National Review
May 23, 2003

Middle East Tragedies
Pressing ahead is our only choice.
by Victor Davis Hanson

http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson052303.asp

The images are jarring, the hypocrisies appalling, the rhetoric repulsive.
Only in the Arab Middle East — and the Islamic world in general — are
suicide-murderers operating and indeed canonized, even blessed with cash
bonuses. An inveterate liar like Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf is lauded for his
defense of a mass killer like Saddam Hussein — and at last lampooned not on
moral grounds, but because his yarns about thousands of dead Marines are
finally exposed by the sound of American tanks rumbling his way. The last
gassings in the modern world — Nasser's in Yemen and Saddam's in Kurdistan
and Iran — were all Mideastern; so are promises of virgins in exchange for
bombing women and children.

Pick up any newspaper and the day's bombings, killings, and terror are most
likely to have occurred somewhere in the Islamic world. The big, silly lie —
Jews caused 9/11, the U.S. used atomic weapons against Iraq, Americans
bombed mosques — has been a staple of Middle East popular culture. The
hatred of Jews is open, unapologetic, and mostly unrivaled on the world
stage since the Third Reich.

I think the American street — and as we have learned in the case of anger
toward the French, there surely is such a thing — has finally thrown up its
hands with Arab ingratitude. Egyptian, Jordanian, and Palestinian recipients
of billions of dollars in American aid routinely reply by trashing the
United States, whether in the street, through government publications, or
via public declarations in Arab and European capitals.

In embarrassed response, we are tossed the old bone by their corrupt
leaders — "Ignore what we say publicly and look instead privately at what we
do." Arab apologists claim that triangulating with and backing off from the
only democracy in the region would win back their good graces; but we know
that such perfidy toward Israel would only win us contempt, as we were shown
to be not merely opportunistic, but weak and scared into the bargain as
well.

Shiites, once murdered en masse by Saddam Hussein, now turn on the American
and British liberators who alone in the world could do what they could not.
Iraqis, freed by us from their own home-grown murderers, in thanks now blame
us for not stopping them from robbing themselves. Our citizens are routinely
blown to pieces in Saudi Arabia or shot down in Jordan, even as we are told
that Americans — after losing 3,000 of their citizens to Islamist killers —
are not being nice to Arab students and visitors because we require security
checks on them and occasionally tail those with suspicious backgrounds.
Egyptians march and shout threats to America and the West — and then whine
that thousands in Cairo and Luxor are out of work because most over here
take them seriously, and choose to pass on having such unhinged people
escort them around the pyramids and the Valley of the Kings. Have all these
people gone mad?

The world is watching all this, and it is not pretty. After talking to a
variety of foreigners who do not necessarily share the American point of
view, I conclude that South Americans, Europeans, Asians, and Africans don't
much like what they see in the Middle East — and blame those over there, not
us, for the old mess.

The general causes of these Middle Eastern pathologies have been well
diagnosed since September 11, ad nauseam. The Arab world has no real
consensual governments; statism and tribalism hamper market economics and
ensure stagnation. Sexual apartheid, Islamic fundamentalism, the absence of
an independent judiciary, and a censored press all do their part to ensure
endemic poverty, rampant corruption, and rising resentment among an
exploding population. Siesta for millions is a time not for napping between
office hours, but for weaving conspiracies over backgammon.

Class, family, money, and connections — rarely merit — bring social
advancement and prized jobs. The trickle-down of oil money masks the generic
failure for a while, but ultimately undermines diversification and sound
development in the economy — as well as accentuating a crass inequality.
Autocracies forge a devil's bargain with radical Islamists and their
epigones of terrorist killers, from al Qaeda to Hezbollah, to deflect their
efforts away from Arab regimes and onto Americans and Israelis. All the talk
of a once-glorious Baghdad, an Arab Renaissance in the 13th century, or a
few Aristotelian texts kept alive in Arabic still cannot hide the present
dismal reality — and indeed is being forgotten because of it.

