What’s The Phrase I’m Looking For?
Aaron L. Friedberg, one of Norman Podhoretz’s hired goons, tries to defend neoconservatism from Francis Fukuyama’s apostacy. In the process, he …well, he lies:
Neoconservatives…have been inclined instead to draw sharp distinctions between democratic and non-democratic states. For them, authoritarian regimes are not merely distasteful but demonstrably unreliable and untrustworthy.
What’s the phrase I’m looking for?
“Oh, wait, wasn’t she a great big fat person?” Nah, where did that come from?
“Eat shit and die, you fuckety fucking fucktard”? Nah, but we like it. Save it for later.
Wait. How about “Sadly, No!?” Aha! That’s the ticket:
In an article titled “Dictatorship and Double Standards” that appeared in Commentary magazine in 1979, [Jeane] Kirkpatrick connected global Soviet expansion with local Third World revolutions in a causal relationship. She claimed that Third World revolutions were illegitimate since they were products of Soviet expansion, rather than local historical forces fighting repressive dictatorships.
Kirkpatrick then drew a distinction between two kinds of dictatorships: left-wing (totalitarian) and right-wing (authoritarian). The difference, she argued, was that totalitarian dictatorships were incapable of reforming from within and so needed to be overthrown forcibly from without, whereas authoritarian dictatorships were open to internal reform, which could be tapped through constructive engagement.
This essay gained neoconservatism entree to the Reagan Administration; indeed, it single-handedly got Kirkpatrick her job as St. Ronnie’s rep to the U.N.
It’s more than a little tiring to keep reading about how neoconservatives are these idealistic, revolutionary, democracy-loving, do-gooders who only want to better the condition of the huddled, if sullen, dusky masses throughout what used to be called the third word. If this line is true, then it’s a new thing and should be stated as such: through the Kirkpatrick Doctrine, neoconservatives excused or even praised US collusion with anti-democratic client states including Suharto’s Indonesia, Apartheid South Africa, Pinochet’s Chile, Marcos’s Philippines (until the relationship became untenable; when Marcos fell, neocons and St. Ronnie were quick to take credit for the Aquino government they’d so long opposed), the Shah’s Iran and, yes yes, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Clearly, neocons didn’t always find authoritarian regimes distasteful, unreliable or untrustworthy.
Though neoconservative attitudes to Iraq did indeed change, their capacity for weaseling-around fundamental double standards has remained the same. The “new line” is not new.
In actual fact, neocons are morally-depraved, reactionary, imperialist hacks; they were in Kirkpatrick’s heyday and they are now. How they accomplish such a good press — how they fool the press as to the true status of their condition — is not only through a Straussian misrepresentation of their history but moreso, by a misrepresentation of the true distinctions by which they judge “good” and “bad”. They would have everyone believe that their moral calculus is based on the democracy vs. dictatorship criterion. Actually, their geopolitical-moral calculus is based on a Pro-U.S., Pro-Israel vs. Anti-U.S., Anti-Israel criteria — all in all based not on high-minded ideology, but rather on the homely trinity of nationalism (hence the blood drawn by Fukuyama’s recent fulminations against neocon “American Exceptionalism”), religious sectarianism (muslims are eeeevil), and tribalism (dusky Arabs are the eternal enemies of White Anglos and Jews). Neoconservative democracy concerns are a sham, a bit of window-dressing, albeit window-dressing skillfully enough wrought to fool our legions of idiots in the press.
Two things happened since the 80s: Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden ceased being “Our Sons Of Bitches”, and the socio-economic phenomenon of “Jihad Vs. McWorld” began to take shape — bin Laden being emblematic of the worst of “Jihad”, its terrorist wing; Hussein, embarassingly for neocons and their precious Bush administration, not so much so.
By the same token, some things have remained the same since the 80s: the neoconservative desire to construct a monolithic enemy bent on world domination and allegedly incapable of reforming itself (a little “gotcha” unfortunately little remembered nowadays: when the Wall fell in 1989, Norman Podhoretz and other neocons shrilly declared, like Admiral Ackbar in Return of the Jedi, “it [was] a trap!”, a ploy of the Evil Empire) unless “helped” by the US Army, the neocon penchant for nauseating grandiosity and fear-mongering, and the neoconservative habit of papering-over their true geopolitical aims with the rhetoric of sweet idealism.
