part of the article. Nor is the best part of the article the part that justifies his Holocaust denial because, in the Muslim world "fogginess about the Holocaust traces more to a sheer lack of information" - and we know that's not true, since they seem to have enough information to correctly draw swastikas. Anyway, enough buildup. Money graf:
Mr. Ahmadinejad made other statements at the Organization of Islamic Countries that clearly indicated his understanding that Israel must be treated within the framework of international law. For instance, he recognized the reality of present borders when he said that "any aggressor should go back to the Lebanese international border". He recognized the authority of Israel and the role of diplomacy in observing, "The circumstances should be prepared for the return of the refugees and displaced people, and prisoners should be exchanged."
Flat out, no. The statement "any aggressor should go back to the Lebanese international border" is a statement that Israel should get out of Lebanon and leave behind the soldiers that Hezbollah kidnapped – the opposite of treating Israel within the framework of international law. The statement "the circumstances should be prepared for the return of refugees and displaced people, and prisoners should be exchanged" is a statement that Israel should free terrorists and allow millions upon millions of the most hostile elements of the 1948 and 1967 refugees to flood the country – exactly the opposite of recognizing the authority of Israel.
Of course, this is a little unfair. Tilley's not a foreign policy expert by any means – it seems like 'hack' would be a reach for her. She does have a book from UMich press, so theoretically we could lump her in with the foreign policy establishment, but fairness dictates otherwise. Still, she is typical of that establishment in her style of denying obvious intentions by referencing tiny and irrelevant details.
This isn't some vast conspiracy - it's literally about what's being said in the Oval Office in the 10 minutes when a decision is being made. And this isn't about Democratic foreign policy experts being traitors. Coulterism aside, the vast majority of Democrats really do think that the policies they recommend are more likely to make the world safe than the other side's policies. Center-left foreign policy experts aren't evil, they're just wrong. They're creatures of bureaucratic and educational institutions that are invested in interpreting rather straightforward events in specialist terms that aren't at all appropriate for the context of the Middle East. So Ahmadinejad's speeches that Israel should be wiped off the map are understood in these foreign policy circles as power grabs by domestic Iranian hardliners rather than as declarations that Ahmadinejad will nuke Israel just as soon as he can. Now of course, many experts will concede that it's both - but then they go right on suggesting policy on the basis of this 'sophisticated' insight rather than on the obvious understanding that anyone can take away from the speech (because if you based policy on what everyone can see, why would we need experts?)
During the Clinton years, the assumption of Iranian moderation had center-left foreign policy experts insisting on engagement - the idea was that the Clinton administration would show the Iranian people that the US was not their enemy, and they would in turn win more moderates to their cause by showing that the US is not Iran's enemy. The center-right said that what liberals were calling moderation wasn't moderation – but that even if Khatami was a moderate (which he most certainly wasn't), the mullahs were in control of everything. So according to the center-right, regardless of whatever subtle current elites could extrapolate from the ratio of headlines in Iranian newspapers, the US should act as if the hardliners are going to be in charge for a long time. And of course it turned out that the people emphasizing Iranian fanaticism over moderation were right - Iran used the 90s to build the literal foundation of their nuclear program, then when they were ready engineered an election to put an Islamist face back on the regime.
But the siren call of 'sophistication' is a strong incentive to keep 'decoding' Arab and Muslim statements as something other then their plain meaning. So Hamas's refusal to recognize Israel becomes a result of internal triangulation between West Bank Palestinians, leaders in Damascus, and funders in Iran - as opposed to evidence that Hamas really wants to wipe out Israel. The elitist mistake isn't that the triangulation isn't happening - of course, that's a small part of what's going on. The mistake is in thinking that this dynamic is what's determining the behavior. The mistake (in this case) is thinking that triangulation is what's causing Hamas's refusal – rather than the triangulation being an echo or result of the triangulation. The consequence is that they end up recommending policies that address triangulation by encouraging Israeli concessions, hoping thereby to get to Hamas's refusal. But Hamas's hatred of Israel is ideological not tactical, and so Israel's concessions are pocketed and ignored – to the confusion of insightful experts.
Democratic foreign policy teams played this game with Arafat for a decade:
Arafat is still appointing people who are involved in terrorism to security positions? It's because he is trying to bolster his credibility against Hamas.
Arafat is still talking about redeeming Jerusalem with the blood of martyrs? It's his strategy for holding off opponents in Fatah.
Arafat is still promising refugees they'll be able to march into Tel Aviv? It's because he needs their support.
Arafat is still publishing schoolbooks advocating the murder of Jews? It's because he has to work within the limitations of Palestinian anti-Semitism.