Millions in the Arab street now enjoy merely the patina of Western culture —
everything from cell phones, the Internet, and videos — but without either
the freedom or material security that create the conditions that produce
these and thousands of other such appurtenances. The result is that
appetites and frustrations alike arise faster than they can be satisfied
with available wealth — or constrained by the strictures of traditional and
ever-more-fanatical Islam. Americans now accept all this — and snicker at
the old Marxist and neocolonialist exegeses that the British, the Americans,
the French — or little green men on Mars — are responsible for the Middle
East mess.

Illegitimate governments — whether Arab theocracies, monarchies,
dictatorships, or corrupt oligarchies — rely on state police and their
labyrinth of torture and random execution to stifle dissent. Filtered
popular frustration is directed toward Israel and the United States — as the
martyrs of the West Bank are the salve for anger over everything from dirty
water to expensive food. Millions of Muslims collectively murdered by Saddam
Hussein, Milosevic, the Taliban, the Assads, Qaddafi, and an array of
autocrats from Algeria to the Gulf seem to count as nothing. Persecuted and
often stateless Muslims without a home in Kurdistan or Bosnia gain little
sympathy — unless the Jews can be blamed. It is not who is killed, nor how
many — but by whom: One protester in the West Bank mistakenly shot by the
IDF earns more wrath in the Arab calculus than 10,000 butchered by Saddam
Hussein or the elder Assad.

Before 9/11, the West in a variety of ways had been complicit in all this
tragedy, and either ignored the alarming symptoms — or, worse still, aided
and abetted the disease. Oil companies and defense contractors winked at
bribery and knew well enough that the weapons and toys they sold to despots
only impoverished these sick nations and brought the dies irae ever closer.
"If we don't, the French surely will" was the mantra when bribery, Israeli
boycotts, and questionable weapons sales were requisite for megaprofits.

Paleolithic diplomats — as if the professed anti-Communism of the old Cold
War still justified support for authoritarians — were quiet about almost
everything from Saudi blackmail payments to terrorists and beheadings to
mass jailings, random murder, and disfigurement of women. Political
appeasement — from Reagan's failure to hit the Bekka Valley after the
slaughter of U.S. Marines, to Clinton's pathetic responses to murdered
diplomats, bombings, and the leveling of embassies — only emboldened Arab
killers.

Judging magnanimity as decadence, the half-educated in al Qaeda embraced
pseudo-Spenglerian theories of a soft and decadent West unable to tear
itself away from thong-watching and Sunday football. Largess in the halls of
power in New York and Washington played a contemptible role too — as
ex-ambassadors, retired generals, and revolving-door lawyers created fancy
names, titles, and institutes to conceal what was really Gulf money thrown
on the table for American influence.

On the left, multiculturalists and postcolonial theorists were even worse,
promulgating the relativist argument that there was no real standard by
which to assess third-world criminality. And by mixing a cocktail of
colonial guilt and advocacy about the soi-disant "other," they helped to
create a politically-correct climate that left us ill-prepared for the
hatred of the madrassas. Arab monsters like Saddam Hussein sensed that there
would always be useful idiots in the West to march on their behalf if it
came to a choice between a third-world killer and a democratic United
States. More fools in the universities alleged that oppression,
exploitation, and inequality alone caused Arab anger — even as well-off,
educated, and pampered momma's boys like Mohamed Atta pulled out their
Korans, put on headbands, and then blew us and themselves to smithereens,
still babbling about unclean women in the last hours before their rendezvous
in Hell.

So the general symptomology, diagnosis, and bleak prognosis of this illness
in the Middle East are now more or less agreed upon; the treatment, however,
is not. Arab intellectuals — long corrupted by complicity with criminal
regimes, and perennial critics of American foreign policy — now suddenly
look askance at democracy, if jump-started by the United States. American
academics, who once decried our support for the agents of oppression, now
decry our efforts to remove them and allow something better.

What in God's name, then, are we to do with this nonsense?

