Letter to Tim Rutten of the LA Times: We need to be honest with ourselves

Mr. Rutten,

I have been a longtime reader of your pieces in the LA Times. I consider the paper one of the best and I consider you one of the best writers on the staff there. It is with this in mind that I attempt to sound out where you’re coming from in the recent article, “Ahmedinejad walks away with a win.” Forgive me for my sarcastic tone in places. It’s a weakness of mine and, for emphasis, I have only inserted it sparingly. I do not intend in any way to demean you personally.

You write, and I paraphrase, “Arrogance is invincible to irony.” Indeed. I read your opinion piece this morning with careful interest. Perhaps like you, I have come to distrust Western media so much when it comes to reporting on the Middle East and South Asia. (It wasn’t always this way.) In principle, of course, you are right about Mr. Ahmedinejad. You also raise some interesting points about Columbia’s history. There are, however, two undercurrents in the piece that concern me with respect to reporting the truth. One of them carries a faint whiff of revisionism. The other a faint whiff of what I can only describe as Jewish identity fetishism. (At risk of being called an anti-Semite, I wonder aloud whether you are Jewish and what kind of impact this has on your personal and public positions with respect to Israel and its internal and external activities over the past sixty years.)

It is important for you to know that I do not have an agenda here. I am a junior military officer in the USMC, working in the Middle East / North Africa. My assignment is to learn the culture, history and politics of the region so that I can provide sound council to my superiors. As such, I make it my business to know what my enemies know. I also make it my business to know what my friends know. As I progress, a troubling trend has emerged. It is becoming more difficult to for me to discern which is which. It is becoming more difficult to feel comfortable with “the truth.” The more I talk to people in this part of the world, the more I hear that this is the way it has always been for them. “It should be no different for you,” they say. “You need to make up your own mind and take a side.”

But there is a truth to be found in history. There have been discrete events we can say are historic. There were causal chains that led to those events and linked them to others, although complicated and almost always multivariate. In these events – usually wars, genocides, forced conversions, and mass capitulations – people take sides. There are “winners” and there are “losers.” The winners, to paraphrase Orwell, write the history. (Note that Orwell advocated discussing British anti-Semitism in the open and was himself accused of being an anti-Semite.) I saw this phenomenon of rewriting history in Rwanda when I lived and worked there from 1994 through 1997. In fact, it is happening all over the modern world. Since the fall of the Ottoman empire, history is not being written by Muslims – or for that matter, by any people of the Middle East or North Africa. One could effectively argue that Palestinians haven’t written history since 1917, or indeed ever. (I personally think the pendulum has begun to swing in their favor, but it’s too early to say with any reasonable measure of certainty.) One could also effectively argue that a whitewash, if not a complete revision, is underway concerning the history of the US in the Near East.

It is this last phenomenon that has me worried. Increasingly, as I immerse myself in the region, I wrestle with important questions that are either impolitic or taboo in US diplomatic and political communities. Why were Palestinians driven off their land and why have the appalling conditions of the “camps” persisted for so long? This question is tantamount to heresy in some circles. I have even been accused of being anti-Semitic for suggesting that Israel is guilty of perpetrating against the Palestinians just what its own ruling elites experienced in Europe and Russia. (Jews from the Middle East and Africa hardly enjoy what I would call equal status in Israeli society.) Of course, you know I’m not speaking about the Holocaust. And never mind that the Palestinians are themselves a Semitic people. When dealing with grand narratives, such as the co-mingling of the Palestinians and Jews throughout their histories, we in the US tend to oversimplify and this leads to some absurd attributions. We also ignore, as a matter of policy in some instances, the nuances of less-than-savory subplots. We have even played the fool.

More to the point of your piece: What created men like Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and Saddam Hussein? Much like the treatment of the Palestinian question, the answers from my counterparts tend to be ahistorical, reductionist and disparaging. They ignore or downplay our own roles in their creation and in the very troubled modern histories of their nations. You ask why the American press demonstrates a “studied indifference” at the danger Ahmedinejad poses to the West. What about your studied indifference to our role in Iran prior to 1980 and afterward? Or to the Israeli state’s treatment of Palestinians? To the best of my knowledge, none of your articles mentions our important (some would say pivotal) historical role Iran. And does Ahmedinejad pose the mortal danger to the West so many warn us about? Really, Mr. Rutten, I am beginning to wonder whether you aren’t a little bit guilty of that which you criticize in what you call “the American media.” (By the way, just what do you mean by that term?)

