I was in another history discussion with my 24-year-old son last
week. He had just seen Bobby, about Robert Kennedy, and
was trying to catch up on what they didn’t teach him in school.
“I didn’t realize there were so many assassinations in those
days,” he said. “It seemed like every time you turned around
somebody else was getting shot. Why do you think it doesn’t happen
now?”
“The Internet” was the thing that popped into my head.
“Gee, I hadn’t thought of that,” he said.
I hadn’t thought of it either but now it didn’t sound completely
implausible. “It’s hard to remember, but in the 1960s there was a
vast chasm between the world of television and the world of
everybody else,” I ventured. “People didn’t have video cameras,
they didn’t have blogs, the only way to bridge that gap was through
spectacular acts of violence.
“The thing about those assassins was they were all complete
nobodies. None of them ever had political motivation. Sirhan Sirhan
claimed he shot Bobby Kennedy because of something he said about
the Palestinians but that was just rationalizing. He was just
another cipher who wanted his name in the papers. Marshall McLuhan
noted all those assassins had the same habit of cutting out
newspaper clippings and carrying them around in their wallets.
Killing a famous person was their way of saying ‘Here I am.’ Today
you can blog and do the same thing.”
“I guess Andy Warhol was right when he said, ‘In the future
everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes,’” he said.
True. And the same thing applies to tin pot dictators today.
RIGHT NOW WE’RE TRYING TO DECIDE whether to let Syria and Iran play
a role in the mess in Iraq. I think it’s worth remembering that in
many ways these people have the mind of assassins. And that offers
a clue of how to deal with them.
There are two things going on in the Middle East. First, the
Sunnis and the Shi’ia still hate each other as they have for the
last fourteen centuries. Second, everybody in the Middle East,
Sunni and Shi’ia alike, wants to get on TV. They feel like
second-class citizens of the world. What else was September 11
about except a nobody named Osama bin Laden wanting to get his name
in the papers? My first reaction was the same as everybody else’s
— Arab terrorists, what do they have to do with us? But that’s
just the point. We’re John F. Kennedy. They’re Lee Harvey Oswald.
It’s the chasm between us that invites assassination.
The Baker-Hamilton Report is urging us to bring Iran and Syria
into the process. President Bush and the neoconservatives are
resisting under the premise it would be humiliating for our
President to sit down with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Bashar al-Assad
as equals. But this is the same dilemma President Richard Nixon
faced when he pulled his brilliant opening to China. By swallowing
his pride and treating Mao as an equal, Nixon achieved two things
— he accomplished our policy objectives in the Far East and he won
the Vietnam War.
As Baron von Clausewitz wrote, “War is a continuation of
politics by other means.” The object of war is not to create
heroes. It is not to win spectacular battles. It is to pursue clear
political objectives.
What are our objectives in the Middle East? We want to create
stable, modern societies that do not spend all their time
slaughtering each other so that they eventually decide the only way
to resolve their differences is to obliterate Israel or burn down
buildings in the United States.
Our first impulse was to turn Iraq into a “Little America” with
its own Declaration of Independence and Constitution so it would be
“just like us.” That obviously isn’t going to work. But that
doesn’t mean we’ve failed or that there is no other avenue for
achieving our ends.
Calling together a huge conclave inviting Saudi Arabia, Egypt,
Syria, Iran and the Gulf States to participate in stabilizing Iraq
would accomplish two things: 1) it would put the Middle East in the
world spotlight, which is where they want to be, and 2) it would
give Iran, Syria, Egypt et al. a chance to act like mature nations,
which they just might do. Right now the Sunni and the Shi’ia never
talk about anything. All they do is quote the Koran, fund proxies
armies in each other’s countries, and rage about Israel and the
United States. Sitting down to help find a practical solution for
stemming the violence in Iraq would put them in touch with
reality.
TO SOME EXTENT, it’s already worked. Look at what has happened to
Al-Jazeera. Right after September 11 the network was an Al Qaeda
propaganda machine, reprinting every rumor, reciting the Protocols
of the Elders of Zion, openly jeering at the United States. Go on
their website today and it hardly differs from Fox News. Did you
know that the Sunni Gulf States are planning their own “peaceful”
nuclear initiative in response to the perceived threat from Iran?
Did you know people are setting off roadside bombs in Algeria? It’s
a perspective we don’t get from our media.
Neoconservatives still insist we can “win” in Iraq “if we choose
to.” All we have to do is throw in another 50,000-to-300,000 more
troops into the pot. John Podhoretz, brigadier general of the
New York Post, had a simple solution last week — kill all
the Sunni leaders, then kill all the Shi’ite leaders. After that
maybe we can turn Iraq into a parking lot and solve the problem in
midtown Manhattan.
Last week the Post completely lost it, depicting Baker
and Hamilton on its front page as the “surrender monkeys.”
Substituting policy objectives for terms like “victory” and
“surrender” might help us get a grip. Let’s use the Vietnam example
once more.
People still insist we “lost” the Vietnam War, but what were our
objectives? At the time Communist China was an overwhelmingly
formidable enemy, free institutions had never gained a foothold in
Asia, and the entire region seemed destined to fall under rigid
Communist dictatorships. What happened? Our military effort in
Vietnam stalled Communism’s advance. Then Nixon’s brilliant
stratagem reversed the momentum of the entire region. The calming
of East-West relations opened the way for post-Mao reforms. China
eventually joined the world economy. Vietnam was the last domino to
fall and today it is embracing free enterprise and begging the West
for trade. Who won that encounter?
Yet all this was achieved only after we abandoned a concept of
“victory” that would probably have us still patrolling the Mekong
Delta. In Vietnam we began with a few thousand military advisors
and eventually invaded with an army of 500,000. In Iraq we are now
proposing the opposite — an invasion pared down to a few thousand
military advisers. Either way the outcome is the same. It’s very,
very difficult to impose your will on an alien people for an
indefinite period of time.
Right now President Bush needs to pull a Nixon. He needs to open
up the Middle East peace process to all those tinhorn dictators in
a way that leverages our success in bringing down Saddam against
the dreary effort of nation-building that lies ahead. In two short
years he might just be able to rescue the lives of hundreds of
American soldiers, thousands of Iraqis citizens — and his own
historical reputation as well.