As a case in point, how often did one, pre-2005, hear a democracy-loving neocon protest our alliance with the authoritarian dictatorship in Uzbekistan? Michael Kinsley asked a similar question, which inspired self-described “neocon fellow-traveler” Christopher Hitchens to sneer that, well, okay, there may be a bit of Kirkpatrickian hair-splitting at work in the Bush-neocon willingness to collude with dissident-boiling Uzbek dictator Islom Karimov while at the same time making all-out war with Saddam Hussein, but, somehow, the “irony” of it all was mostly at the expense of the anti-war Left’s position, and besides, Hussein and Karimov are not moral equivalents. Then there’s Stephen Schwartz — who in Kristolmethodist pages can write, with a straight face as it were, “good riddance to dictators” — but also has propagandized in favor of Karimov’s democracy-thwarting activities. These are but examples. Of course the excuses couldn’t be sustained after Karimov’s May 2005 crackdown including the Andijan Massacre. So the neocons are now in a grace period whereby they dispatch articles like Schwartz’s to the memory hole; soon, if Karimov turns his attention away from abusing his own people to abusing our “interests”, look for a flowering of deeply-held, principled neocon concerns for Uzbek democracy. Along the same lines, if Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan decides to quit his position of the U.S.’s most favored client-dictator, look for the neocons to “care” about Pakistani democracy.
Of course neocons also protest the U.S. alliance with Saudi Arabia, in this case rightly (if often in their intemperate-to-the-point-of-insanity way — if the U.S. were to atomically render Mecca a sea of glass, the resulting radioactive glow could not match the resulting intensity of Norman Podhoretz’s smile). But isn’t the Saudi autocracy a rightwing, capitalist, “authoritarian” regime therefore worthy of a diplomatic rapport? Buh buh buh buh, says Kirkpatrick. Others reply that Saudi Arabia’s religious condition renders it “totalitarian” rather than “authoritarian”, so it may require American military power to reform it. Regardless, if a legitimate, self-determining democracy were to ever rule Saudi Arabia, it’s most likely to have the same effect on “democracy-loving” neoconservatives as Palestine’s recent elections of Hamas has had.
Though any human (or neocon) can say that the election of Hamas was stupid and irresponsible, one can’t say that it was illegitimate. Part of being pro-democracy is to acknowledge that democracies can behave stupidly and irresponsibly (look, after all, at some of the menacing idiots we have elected). Oh, but that’s different!, neocons are saying — and will say. Already the egregious, Godwin-defying attacks are being levelled (“Well, Hitler was elected, too”). Much the same attitude is exhibited regarding the democratically-elected Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. So much for neocon love of democracy. How to weasel out of this latest double standard?
By championing American moral exceptionalism — the backbone upon which Kirkpatrick’s essay was built. Basically it argued that the United States was not engaging in immoral statecraft by supporting horrible rightwing dictators worldwide or by otherwise employing soft or hard imperialism, because the U.S. is Good, while the leftist insurgencies against these dictatorships were irrevocably tainted because they were often — but by no means always — supported by the brazenly imperialist Soviet Union which was Bad. Hence the neocon buzzphrase “moral equivalence”, used as a rhetorical acid to throw in the faces of Western Leftists who questioned the ethics of the U.S’s support for murderous rightwing assholes worldwide: when the Lefties would ask why we would try to be just as bad or worse than the Russians in this regard, the neocon reply was to the effect that the very question itself was immoral, no matter how nasty the U.S. was behaving, no matter how many legitimately democratic movements we were helping to destroy. Naturally the dividends from this facet of neocon “intellectualism” betrayed its bias in the fact that neocons weren’t really idealists but instead were the ugliest sort of nationalists. (Indeed, the neoconservative hatred of International Law is based on this very bias: International Law by its nature tries to enforce single-standards for everyone, the U.S. included.)
