Liberal Hawk Down (Page 3)

By refusing to make this basic distinction between Arab nationalists and Islamists, Berman demonstrates the same disastrous, willful ignorance that led the Bush Administration into Iraq in the belief that by overthrowing the Baath they would also strike a mortal blow at Islamist terrorism. This applies with even greater force to the failure of Berman and others to make the critical distinction between Shiite and Sunni Islam, and between the different national agendas of Iran and various Arab states.

It is bad enough that most of the American public is incapable of making this distinction, without the error being actively encouraged by so-called experts. In consequence, the Bush Administration may be stumbling toward an attack on Iran's nuclear program that could have the most disastrous consequences for Iraq, Afghanistan and the entire American position in the Middle East--without even a truly serious national debate taking place in the United States on the subject of US-Iranian relations.

This brings me to the parallel drawn by Berman, Pipes and others between the war on terrorism and the cold war. There are indeed very useful lessons to be learned from the cold war, but they are diametrically opposed to the ones presented by these authors. The cold war was indeed an ideological struggle waged across much of the world against a range of "Communist" opponents. These opponents, however, differed immensely among themselves, and a belated recognition of this was central to America's eventual victory.

The Communist movements all shared a basic ideological hostility to Western capitalism but differed greatly in their degrees of ideological fanaticism and in their different and often mutually hostile national sentiments and interests. A good many Communists either started as enemies of the United States and then became allies, or need never have been enemies in the first place, as in Ho Chi Minh's case. American policy toward Vietnam was characterized by the demonization of all Communists as irredeemably fanatical and hostile to the United States, the imposition on an alien culture and tradition of rigid American ideological paradigms uninformed by serious local research, and the lumping of all Communists into one undifferentiated enemy camp. We know the consequences.

Given the threat posed by Al Qaeda and its Sunni extremist allies to virtually every state and elite in the Muslim world, and given the savage divisions between these forces, the Shiite tradition and secular Arab nationalists like the Baath, there was a cornucopia of opportunities after September 11 to seek Muslim allies in the war on terrorism. From this point of view, for the Bush Administration to have succeeded in uniting Shiite radicals, Baath die-hards and Sunni extremists in Iraq; to have invaded Afghanistan and Iraq while simultaneously threatening Iran and Syria; and to have alienated both Turkey and Saudi Arabia--this almost defies description. It is a kind of baroque apotheosis of geopolitical cretinism.

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