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