The real concern to neocons is that the democracy in question is pro- or anti-American (or -Israel). And whatever new excuse they come up with to finesse their latest instance of double standard-bearing with regard to democracies, it will rest on the same nationalist underpinning as the Kirkpatrick Doctrine, disguised with a new false distinction (maybe the new “authoritarian vs totalitarian dictatorships” will be “liberal vs. illiberal democracies”).
One thing is certain: what is guaranteed to continue is neoconservative war-mongering.
Although in the days of detente neoconservatives often attacked Henry Kissinger (and always from the Right; he was never quite bloodthirsty enough for them, which is all you really need to know), they greatly resemble him in basic morality. The essential difference between neoconservatism and Kissingerian realism is not due to some high-minded idealism of the former, but rather due to neoconservatism’s greater love of aggression and its gift for manufacturing intellectual veneer. If Kissingerian realism can be described as pragmatically amoral, neoconservatism can be defined as aggressively immoral; if these schools-of-thought can be analogized to WB cartoon characters, Kissingerian realism is the menacing but practical Elmer Fudd, while neoconservatism is more like the spastically aggressive Tasmanian Devil or the explosively jingoistic Yosemite Sam. Francis Fukuyama was right to, if not quite bring himself to side with the Bugs Bunnies and Daffy Ducks of the Left, at least distance himself from the cartoonish supervillains of the neocon Right.
Does this make John Aravosis Foghorn Leghorn?
(RETARDO lurves me!)
Did you win the Koufax for Most Humorous Blog? Sadly, No! You were the runner-up, though. I voted for you, if that helps.
That was a sexy, sexy rant.
Now, just say something mean about the utter disingenuousness of Kevin Phillips kvetching about how “the religious Right has taken over the Republican party” when he’s the bastard who brought it about in the first place with his Southern Strategy, and I’m yours for life!
Well, maybe not really. But it was still a Really Good Rant.
Damn, this is a great post. I’m going to link to you, which may send you another 5-10 readers…
1. Who are the neo-cons? Everyone talks about them but nobody is willing to stand up and say IR1.
2. Why is the whole world full of lies, bs, and more lies? I’d give my left nut if just once, somebody, somewhere, would get up tell the plain fucking truth about anything, just once.
3. They need to quit calling them all conservatives and just tell it like it is. Mutant, life sucking, jolly don’t give a rip about anybody but ourselves party of obnoxious dried out asshole suckubusses.
They actually do believe in democracy.
Specifically, they believe in the Milton Friedman version of democracy, aka “free market, free trade, laize-faire economic policy conducive to foreign [read: U.S.] investment.” Because Friedman’s argument was that political democracy was dependent on what Orwell called “economic liberty” (that is, the freedom to buy, sell, and exploit), they believe it counts as a pass to claim “economic democracy” means a power inequality in the economic sphere, which is directly in opposition to the egalitarian principles of democracy.
At best, the freedom to rip each other off is secondary to functioning political democracy, and it’s more often outright hostile, particularly in poor countries (though economic inequality very likely exerts a tremendous distorting effect on U.S. policies). Essentially, they’re saying you get to vote so long as you don’t fuck with the money, and that’s democracy.
But they’re even hypocritical on that point, as they had no problem letting Pinochet’s government keep the copper, so long as they bought shiny new M16’s with it.
People will eventually make whole careers out of analysing and writing about just what neo-conservatism was and just exactly how it come off the spools and turned into one the greatest failures of a political movement in a long time, but I’ll advance just a kernel of my thinking on this that comes from a good 5 years of observing them closely…
Neo-cons strike me as really, really dumb. Not run of the mill dumb, but aggressively, verbosely, tenaciously dumb. A baffling combination of weak intellect, inexperience with the real world and a sollipsism that leaves me speechless.
Many of them are stupid, but some of them are smart.
But they’re the really evil ones.
Bill Kristol is one of those….I saw him the other day on a panel with Bernard Henri-Levy discussing the latter’s book, and Kristol was going on and on about Platonic idealism and the Hegelian dialectic……..and then segued right into a monologue about how “intellectuals might think X, but he doesn’t know much about X, because he’s no intellectual”.
No intellectual? And he lectures people about GWF Hegel?
