Cowboy letters continued...

My friend Jonathan has produced another entry for the cowboy letters. This one's a tour de force. It's too long for the commenting system, so I will post it below. Everyone in America with the slightest inclination to search our souls about who we are and what we're doing ought to read this.

And I want to refer to a couple of related items I've read in the last few days that seem to be related to what Jonathan says, especially so since in a post to come, Deep Blade Journal will be endorsing the "imperfect" messenger of peace, John Kerry, for president.

The first is Alexander Cockburn's excoriation of "Kerrycrats" deluded into thinking electing Kerry would be a move toward world peace. Cockburn writes,

voting for John Kerry now is like voting for LBJ in 1964 with full precognition of what he was going to do in Vietnam for the next four years. By all means vote for the guy if you think your ballot will really count in keeping Ralph Nader out of the White House, but don't do so with the notion that all along John Kerry has been holding a secret withdrawal plan close to his chest and that his first three months in office will see the US Marines haul down the colors from the US embassy in Baghdad, scoop Ambassador Negroponte off the roof and head for home.

That's not what Democrats do when they get into office. When they settle down in the White House and put up the portraits of Teddy Roosevelt and Harry Truman in the Oval Office, they settle down to fight the usual good fight of all Democratic presidents, which is battling the slur that they are wimps, and less than real men.

The other is an item from The Angry Arab highlighting an endorsement of John Kerry by the National Jewish Democratic Council. Please read through the endorsement and tell me you don't think Jonathan has some really good points about treatment of Arabs as something less than human -- as violent insects worthy of summary squashing. ("FACT: John Kerry has clearly supported Israel's right to target Hamas leadership for assassination.") Might as well call them "cockroaches", as the truculent, extreme-right AM-radio host Michael Savage regularly does.

Along with that, we who endorse Kerry as the only way to prevent ratification of the horrors of Bush -- which is the main reason Deep Blade endorses Kerry -- must heed what Cockburn says and afford no honeymoon for Kerry by assuming a new administration will immediately begin working for peace, or ever begin so, without strong pressure. Jonathan implies that this kind of pressure is weak in our society, and that most middle Americans actually react with quite the opposite impulse. Yes. Can't argue with that for now. But we don't stop trying.

Despite what Jonathan says, we should hope that some moderation becomes possible if we can enter a Kerry era. We have to have that hope at this moment, don't we? Most Americans, for all their reactive jingoism, deep down have decent hearts that usually are reachable with the right communication. The media fog makes this very, very difficult. That's why people with a peace orientation need to continue expanding the excellent alternative media that we already have right now! Look at the left pane of this blog. All is not hopeless!

We know moderation never will be possible with Bush in office. This is where Cockburn fails. "Bush" does not appear anywhere in his piece, and he writes as if Kerry offers nothing redeeming, no peace perspective, and no progressive values. This clearly is false, as Rodger Payne well articulates.

So, we know what we are doing with Kerry. As Jonathan writes, we know the picture is not pretty. Relations and conditions on this planet hang by fine threads that may or may not into the future continue supporting civilization itself. Maybe people do not understand just how tenuous these threads are, how solutions other than violent ones are possible, or even the true results and backlashes of the violent solutions now being pursued.

Thomas Friedman recently wrote about the perceptions of "JIA" in the Arab/Muslim world:

Our communications in Iraq have been so inept since we arrived, many Iraqis still don't know who America is or why it came. But such talk is also indicative of a trend in the Arab media, after a century of Arab-Jewish strife, where if you want to brand someone as illegitimate, just call him a "Jew." Indeed, this trend has widened since 9/11. Now you find a steadily rising perception across the Arab-Muslim world that the great enemy of Islam is JIA - "Jews, Israel and America," all lumped together in a single threat.

This wider trend has been fanned by Arab satellite TV stations, which deliberately show split-screen images of Israelis bashing Palestinians and U.S. forces bashing the Iraqi insurgents.

While Friedman reduces this to a communication problem, Jonathan tells us that something much deeper is happening. Americans have images of aircraft striking buildings in our minds, while Muslims see JIA crushing their children with bullets and aerial-launched 500-lb bombs. Everybody's perception of what it means to be human is under assault, and vengeance becomes the dominant motive behind all action.

