If you caught
Newshour you saw Prof. Rashidi Khalidi offer up these lucid counterpoints to the Bushmishmash, namely today's utterly disgraceful news conference.
Sorry to quote at such length but I'm bowled over by actually hearing these things said out loud
anywhere after four years of la-la-land, but there's more riches to mine in the full transcript, which I have linked. I'll leave out the "nothing" part, as in exactly how much Iraq had to do with 9/11 and focus on the rabid inconsitencies in President George Wal-Mart Bush's world view.
First on the concept that a group like Hamas, which ascended to political power by a popular vote, is in opposition to the "march of democracy" Khalidi says:
The differences between the various movements he's talking about, the degree to which in -- certainly the case of Lebanon, Hezbollah, in the case of Palestine, Hamas, we're talking about elected groups that managed successfully to win elections leads to a kind of dissidence, in terms of the president's rhetoric about democracy.
People in the Middle East see these as whatever they may be doing vis-a-vis Israel, representative groups that bring forward the aspirations of their people. The fact that the president says these are groups that are against democracy makes people believe -- with, I think, some reason -- that the United States is absolutely insincere when it talks about democracy and tries to crush an elected government in Palestine and supports Israel in smashing Lebanon and weakening a democratic government there.
So I think the real threat to the United States is, frankly, the policies of this administration in the Middle East. I think it gravely endangers the security of this country in the long run, and I think it's going to be a very long time before we can resolve the problems, not just in Iraq, that were caused by this administration.
How about this one,
Well, I think one of the great structural problems in the Middle East is American intervention. We, in our support for Israel, created Hezbollah. Hezbollah didn't exist in 1982.
We have caused a failed state in Iraq. We have created a catastrophic situation which threatens regional security and which may well threaten our security in the long run, by what we have done in Iraq. It was a terrible, awful regime that attacked its neighbors, oppressed its people, but Iraq was nothing like the threat to regional security that that country is today.
We helped to incite a civil war in a country which had no particular history of direct sectarian violence. Yes, the Saddam Hussein regime had attacked the Kurds. Yes, it had attacked Shia revolutionaries in the south. But this is a country that has become a catastrophic failed state as a result of an American invasion.
Now, tying all of these things together, as the president does, to my way of think[ing] is, a, laughable; and, b, it's something that is, I believe, causing us serious problems. If we don't see the specificities of the Israeli occupation in Palestine or what has happened to Lebanon, not just because of Israel, not just because of us -- because of Syria, because of the Palestinian presence there, because of internal Lebanese problems -- if we don't see each of these things, in terms of its own specificity, and we go with the over-simplification of the president, we are really moving into a situation where there will be serious dangers to the United States in the long run.
Of course, Ralph Peters, a retired Colonel, was valiantly trying to put an administration spin on it but in response to Peters' accusation that Islam is "a failed civilization" try this on:
Before the United States was involved, there were deep, profound problems in the Middle East. One of the things I talk about in this book, one of those problems was external intervention.
This is the most strategically important region in the world. This is a region which, since the British discovered oil in Iran in 1901, has most of the world's oil reserves. The degree to which it has become a penetrated system -- Britain, Russia, later on the Soviet Union, France, Italy, Germany, and now the United States -- are a large part of the problem in that region.
To say that there's no indigenous problem would be false. Of course there are profound indigenous problems. I wouldn't put it in the kind of stereotypical terms that Colonel Peters has. Of course there are.
I'm suggesting that these things have been more than exacerbated by the United States. I'm suggesting that, if you try and talk about Palestine, which is a country, a people, a nation that's never had sovereignty, never had statehood, that has been under occupation by Israel ever since 1948, then you are -- and you ignore that -- you are trying to blame the victim, in essence. And I think that that's what Colonel Peters is doing.
I would finally say about Iraq, I think we should hope that the Iraqis succeed, but I think we should look very carefully at our own responsibility for creating the catastrophe that is Iraq, the responsibility of the United States. Iraq was a mess before the United States intervened, before the United States invaded, but we have created a dynamic that was not there before our invasion.
But the BEST quote of the night is owned by an editor for The Wall Street Journal who was on at the beginning of Wolf Blitzer's Situation Room tonight, who completely clarified the Iraq situation for us: He wouldn't say it's a civil war, but he admitted to a "lack of civil peace." I'm sure the survivors and refugees in Iraq will be comforted to know their situation wasn't cause by civil war, per se, but an unhealthy absence of civil peace.