A couple days ago I tried to
preempt inevitable moves by the Left which seek to deny Bush credit for Lebanon. The post was built around a quote from Druze leader Walid Jumblatt to the effect that Lebanon's democratic resistance to Syria is being inspired by Iraq. Celebrity Leftist blogger Juan Cole, reading the same quote, has a post this morning in which he announces to the world that he
remains unconvinced:
I don't think Bush had anything much to do with the current Lebanese national movement except at the margins... Jumblatt has a long history of anti-Israeli and anti-American sentiment that makes his sudden conversion to neoconism likely a mirage.
My problem with Cole isn't so much that he's wrong-minded, and I don't necessarily think he's disingenuous. I think that his ideology has so over-determined the way that he reads news that he could rationalize anything to deny Bush credit. What does bother me is that the way that he writes and argues is explicitly done in order to shut down debate: he frequently pulls the expertise card, and his readers then do the argumentative equivalent of putting their hands over their ears and shouting "I can't hear you" whenever someone tries to call them on what they somehow shamelessly refer to as facts. This in turn leads to, among other things, rampant anti-Israel and anti-American bias on the Left: of course readers of the Nation hate Israel and America if all they read about the West Bank is from the Nation! In Cole's case, the issue is particularly problematic: so much of the blogosphere is hackneyed and amateurish that even the gesture towards authority is a huge psychological boost. Cole plays on that, acting as the blogosphere's Edward Said: ostensibly translating and decoding complex Muslim history into contemporary problems in a way inaccessible to the uninitiated. The problem is that, in an age of politicized Middle East studies, Cole and his colleagues are little more than collections of conspiracy theories layered with self-righteous venom - barely more than Democratic Underground zombies with a rudimentary command of modern Arabic. That their work is considered scholarship undermines the crucially important task of education the American public about the Middle East. That their work is considered authoritative obliterates the possibility of educated, reasoned debate across the political spectrum about how to confront Islamofacism. The "facts" that Cole spews in this post are a perfect example of the type of corrosive approach that he has.
The most grating aspect of getting through many Juan Cole posts is having to slog through the pedantic yet banal history lesson at the beginning. You can just tell that he's so damn pleased with himself, and you know that his readers just love being able to say that they're reading someone who "really knows what's going on." Cole, of course, is a scholar of medieval Islam - which makes him eminently qualified to describe how the economic factors set in motion by sea-based Euro-Asian spice trading influenced the rise of the Ottoman Empire. It makes him less qualified to talk about things like democracy (another blogger might argue that spending your life studying Muslim history actually disables one from understanding the political, economic, and psychological effects of democratization, but I'll leave that to a blogger who's been accused of racism fewer times than myself).
But none of this stops his readers from insisting that he's an expert on all things Middle Eastern. And Cole feeds this perception through the kind of wearisome history lesson with which he begins this post. Admittedly, the first three paragraphs are a lesson on (wait for it) medieval Lebanon. All well and good, although the exact same lesson turns out to be available, well,
everywhere.
Believe it or not, Cole actually manages to become more of a pompous jackass after this stunt of trying to sell page 2 of an Encyclopedia Britannica entry as erudition. He then goes all Josh Marshall on us, with secret sources that we're supposed to be so in awe of that we don't question what they're actually saying (after all, anyone who has secret "sources" just has to be way more in than anyone else. How else would he have gotten secret sources?) Check out the hushed tone that this is conveyed in:
I have been told by a former US government official, the US CIA intervened covertly in the Lebanese elections to ensure that the Lebanese constitution would be amended to allow far-right Maronite President Camille Chamoun (1952-1958) to have a second term.
The cryptic passive voice. The shadowy gesture towards intrigue. The access to geopolitical visions. It's all here. It's also all publicly available at the Eisenhower Library, in a memo on a February 6 conversation between Charles Malik and President Eisenhower where they discuss CIA intervention in the election. How is it that one uncovers the same material that Cole's anonymous Lebanon source fed him? Must one undergo years of PhD training? Undertake rigorous archival work? Actually go so far as to check the footnotes of the Lebanon chapter in David Lesch's
The Middle East and the United States, where he sites the memo to say that the CIA "provided covert financial support to the campaigns of pro-Chamon candidates"?
Lesch's book, incidentally, is a standard undergraduate text in Middle East politics, but one can see their way to forgiving Cole for not knowing what the average third year poli sci student knows about contemporary Middle East diplomacy. In an age of regrettable academic specialization, contemporary politics is way, way outside the scope of Cole's expertise. He might do well to pick it up for some light reading: it's a good overview of where the field is, and it will prevent him from embarrassing himself in the future by spouting off common knowledge as privileged information.
This is just piling on, but if he had read the book he would have discovered that his dark implication that the CIA actually "rigged the election" is flatly false: classified documents from the time show that the CIA was in fact floored by the vote results. So either they got really drunk, rigged the election, and then forgot about it in the morning - or Cole vaguely remembers once reading about CIA involvement in the 1957 Lebanese elections and decided to try to boost his ethos by making up a CIA source (or he really does have a CIA source who doesn't really have enough clearance to read even declassified documents) But such are the dangers an academic courts when he attempts to impress the simple-minded by venturing beyond his field of expertise to make sweeping statements based on a fog of anti-American sensibilities and confused conspiracy theories.