These are tough issues. Surprises are in store for us, as escalation is sure to occur in the context of increased competition for global resources, especially oil. Jonathan's letter follows...

Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 14:55 -0500 From: Jonathan Subject: Re: Cowboys continued

Hi Jeff and Eric,

Thanks for your long, thoughtful reply. As I re-read my original comments to you, I realized that they too were written in a Sox-induced haze. I don't know that I have the time to totally re-write them -- I too have papers to grade, and also a presentation to prepare, and Game 4 is tonight. But I would like to clarify a few things.

I didn't mean to go as far as you seem to have thought I did in implying a takeover by fundamentalists in the Islamic world - although it is interesting listening to Ben talk about what his Islamic Studies prof has to say about the internal dynamics of discussion right now in the Islamic world, even the intellectual community. US actions appear to make it very difficult for moderates to have any credibility. But let's keep going there. Exactly the same dynamic is at play in the US -- "terrorists" or freedom fighters or radical islamists or whatever you care to call them (and we can't call them all the same thing) undermine US "moderates" by their actions. I call for understanding them as people and then they behead someone and, for most Americans, all discussion is off.

Or, more properly understood, our response to their actions undermines the discussion of moderates. First, it needs to be recognized that the American public's response to what is happening is first and foremost an emotional one, not a policy response, a logical response, whatever. It is anger, which is a mask for fear and confusion. Even Kerry, if his publicists are to be believed, first reacted with anger to 9/11. And for the most part we have stayed in that state ever since. (There is a fascinating song by John Farrell, who was biking across New England on 9/11 and the aftermath, who says that at first people reacted with profound sadness and a joining together in grief, and it was the politicians who surfaced, and then channeled the anger. But wherever it came from, it's what we've got now.) This anger has been the defining characteristic of the public response ever since and has framed the debate and frames our policy choices.

But we must go a step further. The anger led to a very particular conclusion -- that the people who did these acts (and who continue to do acts that leave most Americans horrified, confused, and fearful) are "evil," that they live to kill, that they have, in essence, no human soul. Now, this is interesting considering Bush's theology - hate the sin, love the sinner doesn't seem to apply here. But the consequence is that the "enemy" is less than human. Non-human. Perhaps even anti-human. Listen to Bush talk about the "terrorists." Listen to the words he uses to describe them, and how often he does so. Now, we can argue about lots of elements of Iraq policy, but his portrayal of them as being unhuman is not on the table as negotiable - it is widely accepted by all sides, not directly, but implicitly. Some additional evidence. Remember back to post-9/11 and the cartoon portrayals of Al Qaeda and the Taliban as vermin? Around here anyway, the going political cartoon image was that of a rat in a cave. What do we do with rats? Or remember Susan Sontag's attempt to think about why this might have happened in the pages of the New Yorker? Never have I seen any essay so roundly, so violently, condemned. These are not people whose motives we need to think about. These are vermin, anti-life, what is it Bush says, "they love death."

Now I don't know a lot about the Islamic world so I'm not going to say much about that side of things. But my limited information suggests that our actions are becoming widely seen there as being as despicable as we see whoever the hell the opposition is in Iraq. And at least among Al Qaeda, we are as much caricatures of human beings as we make of them.

So what are the consequences of this? Here is where I turn to the Israel-Palestinian example. In both lands the possibility of peacemaking seems to have been destroyed, for various reasons perhaps. But they are locked into place by a belief that the other is some sort of vermin. I don't know if they use that imagery. However, each action by the other both re-confirms that anti-human portrayal of the opposition and justifies the next atrocity by their own side, which of course confirms for the other side how they're nonhuman and justifies their atrocity. A never-ending spiral of violence and, and, a never-ending spiral of confirmations of their own rightness and the other's implacable evil. In this perception of the situation, the only ways out would appear to be to kill all the others, or perhaps to build a really, really big wall.

Note also that both sides in the "global war on terror" or the "jihad" or whatever identify very strongly with their counterpart in that struggle - many Americans say we should be like the Israelis, and many in the Middle East appear to be coming to see themselves as "we are all Palestinians."