I swear to Bob, that man gives me the serious creeps.
The Vietnamese just didn’t understand that all we wanted to do was give them the gift of capitalism. We had to force it on them. At the tip of every bayonet. On the underside of every bomb. In the fine print of every defense contract. Written with the blood of 58,000 Americans and several million Vietnamese.
We did for their own good. It was tough love. We had to destroy the country in order to save it.
And we would have won, if it hadn’t been for the Liberal Media (TM).
(Do I have to label this as snark? Or is all the proper spelling a dead giveaway?)
BTW, equal opportunity hater here. The demon rats are no better. Dried out out rusty lemon peels. I won’t name names, pick your favorite destroyer of the planetoid and fill in the particulars for yourself. X out.
Many of them are stupid, but some of them are smart.
No, I think that’s just bookish…not really smart. Or maybe what I mean is wise. None of them strikes me as great intellects in any case, particularly Kristol, and he seems to be the pick o’ the litter. Then again, I’ve been conditioned to think of evil as essentially, banal and dumb, so maybe I’m biased.
Hmm, moral relativism…my enemy’s enemy is my friend…defense of extremism in pursuit of power…ZOUNDS! National Socialism!
i thought john”let’s reform the UN by voting against reforms” bolton was bad, but this kirkpatrick dame puts his anger-therapy-needing child-molester-moustache wearing ass to shame
The best analogy I can come up with for these people is a twisted kind of “poorly-written comic book” (think Rob Liefeld) morality:
We are the Good Guys (because the author says so). Anything We is do OK, because we are the Good Guys. In fact, Good is defined as “that which we choose to do.”
They are the Bad Guys. Anything They do is–by definition–Bad, even if it happens to be exactly the same thing We do. It’s Bad, because They are Bad Guys. The Author said so.
Maybe it’s worse than that: it’s more like “badly-run role playing game” morality: We are the player characters. We can do anything We want to, because nobody else is real.
Great post, Retardo. Just one request: could you please end one of your posts like this:
“KIRRRRRRK!”
I think that Kirkpatrick paper was specifically aimed at the Sandanista government in Nicaragua. Which, for all its many faults, was much much less bad than the Somoza dynasty of brutal plutocrats. The Somozas, of course, had been in power since the the 30s, when US marines fought a long guerilla war, trained the “National Guard” goon squad, and installed the first Somoza.
And of course the governments being backed by the US government in the 80s in Central America included the friendly death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala.
So, you see, the lying started right from the beginning.
Er, “Sandinista” not “Sandanista”. Sorry.
Dorothy, the sad thing is that large numbers of our religious looney fringe really do believe precisely that.
If you’re feeling sympathetic, you could always claim that it isn’t really their fault – their faith position demands it.
I’m just not feeling overly sympathetic lately.
solid post.
btw, it’s been argued by ppl smarter than i that the hamas victory had less to do with embracing hamas outright than selecting representatives that offered at least the resemblance of independence in the face of u.s./israeli meddling, a sort of protest vote.
I heard Negroponte sent death squads after the Girl Scout who tried to sell Reagan a box of Pecan Sandinistas.
What happened to all the dick jokes?
😀
Great essay.
Thanks for the love, y’all!
I’ll start working on that Kevin Phillips post right now, Jillian.
Teh, you make me all melty inside. And i’m still laughin at that Negroponte joke.
Retardo,
That was a really, really, historically well informed post. Thank you so much.
aimai
Great post RM.
(Looks at the site’s letterhead. Rescans post. Rechecks the URL.)
Hell, Yes!
That was a full cup-o-joe post right there. Reminds me of what a friend related to me about a month ago.
He had received a string of email forwards from a Right-minded friend, with the final one in the series relating the story of a man explaining to his son just why the US is in Iraq. The man in the story used the analogy of ‘If you see our neighbors being robbed, beaten, and raped, how does that make you feel?’. The boy in the story becomes angry and declares that he now understands why we’re in Iraq.
So my friend replied to that mail with a continuation of that story:
“But Daddy, by didn’t President Bush say that before we went to war? And why don’t we help the people in Uzbekistan and their neighbors? And what about the people in Sudan? And North Korea?”