Cole's history lesson continues with relatively minor fumbles (by which I mean that they can be written off as wrong-headed and intentionally misleading rather than personal failings exposed in his pathetic attempts to build ethos). There's some stuff about parliamentary maneuvering which is confused and tangled. He then says that:
In 1982 the Israelis mounted an unprovoked invasion of Lebanon as Ariel Sharon sought to destroy the remnants of the weakened PLO in Beirut. He failed.
The Israeli invasion has little if anything to do with the post, but why pass up a chance to demonize the Jewish state if you don't have to. Let's take a close look at this:
"In 1982 the Israelis mounted an unprovoked invasion of Lebanon..." : only true if you don't count Abu Nidal's assassination attempt of Israel's ambassador to the UK as "provocation".
"... as Ariel Sharon sought to destroy the remnants of the weakened PLO...": only true if you think "weakened" includes the 1974 Kiryat Shmona murders that left 18 apartment building residents dead, the 1974 Ma'alot invasion of a school that left 21 children murdered, the 1975 Savoy Hotel hostage crises that left 8 killed, the 1978 Coast Road bus massacre that left 35 dead and 100 injured, and the constant bombardment of Israel's northern cities. These atrocities also, incidentally, count as "provocation".
"...in Beirut...": only sounds true or significant if all you know about Israel comes from Al Jazeera - Prime Minister Begin ordered the IDF to expel the PLO from Southern Lebanon (from which they were conducting all the murdering, raiding, and shelling that weakened terrorists organizations are wont to do) in operation "Little Pines". That Defense Minister Sharon kept pushing into Beirut after the PLO scattered in operation "Big Pines" does not mean, as Cole would have it, that Israel originally was targeting Beirut
"...[where] he failed": only true if you count successfully expelling the PLO from Beirut as "failing" to successfully expel the PLO from Beirut. But at this point who's counting?
All this has been fun, but it doesn't get us to our main issue, which is the way in which Cole's ideological commitment to Bush-hating overrides what modicum of good sense that might have escaped his ideological commitment to Israel-hating (can't say "Jew-hating" because that is a tool used to silence legitimate dissent of Israel - even if it might turn out that in Cole's world every piddly-ass identity group is entitled to self-determination except Jews. That's a coincidence). Cole attempts to answer the Jumblatt quote that many people have used to tag Lebanon as a victory for Bush. Here's the full paragraph:
Walid Jumblatt, the embittered son of Kamal whom the Syrians defeated in 1976 at the American behest, said he was inspired by the fall of Saddam. But this sort of statement from a Druze warlord strikes me as just as manipulative as the news conferences of Ahmad Chalabi, who is also inspired by Saddam's fall. Jumblatt has a long history of anti-Israeli and anti-American sentiment that makes his sudden conversion to neoconism likely a mirage. He has wanted the Syrians back out since 1976, so it is not plausible that anything changed for him in 2003.
Wrong on the facts and wrong on the analysis. Wrong on the facts: Jumblatt has a long and complicated relationship with Syria built on, among other things, Arab nationalism. It was Syria who supplied him with the weapons that he used to slaughter over 1,000 Maronite Christians and displace another 50,000 in 1983. It was Syria who he strongly, explicitly, and openly supported throughout the 1980s, until they took over Beirut in 1990 and rewarded him with high ranking cabinet-level positions through 1996 (let's read Cole again: "[Jumblatt] has wanted the Syrians... out since 1976"). Wrong on the analysis: It is true that Jumblatt came out against Syria in 2000 - but he then backed off in the face of repeated intimidation and, in one case, a letter bomb directed at a Druze MK (Jumblatt called it out as terrorism, but he then went, cowed, to high-level meetings in Damascus). So what gave him and the Druze community the determination to now seek freedom even in the face of the intimidation that successfully cowed them in the past? Nothing more or less than the successful example of Iraqis standing up to the same kind of intimidation. In Cole's terms, millions of Lebanese have had a "sudden conversation to neoconism."
Cole will do and say anything to deny a victory to the dark, shadowy cabal of "neo-conservatives" (psst - he doesn't mean Presbyterian) that he talks about in every, single post. He's a lost cause. The shame is that the few people in the blogosphere reading him for genuine information might, because his crude conspiracy theory-laced narrative of Middle East history plays on their predispositions, actually come to believe that he knows what he's talking about. His misinformation harms dialogue and deliberation, and people's admiration no doubt gives him a warm and fuzzy feeling that no one as preposterous as him should ever be entitled to.
UPDATE: Special Bonus Brain Teaser. Cole asks:
"People in the region, in Europe, and in the US itself may begin asking why, if Syria had to leave Lebanon, Israel should not have to leave the West Bank and Gaza." Answer: Because Lebanon didn't start a war with Syria, invade Syria from its own territory, and then lose that territory to Syria.