This is the "death dance" of which I wrote. It's not just about Iraq, it's the whole dynamic of the actors and the persuadables in each region. Is that a "clash of civilizations?" I don't know about that - although I would say that Lewis and Hitchens and Huntington's portrayals of the dynamics of that clash are laughably racist. But it is two societies, each very complex, but each being driven by an intertwining and self-perpetuating dynamic towards greater and greater caricaturization of the other , and thereby greater and greater willingness to use the most horrific ends towards each other. Look at what the Israelis and Palestinians are able to do to each other now. And look what we're able to do to "terrorists/vermin." The scariest thing about Abu Ghraib is not that it happened, it is the acceptance of it. Why was it so possible to accept it? Partly because we are living in fear, and people will do damn near anything to keep themselves alive. But partly because the other side has been dehumanized.

It is classic conflict escalation. Go to Civil Disobedience Training 101 and learn about how conflict escalates. That's exactly where we are.

So here I place [this] quote from Aaron Miller about the current state of degradation between Israelis and Palestinians: "He who is wet is not afraid of the rain." Both sides are ready to dish out and subsequently absorb as much pain and suffering as need be because that is that state in which they are already living.

Are we headed there?

And until somehow this living out of anger and dehumanization is either soothed or challenged, the policy options will be few. Notice that Kerry can't even say that we need to improve relations with the Islamic world. Sucking up to terrorists? You pointed this out too Jeff.

Jeff, by the way, I have absolutely no disagreement with your argument in support of Kerry. I'll vote for him, I'm working for him, we're ... out canvassing the streets of St Cloud.

But let's go back to what Kerry can and can't say. This is not just an electoral politics problem. This same dynamic will constrain his choices if/when he gets elected. His actions will be constrained by this world of perceptions. He must know that there's no resolution to any of this as long as we are blind adherents to the Israeli Likkud line. But he also knows that he can't sustain any other policy politically, and not just because of the Jewish lobby in the US. ALso because Americans have come to identify themselves with the Israelis, that the Israelis wear the white hats and those dirty Palestinians wear the black hats. How can you not be on the good guys' side? THere are real policy consequences to this stunted, deformed intellectual terrain.

And one other thing -- if I gave the impression that we need to stay the course in Iraq, I didn't mean to. Frankly, I don't know what the hell to do, and here's why: Morally, no question in my mind that we have a responsibility to the people of Iraq to clean up our mess. Geostrategically, an Iraq in the kind of chaos we're seeing now is actually much worse than stability under Saddam. So on some level yes, it makes sense to stay.

However, that assumes that by staying we can achieve a better outcome than we can achieve by leaving. I don't know if that's true. The dynamic in Iraq appears to be that we are the major trigger of the violence. Geez, I heard an Iraqi feminist a couple of weeks ago on the radio who was appalled by terrorism but insisted on calling the "insurgents" "freedom fighters." That suggests that as long as we stay, the violence will get worse. Militarily, the only answer to this is actually to escalate, to, say, triple the number of troops. Now I don't think that's even militarily possible given the current force structure. But even if it were, I think it's an open question as to whether we can kill and imprison our way to stability in Iraq. I think the dynamic may be that each of our "successes" breeds at least as many new opponents as we killed. Let's not even discuss the morality of that option. 40 years ago we tried to destroy villages in order to save them. It doesn't sit very well.

So in reality the choices are to leave or to see what happens if we escalate. I expect whoever gets elected to escalate -- we've just seen the start of the killing -- because the costs of leaving are clearly incredibly large so "failure is not an option" We might as well try escalating because we don't know for sure that we'll lose if we go that route. But I don't really expect escalating to succeed.

My analysis, for what it's worth, is that the choice is merely how we want to lose, not whether we lose or not. I have not heard anyone suggest a strategy that actually leads to winning, except that somehow elections in January will be a silver bullet. We're hoping that if we hang on long enough, stability will come. Where is the sign that this is happening? Will elections in January actually transform things? Will the new government have credibility and power? We'll kill like hell from Nov. 3 to the Iraqi elections and hope that they transform the landscape. If the elections don't, we're sunk. Nobody has any other viable strategy.

So I think it's entirely possible that we'll end up leaving just because nothing we do works. Hope I'm wrong, for the sake of the people of Iraq. Will that be a disaster for the people of Iraq, for the Middle East, for America geostrategically? Yes, perhaps even the greatest foreign policy disaster ever to befall this country. But will it be less of a disaster to stay in Iraq until the last Iraqi who isn't on the CIA payroll is slaughtered?