“It’s late son. Brush your teeth and go to bed.”
So, if Fudd, Sam, and Taz correspond to the rightists and Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck to the left, what does Marvin the Martian correspond to? I guess, since he was an antagonist of Bugs (and also of Daffy Duck, as “Duck Dodgers in the 25 1/2 Century”) that Marvin would be like the kind of moderate corporate conservatives, often called corporate liberals back in the day, who were the Best and The Brightest and brought us the Vietnam War for our own good. I’m guessing Wile E. Coyote is actually Nixonian reaction?
Now where does the Chickenhawk fit into this…
The phrase you’re looking for is “shallow analysis.” Why is it then if Wolfowitz is such a blood thirsty nut that Adurrahman Wahid, rival of Suharto and a former Muslim cleric that was later to become Indonesia’s president, by his own account go up to him and befriend him after one of his last speeches as ambassador of Indonesia and remained friends with Wolfowitz to this day?
Why is it that if the Shultz/Wolfowitz wing weren’t purposely undermining Marcos, and if the “untenable” situation wasn’t a result of US prodding did Kissinger take an op-ed piece out of a newspaper and decry the policies that ended Marcos’ reign and, with respect to bringing democracy to the Philipines, wrote something like “Don’t we have any other overriding interests?”
The phrase you’re looking for is “shallow analysis.” Why is it then if Wolfowitz is such a blood thirsty nut that Adurrahman Wahid, rival of Suharto and a former Muslim cleric that was later to become Indonesia’s president, by his own account go up to him and befriend him after one of his last speeches as ambassador of Indonesia and remained friends with Wolfowitz to this day?”
Dunno. Maybe for the same reason that Eric Alterman felt sorry for him at that party.
Why is it that if the Shultz/Wolfowitz wing weren’t purposely undermining Marcos, and if the “untenable” situation wasn’t a result of US prodding did Kissinger take an op-ed piece out of a newspaper and decry the policies that ended Marcos’ reign and, with respect to bringing democracy to the Philipines, wrote something like “Don’t we have any other overriding interests?”
I suspect that Wolfy’s crew had already inquired through backchannels if the new government would be friendly with the US or would engage in some retribution that we deserved from propping up Marcos for so long, and recieved the answer they wished for. What you dont want to remember is that after the Begnino Aquino assassination, there was no way to hold back the forces against Marcos. He’d sealed his own fate. But until Marcos did that the US was glad to keep him afloat. Kissinger, being out of government, probably worried that there’d be hell to pay to our interests with Marcos gone. Wolfy, being in the know, didnt swaet this sort of thing knowing that he did how he and his fellow hacks could spin the regime change.
But if you want to continue being a pompous, dissembling fucktard then by all means, you’re welcome to.
But if you want to continue being a pompous, dissembling fucktard then by all means, you’re welcome to.
ummm, okay…
I suspect that Wolfy’s crew had already inquired through backchannels if the new government would be friendly with the US
So friendly in fact that it was under Aquino’s reign that a century of US military presence ended when the Phillipino Senate shut down the bases at Pampanga and Zambles. This is the sort of thing Kissinger feared despite being “out of the loop”, and clearly he didn’t think it was necessary to abandon Marcos just because Aquino was assasinated.
Funny though that when Wolfowitz was for intervening in Bosnia (along with–shock–Blair) and Iraq in the 90s, he wasn’t in government through most of it, which makes it somewhat difficult to argue that he was using government backchannels to secure US national interests. Perhaps you could explain what his alterior immoral national interest motive was for Bosnia?
I don’t claim that there were people in the US government that stood up for moral causes at every turn, anyone whose been in four or five administrations has been there because he has at times been able to convince his superiors that his proposed actions are in US national interest. Then again, the same could be said for UN Humanitarian Coordinators who get member states to fund their activities by convincing them that its in their national interest to do so (which is often how they get those countries to act).
You can, if you want, argue that being opposed to a democracy where the majority chooses to systematically cleanse a minority or wishes to wipe another country off the map is in fact hypocritical, but the reality is that a democracy that pursues those goals is liable to lose its soveriegnty under UN law, and supporting such a concept of democracy is likely to get you back where you started.
