A Different Kind of Cluelessness

Billmon speaks, I listen. On a day when he admits that he agrees with Rush Limbaugh, Billmon references an article in the WaPo which opens with"blatant, obscene lie"

For the past month the United States has worked urgently to end the violence that Hezbollah and its sponsors have imposed on the people of Lebanon and Israel.

Billmon, a giant in the eyes of this blogosfan, offers a gem of a post today called A Different Kind of Cluelessness, Part II. Normally I try to quote selectively, but sometimes I get so overwhelmed by his wise word-smitherey that I feel compelled to quote his work in its entirety. So here goes... read it and be educated.

In which George Will demonstrates that he's more out of touch than the neocons he criticizes:

The [administration] official is correct that it is wrong "to think that somehow we are responsible -- that the actions of the jihadists are justified by U.S. policies." But few outside the fog of paranoia that is the blogosphere think like that.

Note the straw man Will uses to try to knock down the straw man set up by his anonymous neocon. This is intended to distinguish himself from those who do think U.S. policies are, at least in large part, responsible for the rise of the jihadis. He's turned us into the functional equivalent of Ward Churchill and sentenced us to wander for eternity in the "fog of paranoia."

I think we can best describe this as the "pseudo-realist" approach to foreign relations. Will wants us to understand that he's a hardheaded guy and doesn't buy into Shrub's democracy illusion. But that doesn't mean he's willing to let go of his illusion, which is that the United States has been a beneficient force in the Middle East, virtuously upholding "stability" for the benefit of all -- the proverbial cop on the beat.

The truth, of course, is quite different. The United States has tried to enforce stability in the Middle East because until Commander Codpiece came along foreign policy elites and American presidents alike viewed it as inherently in our interests to do so -- to protect the flow of oil, keep the Soviets out of the region, open markets to Western capital, and keep the Arab-Israeli conflict from getting out of hand.

However, this most emphatically was not done for the benefit of the people of the Middle East. It was for our benefit, and, secondarily, for the benefit of the colonized elites who transferred their loyalties -- or at least their services -- to America after the old colonial powers exited the region.

You can argue (imperialists almost always do) that the masses benefited from this stability because it created security, promoted economic growth and improved living standards. The British crown tried that same argument on the American colonists in the 1770s with a notable lack of success -- and they were all Englishmen. But there is some validity to it.

However, our stability fetish (and our commercial interests) also required us to do business with brutal dictators and/or prop up corrupt feudal elites -- many of them little more than rent-seeking parasites perched on oil fields disguised as countries. Where authentic or semi-authentic nationalist movements appeared -- in Egypt, for example -- we either tried to crush them or buy them off, and usually managed to do one or the other.

We also encouraged our "friends" in the region to Westernize themselves, to abandon or at least dilute their Islamic identities and become part of the globalized culture of capitalism (not that they needed much encouraging). As the energy importance of the region increased and the penetration of Western capital and culture deepened, so did the level of U.S. intervention -- always in the interests of that precious stability.

It may sound like I'm just reciting the plot from Syriana. But these were real policies, deliberately pursued over many years. And they were, by and large, extremely successful -- both for us and for our clients in the region. They were, however, abhorrent to the fundamentalist, anti-colonial Islamic movements (like the Muslim Brotherhood) that had existed in the region since the days of the British and the French. And they became increasingly abhorrent as our political and military presence in the region expanded and our alliance with Israel became increasingly open-ended. Abhorrence turned to rage as our campaign to contain Saddam degenerated into a long, grinding seige of Iraq (with the Iraqi people trapped inside) and the CIA and the Pentagon helped our Egyptian puppets crush the Islamist revolt on the upper Nile.

Did these policies "justify" the rise of the jihadist movement? Ah, that's a moral argument and Will should know that realists -- real realists, unlike his pseudo variety -- don't do morality. All that's necessary is to recognize that the jihadis regard themselves as fully justified, and are acting on that belief. Like all policies, our relentless promotion of stability in the Middle East had a price, and now we're paying it.

In that sense, if no other, America is "responsible" for the rise of what Shrub likes to call Islamofascism. His own rhetoric about democratization (a.k.a. the "forward strategy of freedom") implicitly recognizes this. It's an effort, albeit a hopelessly naive and contradictory one, to address a problem that Will has decided simply doesn't exist -- that is, outside the blogosphere's "fog of paranoia."

So who's the realist and who's the fool here? Or rather, who's the bigger fool?