And all of the explanations that they gave were technically true. Arafat was trying to bolster his credibility against Hamas, he did want to dominate Fatah, he did need the prisoners' support, and he did have to work with Palestinian anti-Semitism. But he was also doing those things because he was on the side of terrorists, wanted to conquer Jerusalem militarily, and intended to see refugees marching into Tel Aviv, and wanted people to murder Jews. Foreign policy elites become invested in the ability to discuss the minutia of Middle East calculations they miss the general tone, direction, and intention of Arab and Muslim leaders and populations. It's not a matter of being mistaken, it's a matter of separating elites from non-elites by their ability to pick up on trivia - and then using the ability to recognize trivia as a sign of elitism. Symptomatic of this collective intellectual back-patting:
SF Chronicle on Arab organizations that want to wipe out Israel: "Hezbollah, which based in Lebanon, and Hamas, based in Palestinian areas, are very different organizations"
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace arms control expert Lee Feinstein on 'Axis of Evil': "These are three very different countries here"
CSIS security expert Daniel Benjamin on 'Islamofascism': "There is no sense in which jihadists embrace fascist ideology... The people who are trying to kill us, Sunni jihadist terrorists, are a very, very different breed".
What Benjamin actually meant is that, based on his in-depth knowledge of Mussolini's fascism and jihadism, he can list hundreds of small differences between the two. And we're quite sure that he can. But of course, there is a very significant sense in which jihadists do embrace fascism: they link the ascent of market forces to the loss of cultural hegemony, insisting that this era was marked by and can only be restored through a renewed emphasis on conquest and honor.
30 seconds on Wikipedia make Benjamin's statement that "there is no sense" in which jihadists are fascists outright embarrassing:
A recent definition is that by former Colombia University Professor Robert O. Paxton: "Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion...
1. a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond reach of traditional solutions; 2. belief one’s group is the victim, justifying any action without legal or moral limits; 3. need for authority by a natural leader above the law, relying on the superiority of his instincts; 4. right of the chosen people to dominate others without legal or moral restraint; 5. fear of foreign 'contamination'"
A year ago, Ahmadinejad gave a speech a relatively typical speech. It's impossible not to line it up, almost paragraph by paragraph, to rhetoric of community decline and humiliation – or to notice his emphasis Islamic crises, his justifications for the annihilation of Israel is justified, his suggestions that Khomeini was a leader whose instincts allowed him to see things no one else could, his glorification of global Islamic conquest, and his characterizations of Israel and the West as contaminating Islamic land and minds .
We are in the process of an historical war between... [the West] and the Islamic world, and this war has been going on for hundreds of years... the Islamic world has been in retreat... Arrogance turned the regime occupying Jerusalem into a bridge for its dominance over the Islamic world...
Today the Palestinian nation stands against the hegemonic system as the representative of the Islamic Ummah [nation]... many people are trying to scatter grains of desperation and hopelessness regarding the struggle between the Islamic world and the front of the infidels, and in their hearts they want to empty the Islamic world...
When the dear Imam [Khomeini] said that [the Shah's] regime must go... people who claimed to have political and other knowledge [asked], 'Is it possible [that the Shah's regime can be toppled]?' [and]... we have, for 27 years, been living without a government dependent on America... [Khomeni] said: 'The rule of the East [U.S.S.R.] and of the West [ U.S. ] should be ended.' But the weak people who saw only the tiny world near them did not believe it [the U.S.S.R. would collapse... [Khomeni] said that Saddam [Hussein] must go, and that he would be humiliated in a way that was unprecedented... today [Hussein]... is now being tried in his own country...
[Khomeini] said: 'This regime that is occupying Qods [ Jerusalem ] must be eliminated from the pages of history'... The issue of Palestine is not an issue on which we can compromise. Is it possible that an [Islamic] front allows another [country] to arise in its [own] heart?... The people who sit in closed rooms cannot decide on this matter. The Islamic people cannot allow this historical enemy to exist in the heart of the Islamic world.
Oh dear people, look at this global arena. By whom are we confronted? We must understand the depth of the disgrace imposed on us by the enemy, until our holy hatred expands continuously and strikes like a wave.
This speech is literally the second hit when you search 'iran president ummah' - you don't even have to know who the President of Iran is. You just need two minutes, Wikipedia, and Google to know that anyone who claims that there is "no sense" in which jihadists are fascists has missed something very essential in the jihadist mentality
Now, there's a slim chance that Benjamin's statement "there is no sense in which jihadists embrace fascist ideology" was restricted to the more specific "Sunni jihadism" that he talks about in other contexts (in other words, he was leaving open the possibility that Iranian Shiite jihadism can be accurately termed Islamofascism). But then it would awfully dishonest for him to imply that Bush was simplistic, since Bush's speech was in the context of both Sunni and Shiite Muslim terrorists and regimes. Besides, it would still be missing the emphasis on the unity of the ummah, on Western contamination, on Muslim humiliation, and on redemption through violence that's prevalent in Sunni jihadism.
The problem with center-Left foreign policy elites is that they're so professionally, academically, and personally invested in the utility of decades of specialized study that, when policy-making time comes, they overemphasize the utility of that knowledge. And so they're not unaware of what everyone can obviously see and hear - they just tend to put too much emphasis on their own, more specific domains of expertise. And so making generalizations based on surface appearances is ridiculed as 'simplistic' (one more Google search: Juan Cole's site on "simplistic": 50 hits. Want to bet how many have to do with conservatives missing differences between different Muslim sects that don't really make a difference?) The crucial point - the point where conservatives differ from liberals - is that often the obvious surface appearances are what determine the direction a situation or crisis will take.