And for you to say that Kissinger was pragmatically amoral and not immoral is hilarious. This after all is the same Kissinger that pretty much gave the green light to Suharto’s adventure in East Timor by telling him right before the conflict that “whatever he does in East Timor needs to succeed quickly.” Awesome.
“So friendly in fact that it was under Aquino’s reign that a century of US military presence ended when the Phillipino Senate shut down the bases at Pampanga and Zambles. This is the sort of thing Kissinger feared despite being “out of the loop”, and clearly he didn’t think it was necessary to abandon Marcos just because Aquino was assasinated.”
And obviously Wolfy and the Reaganites considered this price a bargain, the bases expendable; obviously they gauged the cory aquino government as not substantively unfriendly, and they were right — they lost the hard accoutrements of imperial presence but maintained hegemony while gaining the ability to say “hey, see we dont like tyrants”, a valuable lie considering their other dealings with the Ayatollah, Hussein, Suharto, etc, that they had going at the same time or were to have going in a few years.
Did Wolfy and Kissinger think *identically* per each “crisis” or country? No. But that doesn’t mean that the former is this bleeding-heart democracy-lover, as his fans like to say, and that the latter is a uniquely malevolent thug. My point is that they more resemble each other than not.
Funny you bring up Kissinger’s behavior with regard to Timor. I addressed that in the post I linked to. Funny that there were no protests then from that well-connected bleeding heart Paul Wolfowitz, nor did he do anything later in his capacity as representative in Indonesia to rectify the moral imbalance.
As for my calling Kissinger amoral, I don’t know why you seem to consider this a compliment. IMO he deserves a cell in The Hague.
“You can, if you want, argue that being opposed to a democracy where the majority chooses to systematically cleanse a minority or wishes to wipe another country off the map is in fact hypocritical, but the reality is that a democracy that pursues those goals is liable to lose its soveriegnty under UN law, and supporting such a concept of democracy is likely to get you back where you started.”
It’s not that I or anyone can argue it’s hypocrisy. It *is* hypocrisy and those who deny it do so at their intellectual peril.
Even Hitchens for God’s sake has argued that Hamas will be forced into a position of responsibility with their election. And if they aren’t, and they take action on their rhetoric, then other nations can hold them accountable. Your protest betrays your internalisation of the stupid and inherently immoral pre-emption doctrine by which democratically-elected parties are condemned and their countries deemed worthy of top-down regime change from an extranational entity (the U.S.) just because you don’t like what you hear and don’t believe that any country anywhere should not like the United States or Israel. In short, you only allow for soveriegnty and self-determination when the results are to your liking. That’s a fair-weather democracy lover, and they deserve contempt just as fairweather sports fans recieve from genuine fans.
I like how you equate opposing a majority that “chooses to systematically cleanse a minority or wishes to wipe another country off the map” with not liking what you hear. Is Hamas actively pursuing those goals at the moment or even cable of achieving them? And when they are, I take it you would think it wrong to oppose such a democracy? …What I would say about Hamas is that if the US or EU found it objectionable to hand over cash to Hamas before the elections, not giving them cash even though they were selected by the majority is taken by some as “not respecting democracy.â€? Now do you think that’s the case, or would you see it as a case where the government is held accountable? By your account though, wouldn’t holding them accountable be a case where outsiders interfere with a country because “they don’t like what you hear?â€? What exactly is your position then?
In short, you only allow for soveriegnty and self-determination when the results are to your liking.
If to my liking means not committing genocide or not annexing neighboring countries, than yes, since those are precisely the sort things that will strip a country of its sovereignty. Consider this: if an intervention force invades a country in order to stop genocide, and after it does, it holds an election which results in the party responsible for the genocide being elected, should the intervention force allow the party to stay in power? Is that to your liking? Wouldn’t preventing that popular party from running be “undemocratic�?
Funny you bring up Kissinger’s behavior with regard to Timor.