We seek military action and democratic reform hand-in-glove to end Islamic
rogue states and terrorist enclaves — not because such audacious measures
are our first option (appeasement, neglect, and complicity in the past were
preferable), but because they are the last. Go ahead and argue over the
improbability of democracy in the Middle East. Reckon the horrendous costs
and unending commitment. Cite the improper parallels with Germany and Japan
until you are blue in the face. Stammer on that Baghdad will never be a New
England town hall.

Maybe, maybe not. But at least consider the alternatives.

Hitting and then running? Did that in Iraq in 1991 — and Shiites and Kurds
hated us before dying in droves; Kuwaitis soon forgot our sacrifice, and we
spent $30 billion and 350,000 air sorties to patrol the desert skies for 12
years. Afghans gave no praise for our help in routing the Soviets, but
plenty of blame for leaving when the threat was over.

Establish bases and forget nation-building? Did that too once, everywhere
from Libya to Saudi Arabia, and we still got a madman in Tripoli and 60,000
royal third cousins in Riyadh.

Turn the other cheek and say, "What's a few American volunteers killed in
Lebanon or the Sudan when the stock market is booming and Starbucks is
sprouting up everywhere?" Did that also, and we got 9/11.

Pour in money? Did that for a quarter-century; but I don't see that the
street in Amman or Cairo is much appreciative about freebies, from tons of
American wheat to Abrams tanks.

Get tough with Israel? Taking 39 scuds, pulling out of Lebanon, offering 97
percent of the West Bank, and putting up with Oslo got them the Intifada and
female suicide bombers.

The fact is that the only alternative after September 11 was the messy,
dirty, easily caricatured path that Mr. Bush has taken us down. For all the
reoccurring troubles in Afghanistan, for all the looting and lawlessness in
the month after the brilliant military victory in Iraq, and for all the
recent explosions in restaurants, synagogues, and hotels — we are still
making real progress.

Two years ago the most awful regimes since Hitler's Germany were the Taliban
and the Hussein despotism. Both are now gone, and something better will yet
emerge in their place. The American military has not proven merely lethal,
but unpredictable and a little crazy into the bargain — as if our generals,
when told to go to Baghdad or Kabul, nod yes and smile: "Hell, what are they
going to do anyway, blow up the World Trade Center?"

Two years ago the world's most deadly agent was an Arab terrorist; now it is
an American with a laptop and an F-18 circling above with a pod of GPS
bombs.

Two years ago nuts in caves talked about Americans who were scared to fight;
now the world is worried because we fight too quickly and too well. There
are no more videos of Osama bin Laden strutting with his cell phone trailing
sycophantic psychopaths. Yasser Arafat is no longer lord of the Lincoln
bedroom, but shuffles around his own self-created moonscape.

Two years ago Syria and Lebanon were considered sacrosanct hideouts that we
dared not enter — or so a sapling ophthalmologist from Syria threatened us.
Today we tell the custodians of terror there to clean it up or we will — and
assume that eventually we must.

Two years ago — and I speak from experience — faulting our corrupt
relationship with Saudi Arabia brought mostly abuse from hacks in suits and
ties in Washington and New York; now defending that status quo is more
likely to incur public odium.

Two years ago the Cassandra-like trio of Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, and
Fouad Ajami were considered outcasts by disingenuous but influential Middle
Eastern Studies departments; now they — not the poseurs in university
lounges and academic conferences — are heeded by presidents and prime
ministers.

No, we are making progress because we have sized up the problem, know the
solution — and have the guts to press ahead. No one claimed all this would
be easy or welcome. But like Roman senators of old with each hand on a fold
of the toga, we offer choices. We hope that there are still enough people of
good will and sobriety in the Middle East to rid themselves of the terrorist
killers, and thus select a freely offered, Western-style democracy over the
1st Marine Division, a 1,000-plane sky, and some 30 acres of floating
tarmac.

middleast tragedy is an oxymoron.  Unless something happens to one of our people, then it's a military "tragedy" or an "American tragedy".  If a bunch of fucking retarded religious zealots want to blow themselves and each other up, I say more power to ya.  Just let me know what I can do to speed things up.