We're All Israeli Now

...and it has nothing to do with the easy availability of good falafel.

I just watched Waltz with Bashir (an excellent movie, by the way), and was struck by the contemporaneity of the depiction of Israel's 1981 invasion of Labanon. The catch-all extension of "terrorist" was central to this feeling, I think. But I would go further and say that Israel is now, in many respects, the exemplar of the West, in the way that the US used to be, and Britain was before that. The striking difference is that previous exemplars have also been military hegemons, even if exemplarity and hegemony have not been completely synchronous. Israel remains a client state of the US militarily, but nonetheless articulates in the sharpest way the experience of being Western at the current moment. It is ideologically hegemonic without being militarily or economically so.

What I mean is that the Occupied Territories, the terrorist, the border wall, the settlements, the car bomb -- all originally Israeli phenomena -- are now archetypes of Western life in the same way that cowboys and Indians, the frontier, and the goldrush used to be. What it is to be European or American now takes its reference, to some critical extent, from what it is to live in the midst of enemies who are at once akin to you and alien, and whose mode of life and struggle confound the partitions between secular and religious, military and civilian, national and international, which confounding leads us to question the very reality of those seemingly foundational distinctions in our own societies.

One of the fairly explicit lines of thought advanced by one character in the movie is that Israel has such a hard time remembering and facing up to its role in the Sabra and Shatila massacre because the whole complex of mass murder and camps is overwhelmed by the memory of the Holocaust. According to this argument, there is among Israelis a massive psychic investment in seeing themselves as the victims of the camps, an investment that makes it impossible to see and recall their complicity with anything that resembles the camps in any way.

Regardless of whether this is a good or bad descriptive account of the Israeli psyche, it suggests to me in the context of the present that one of the reasons for Israel's new centrality to Western consciousness is the liberal repudiation of violence. To whatever extent liberalism cannot acknowledge its own complicity --not an accidental or mistaken involvement, but an essential and necessay participation -- in the violence of the past, neither can liberal Westerners see or recall the violence of the present as their own.

"Conservatives" -- bad liberals, authoritarians -- are thus so far necessary for the Western liberal psyche that if they didn't exist they would have to be invented. Conservatives do the things that liberals can then repudiate as merely accidental to Western liberalism. This sort of point is made by liberals about conservatives all the time: that no failure of conservatism is possible, since failure can always be attributed to insufficient conservatism. But this is just one more sign that "conservatives" are liberals in the broad sense; the same structure of repudiation is endemic to liberalisms left and right. Every liberal liberal says they wouldn't bomb Afghanistan, wouldn't invade Gaza, wouldn't target Hamas leadership with missile strikes, wouldn't build a wall, wouldn't hold people without due process, etc. But every liberal liberal who has the chance to do otherwise ends up doing all of these things -- perhaps with greater circumspection than would a conservative liberal, but doing them nonetheless.

To be Israeli, in this sense, means to struggle with self-recognition in this way, to hate and condemn what one does, and yet not be able to do otherwise.

On This Day In Idiocy...

Via Andrew Sullivan I find this, in which Eric Posner argues that the Iraq War may be a humantarian success story because more people would have died had the sanctions had stayed in place for an additional 10 years.

In other news, Jeffrey Dahmer has been named humanitarian of the year, since what he did to his victims was so much less horrible than what he considered doing to them but didn't.

Also, Napolean has been awarded a posthumus Nobel Peace Prize for not starting all the wars he didn't start, and Stalin has been canonized on the basis that the population of the Soviet Union increased under his rule.

(Is Posner's argument "tongue in cheek," a la a very modest proposal? Brian Leiter thinks so, which is probably evidence of the argument's sincerity. Then again, Andrew Sullivan takes the argument at face value, which might be evidence of ironic intent. Hmmm...)

Oh Joy! Zombie History Is on the March!

I know diddle about the conflict between Georgia and Russia, but via Balloon Juice I find that, lo and behold, it marks the return of History! Robert Kagen says so:

Historians will come to view Aug. 8, 2008, as a turning point no less significant than Nov. 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. Russia’s attack on sovereign Georgian territory marked the official return of history, indeed to an almost 19th-century style of great-power competition, complete with virulent nationalisms, battles for resources, struggles over spheres of influence and territory, and even—though it shocks our 21st-century sensibilities—the use of military power to obtain geopolitical objectives. Yes, we will continue to have globalization, economic interdependence, the European Union and other efforts to build a more perfect international order. But these will compete with and at times be overwhelmed by the harsh realities of international life that have endured since time immemorial.

Some people--who didn't have their heads up their asses gazing at the beauty of the moral law within--actually noticed that "the use of military power to obtain geopolitical objectives" was always part and parcel of globalization and economic interdependence.

It is also worth noting that "the return of history" would have a little TM after it if Kagen could copyright titles.

PS: The print at the top is "The March of History," by James W. Mah, an artist living in Vancouver. His work can be viewed and purchased here.

Freedom Isn't Free

Glenn Greenwald, responding to Megan McArdle and Dan Drezner's Alfred E. Newman impersonations:

It can never be the case that there is anything profoundly wrong -- fundamentally wrong -- with the American political establishment. Why not? Because the McArdles and Drezners both support it and are part of it, and they are Good and thus can't possibly be responsible for things like "war crimes" or "torture regimes" or illegal wars of aggression. That's why the political establishment is so desperate to stay in Iraq until we "win" and to convince everyone that the public supports them again. They are desperate to wash their hands of that which they enabled so they can pretend they never did.