Sure, let’s talk about Indonesia and East Timor. I’ll again point out that unlike your claim that Wolfowitz supported Aquino only when Marcos was doomed, Suharto’s main political rival befriended Wolfowitz almost a decade before the fall of Suharto. It was Wahid who by his own account said that Wolfowitz’s one speech invigorated the popular opposition, and it seems Wolfowitz didn’t pick the horse, the horse picked him. It was also Suharto who claimed in an interview several years after that speech, and while he was in still in power, that the one line in that one speech had caused him a lot of problems. I’m not claiming by delivering that one line Wolfowitz is responsible for the ousting of Suharto, I’m simply pointing out that he is in the curious position of being considered a Suharto apologist by some, and a loyal friend by the opposition.Like I mentioned before, my claim is not that Wolfowitz was a relentless human rights activist, but to go from that to say that there is no reason to prefer him over Kissinger is something else.
If you look at East Timor, Wolfowitz didn’t speak out against Suharto about the atrocities and is accused to have supported Indonesian military’s atrocities there. Then why is it, I wonder, that Jose Ramos-Horta the East Timorean Nobel Prize winner and foreign minister had said that he had met Wolfowitz during the Indonesian occupation of East Timor between 1986 and 1989 and welcomed his post at the World Bank, saying: “Those who have suspicions and reservations should not have them because Wolfowitz is very humane and sensitive.” You have to admit, it doesn’t quite add up. Do you think Ramos-Horta would say the same thing about Kissinger?
What exactly is your position then?
That it’s fine for another democracy to withdrawl aid. this is the kind of appropriate response to awful rhetoric. but, as per Fukuyama’s general point, such “soft” weapons aren’t macho enough for neo-cons. I take your position to be that it’s desirable for the US to unilaterally declare war on a country whose leadership has previously called for genocide or warmongering. Face it, you dont *want* to allow Hamas a chance to be responsible.
And as for actively suporting democracies that engage in intemperate rhetoric (an Israeli defense minister in the 80s said, “we wont be the first to use nuclear weapons.. and we wont be the second, either” also, it was the position of the Kach party and many in Likud that Palis were “Amelekites”, to be dealt with as the OT demanded — if this is not a call for genocide, there’s no such thing) and democracies that engage in, if not, thank god, active genocide, then ethnic cleansing (which is not necessarily murderous but is immoral; and yes that is the proper term for the policy of bulldozing evictions of Palis from their land in the name of Jewish settlements), and democracies that engage in either (if you believe that Pali problems are “internal”) bills of attainder (so horrible a legal concept that they are explicitly forbidden in our constitution) or assassinations of foriegn leaders (if you believe tha Pali problems are “external”), which are forbidden in America by executive order, then we’ve been doing that for a long time anyway, not to mention Hitchens’s old point, still very valid, that US support for the Israeli settlements amounts to a government funding of an establishment for religion, something that is explicitly forbidden by the first amendment — we’ve been doing all these things for years, thank you very much, though the pearl-clutching at Hamas’s rhetoric is touching.
IF Hamas makes good on their rhetoric, then it’s time for either Israel to deal with them via war a super-national entity to deal with them with force. Until then, deal with their rhetoric and STFU, is my position.
“If to my liking means not committing genocide or not annexing neighboring countries, than yes, since those are precisely the sort things that will strip a country of its sovereignty.”
really? if this is your interpretation of international law, i wonder if you’d mind if it was applied post facto? Or is what was okay in 1898 or 1948 for that matter no longer okay now because the US, at least, does not overtly annex neighboring territory anymore? (Of course Israel still does, but somehow THAT’S DIFFERENT.) When did it stop being okay? Could it be precisely when the US decided that hegemony in the form of military bases was preferable on a practical as well as PR scale to outright annexation?
Last night I found Sidney Blumenthal’s collection of 80’s essays. I’d forgotten just how silly the Reaganite line was toward the Philippines. Put another way, it was worse than i’d remembered in writing this essay. Reagan himself slagged Walter Mondale in the 84 debates in defense of Marcos’s latest “election”. This pro-Marcos line was echoed by Jeane Kirkpatrick in her columns, which typically excoriated the Left’s moral concerns with propping up dictators. Yet you guys still want the neocons to have been on a side of history they never were.