He and his party are no more of a danger to the US (or to Israel for that matter) than al Qaeda. There is no threat to our democracy from these actors. They may create chaos in a few cities, but they cannot bring down a strong state. Any claim to the contrary is demagoguery. It will be a fight, surely, to defeat them. The die is cast. But it will not and should not always be about force on force. Much of it, I would argue, is about the US coming to terms with a misguided foriegn policy in the region and correcting its strategy. And the bulk of this process will be decidedly non-military in nature, and will take generations, especially in light of more recent mistakes.

So let’s move beyond the old shibboleths about “freedom and democracy,” “radical Islamic extremism,” “rogue nation dictators” and the like. Let’s start telling the truth. Whether we are justified in denying dangerous men the rights we enjoy in a constitutional democracy that grants freedom of speech and expression is, surprisingly, still open to debate. But we should be honest with ourselves in that debate – particularly when we are complicit in the rise of these men to power and in their actions after. I look to you to perhaps break new ground in this direction. Unless of course you “drank the Kool-Aid,” as we in the military like to say. If true, it is the kind of dramatic irony from which great retrospective plays (and history books) about dead nations are crafted. I pray it isn’t.

Sincerely,

The Angry Marine

Does anyone know what the United States is doing in the Middle East?

There is a fierce debate within the United States on the wisdom of the current administration's foreign policy framework. Public opinion in the US is on balance negative. Not altogether surprising is the split, almost down the middle, of the academic and policy think tank communities. With the exception of some world leaders and troubled factions within their political parties, the rest of the human race is surprisingly united in its opposition to US policies. Unconditional support of Israel, occupation of Iraq, support of less-than-democratic regimes, shady extradition practices, and the flouting of the Geneva Conventions, among other issues, have convinced the greater part of the human race that we are provoking conflict on a regional, if not global scale.

In the last fifty years, the US has inspired great hope in its Middle Eastern diplomatic projects, particularly among everyday Arabs. Yet, almost without fail, such projects have languished, inspiring only disillusionment, anger, opposition, or worse. In the last twenty years, the willingness of the rest of the world to get behind the lofty rhetoric of US presidents has all but disappeared. Some observers wonder whether the current administration has spent the last of what little moral capital the United States had on the global stage. In the short history of the United States, its regimes have cared little for the opinions of other governments or peoples. This is nothing unusual in the realm of international relations. The Executive has cared little for the opinions of large segments of the US citizenry. This is nothing unusual in the realm of government. The Executive has also demonstrated a lack of concern for the opinions of its Legislative and Judicial counterparts in government. Nothing surprising there.

So, what is surprising about the current state of affairs? The sad truth is, not much. What makes people so much more angry today is the arrogance, intrigue and impunity with which the US pursues its interests in the Middle East. (Nevermind what the Executive is pursuing at home.) But it doesn't stop there. What makes people in the Middle East so angry, in particular, is the casual way with which US politicians and corporate leaders play with their very lives. To be sure, other parties in the West and indeed in the Middle East are responsible to a great degree for the suffering and hardship in the region. One could equivocate all day on who is responsible for what. The fact is that the US is in a position to change the fate of millions in the region and has promised to do so. Yet, instead of keeping its promises to the Middle East, it breaks them. Instead of bringing opportunity, it brings retrenchment. Instead of bringing stability, it brings war and anarchy.

As any Arab will tell you -- as any Muslim will tell you -- this isn't all of it. Not for them. The suffering goes much deeper and has a long memory -- longer, certainly, than ours. This makes the debate in the US over the wisdom of President Bush's policies subject to easy scorn. After all, we do not own the Middle East. We do not own the lives of Arabs or anyone else. We do not own their lands or the resources there. So why do we act the way we do? This is a complex question, and one that I will explore over a series of posts to this blog.

Tunisia and the Social Compact

This past month I travelled to Tunisia, a model of economic development in Africa. It is touted as the most competitive economy in Africa and in the Middle East. From a Western institutional perspective, Tunisia is certainly the darling of the "middle income group" of nations. Or so say the World Bank, the IMF, the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, and the European Union. I'm sure a few others have chimed in that aren't listed here. Tunisia is relatively stable. Tunisians themselves lack the aggressiveness, nervousness or opaque reserve of their neighbors in the Maghreb. They are civil to one another and to foreigners. When driving in Tunis, they often wave a thank you to another who lets them into a lane. Pedestrians smile and give a thumbs up when a driver waits for them to cross the street. This is such a contrast to Cairo. (And to many large American and European cities, for that matter.)