So while it's true speeches about the honor and glory of attacking Israel, given to adoring Arab and Muslim crowds, sometimes involve subtle signals to diplomats sitting in obscure post-national European cities. But it's also true that those speeches are about the honor and glory of attacking Israel - and policy should be based on the latter, not the former. Similarly, the existence of subtle signals embedded in a speech doesn't change the brute reality that a crowd responded to that speech with wild cheers of "Death to Israel" - and similarly, policy should be based on the latter not on the former. Just because everyone can see the threats and the cheering doesn't mean that they aren't the most important things to notice - very famously, the Arabs aren't Arabists. They aren't communicating with the West by coded telegram, where a Hamas leader screaming "we will liberate all of Palestine" is suddenly a sign of moderation because yesterday a different Hamas leader declared "we will liberate all of Palestine from the river to the sea". And if you don't believe that foreign policy elites think that way, go back and read the newspapers from right after the Palestinian elections - when some of this country's best minds were desperately trying to find any possible justification for why the Palestinian public was open to peace with Israel.
At the risk of sounding trite, decisions on foreign policy really are made by the people in the room. When someone asks 'is there any reason why we shouldn't pressure Israel to give Hamas concessions', there has to be someone in the room who believes that a majority of Palestinians elected Hamas because Hamas wants to wipe out Israel. And there has to be someone that thinks that, in light of this, the peace process is hopeless and Israel can only be safe if they go in and physically degrade terrorist infrastructure. If the 6 or 7 people in the room all think that Hamas was elected because Palestinians were fed up with corruption and poverty, then no one speaks up and twenty minutes later the Israeli Prime Minister gets a call that more or less links US aid to Israel halting an anti-terrorism operation. Play that out in your mind again, but this time instead of Israel giving Hamas concessions make it the US giving Iran time to negotiate on nuclear inspections (not to worry - we're sure that 'the students' will attack Iran's Heavy Water Reactor for us).
One last time: this isn't an issue of intention, it's an issue of how ideology and sensibility effects what information foreign policy elites think is relevant. Democratic Presidents, Senators, and Representatives get their information and recommendations from people who genuinely believe that Palestinian terrorists are blowing themselves up because of a 'cycle of violence'. They therefore recommend that Israel cease being violent, on the assumption that it will break the cycle. This is not just a misunderstanding of Palestinian intentions - it is a symptom of a flawed approach to figuring out the motivations of people who are seeking nuclear weapons to detonate in the heart of Western cities.
UPDATE: We really can't keep up. We've been referred to this article by Virginia Tilley that attacks people who suggest that Ahmadinejad wants to wipe out Israel. The lede is...
In this frightening mess in the Middle East, let's get one thing straight. Iran is not threatening Israel with destruction. Iran's president has not threatened any action against Israel. Over and over, we hear that Iran is clearly "committed to annihilating Israel" because the "mad" or "reckless" or "hard-line" President Ahmadinejad has repeatedly threatened to destroy Israel But every supposed quote, every supposed instance of his doing so, is wrong.
... which is weird, cause we were pretty sure that the speech we quoted was clear:
The issue of Palestine is not an issue on which we can compromise. Is it possible that an [Islamic] front allows another [country] to arise in its [own] heart?... The people who sit in closed rooms cannot decide on this matter. The Islamic people cannot allow this historical enemy to exist in the heart of the Islamic world
But apparently he was talking about "the government of Israel and its system of laws". Clearly, that's what he was talking about ("Death to Israel" = very subtle). Believe it or not, though, that's not the best part of the article. Nor is the best part of the article the part that justifies his Holocaust denial because, in the Muslim world "fogginess about the Holocaust traces more to a sheer lack of information" - and we know that's not true, since they seem to have enough information to correctly draw swastikas. Anyway, enough buildup. Money graf:
Mr. Ahmadinejad made other statements at the Organization of Islamic Countries that clearly indicated his understanding that Israel must be treated within the framework of international law. For instance, he recognized the reality of present borders when he said that "any aggressor should go back to the Lebanese international border". He recognized the authority of Israel and the role of diplomacy in observing, "The circumstances should be prepared for the return of the refugees and displaced people, and prisoners should be exchanged."
Flat out, no. The statement "any aggressor should go back to the Lebanese international border" is a statement that Israel should get out of Lebanon and leave behind the soldiers that Hezbollah kidnapped – the opposite of treating Israel within the framework of international law. The statement "the circumstances should be prepared for the return of refugees and displaced people, and prisoners should be exchanged" is a statement that Israel should free terrorists and allow millions upon millions of the most hostile elements of the 1948 and 1967 refugees to flood the country – exactly the opposite of recognizing the authority of Israel.
Of course, this is a little unfair. Tilley's not a foreign policy expert by any means – it seems like 'hack' would be a reach for her. She does have a book from UMich press, so theoretically we could lump her in with the foreign policy establishment, but fairness dictates otherwise. Still, she is typical of that establishment in her style of denying obvious intentions by referencing tiny and irrelevant details.