And yet, Tunisia is not a democracy. Far from it. Since independence in 1957, the two regimes in Tunisia (under Bourguiba until 1987 and until now under Ben Ali) have only grudgingly allowed political access to their rivals. They have mercilessly crushed radical opposition groups and have effectively contained or coopted dissident movements. There is no freedom of speech in Tunisia. Even bloggers are imprisoned and, some say, beaten and tortured. Less than two weeks ago, the offices of a lawyer who is currently serving as the Secretary for the Tunisian League of Human Rights (LTDH), the oldest local human rights group in the Arabic-speaking world, were torched. Rumor is the security services are the perpetrators. Hammami has been working for two months on a report on the state of the Tunisian justice system for the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network. The report was to be presented at a seminar sponsored by the organization in Paris this weekend.

At the same time, few societies in the Middle East and North Africa are freer. This is true in particular for women, who enjoy near-equal status in modern Tunisian society. They still lag behind men in the UNDP's Human Development Index, but to make a comparison with a country like Saudi Arabia, for example, is ludicrous. If women are the true barometer of the health of a modern society, then Tunisia is very much on the right track. I was sitting with my wife at a cafe called the Marabout, when we had the opportunity to talk with the owner, who was a woman. (We were visiting a coastal town in the north called Bizerte, which is home to the bulk of Tunisia's Navy and Air Force.) We mentioned to her how different Tunisia was compared to other Arabic-speaking countries we have visited. She replied, simply, "C'est un manque de misère." We also mentioned that we had rarely traveled in a country in which women seemed so equal to men. I asked, rhetorically, whether that wasn't due to the efforts of Bourguiba. She replied with a pride and intensity I will never forget. "C'était la grace de Bourguiba" that had given them their rights.

Tunisia enjoys a standard of living not widely seen outside of Europe and the United States -- there are countries in Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America that are richer, but with much greater internal disparities in political access, wealth, and health. Unlike the Gulf countries, Tunisia does not enjoy the windfall that comes with higher crude prices. It's economy does not depend on oil exports. In fact, its entire energy sector amounted to just 1.5% of GDP in 2005. It has not had the luxury of rents or remittances to the extent that other countries in the region have had. It has had to diversify and to modernize. The efforts of the élite to bring average citizens along with them on the "road to prosperity" are evident. They have certainly done a much better job than their counterparts in Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa, and other giants of the African continent. So it is not surprising that work-a-day Tunisians forgive them for their foibles, for their corruption, and for their heavy-handedness with their political rivals.

And so it also came as no surprise when I heard the vast majority of the people I talked to express their support for the current regime, even in the remote regions of the South. The standard line was that people preferred stability and security to chaos. They preferred a dictatorship to a democracy where radical Islamists are in power. This is code for what is referred to in diplomatic circles as "the social compact." It explains, at least in part, why Tunisia has not yet transitioned to democracy despite Ben Ali's promises. It explains the fear -- the genuine fear --that the majority of Muslims in Tunisia have of what is perceived to be a resurgence of Islamic extremism and militancy in the region. They have even gone to the extent of removing the three-term limit to Ben Ali's presidency, and raising the maximum age from 70 to 75. They did it in a constitution referendum in 2002. He will run for a fifth term in 2009. The campaign posters are already decorating the sides of apartment buildings.

I suppose one could take the cynical approach and say they were just doing what they were expected to do in a closed system (read: dictatorship). Or one could say the voting was gerrymandered. One could even say, as one diplomat has insinuated, that all those people were just telling me what I wanted to hear. Maybe they were. I have to believe that not all of those people, not even most of them, were masquerading. We in the West assume that only multiparty democracies can succeed. Historically, other systems have been just as successful and stable. In fact, democracies are more likely than other political systems to make war -- not on each other, but on "the evil other." On the flip side, non-democratic systems have been more stable. It looks as though, for now, the people of Tunisia have made their choice for the time being. The question is whether the West, in its feverish efforts to "democratize" the "other", will respect Tunisia's incremental process.