One of the fundamental operations of the modern state is to effect a division of labor between those who kill and those who don't. I just taught Lucio Castellano's essay, "Living With Guerrilla Warfare." Castellano writes:

The arming of the state guarantees the disarming of society; the fact that one part of society--the repressive and military apparatus--erects itself as a separate body and functions according to the laws of 'war,' guarantees that the rest of society lives in 'peace.' 'Peace' means only that 'war' has become the private matter of a few men who thrive on it (the police and the military), or of those private men who take command over all others, demonstrating through fact that they--being the guarantors of the peace of all--also govern it by being a ruling part of it.

The peace we love is just the flip-side of the war machine, but we would rather not face that fact. The outbreak of a hot war--and a war of aggression, too, like our war in Iraq--unsettles our own denial, and precipitates three aggressively virulent attempts to shore up our clean conscience.

First, there is the classic chicken-hawk response: mental and emotional identification with the war machine, coupled with an absolute avoidance of all bodily danger.

Second, there is the dissociative disorder characteristic of Versailles. This seems to be McArdle and Drezner: Marie Antoinettes of the digital age. That's over there and I'm over here--and never the twain shall meet.

Finally, there is the beautiful soul of the pacifist, who reassures themselves that, if they had their way, none of this bad stuff would happen.

Greenwald's straight ahead rule-of-law liberalism tends towards the third response at times, but I am beginning to sense a process of radicalization. I don't expect him to start recommending "learning to use violence, so as not to have to delegate it, so as not to be blackmailed by it" (as Castellano does), but...

Self-defeating Strategy

Matthew Yglesias:

Initially, we invaded to depose Saddam and destroy his WMD programs. So when at first the programs weren't there, we had to keep some troops in the country to look for them. What's more, some kind of new government had to be created. But then, contrary to what the Bush administration had expected, an insurgency started against our presence. The insurgents were killing our troops. Then beating the insurgents became the goal. Our troops had to stay in Iraq and risk their lives in order to kill the people who were trying to kill them to force them out of Iraq -- we couldn't leave until all the people who wanted us to leave were dead.

This captures the essential thirteen-year-old mindset of the Republican approach to this war: "I'll go as soon as you stop asking me to leave. So there!"

Defeat would be being perceived to do something that our enemies want us to do. In other words, we have no desire of our own, only the resentful desire to frustrate the desires of our enemies. If they want (or seem to want) x, then we want not-x. This is paradigmatic stupidity.

Iraqis on Iraq

There is an embedded video in this Greenwald post that I think is essential viewing. I have no idea how to embed it over here, so the link is it.

There has been very little US media exposure (at least of which I am aware) for Iraqis' thoughts about our ongoing invasion and occupation of their country. Charlie Rose has two Iraqis living in America on his show, and for 16 minutes, they discuss the history and ramifications of our intervention. There is no way to know how representative are the views expressed, but I don't think that matters much. They are revelatory.

The Quiescence of Baghdad

From the Washington Post.

Casualties on the Homefront

The Times of London has a story today on suicides among American veterans. According to them, "At least 6,256 US veterans took their lives in 2005, at an average of 17 a day." And it looks like many of these are young vets, recently returned from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The suicide rate among Americans as a whole was 8.9 per 100,000, but the level among veterans was at least 18.7. That figure rose to a minimum of 22.9 among veterans aged 20 to 24 – almost four times the nonveteran average for people of the same age.

There are 25 million veterans in the United States, 1.6 million of whom served in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“Not everyone comes home from the war wounded, but the bottom line is nobody comes home unchanged,” said Paul Rieckhoff, a former Marine and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans for America.

CBS quoted the father of a 23-year-old soldier who shot himself in 2005 as suggesting that the military was covering up the scale of the problem. “Nobody wants to tally it up in the form of a government total,” Mike Bowman said. “They don’t want the true numbers of casualties to really be known.”

Mr Bowman’s son, Tim, was an army reservist who patrolled one of the most dangerous places in Baghdad, known as Airport Road. “His eyes when he came back were just dead. The light wasn’t there anymore,” said his mother, Kim Bowman. Eight months later, on Thanksgiving Day, Tim committed suicide.

The "official" casualty count for this war is so far from representing its true human costs.

UPDATE: It seems that, when you control for gender, race, and age, vets are--at most--only marginally more likely to commit suicide than the civilian population. This does not, however, answer the question of whether or not vets who have seen combat (in Iraq or elsewhere) are more likely to commit suicide than those who have not.

The Principle Contradiction?

HTML Mencken:

And yet, and yet… some obsessions — okay, one current obsession — is more equal than others, is a political and moral trump card: Stopping the war. As Atrios has mentioned quite a bit lately with sarcastic understatement, people forget that war is a bad thing. But it’s not just a bad thing; unjust, immoral wars are the worst thing a country could ever do short of a Holocaust. Garden variety American racism makes people miserable and gets people killed, as does sexism, homophobia, etc. But evil wars get people murdered en masse — brown people, I might add. Plus it degrades America, breaks her treasury, and the conditions war exerts on domestic politics as a rule enables rightwing policy: there is a relationship between not just the war and, say, domestic spying, but also between the war and cultural issues like racism, sexism, etc. War is the fuel that the engine of wingnuttery guzzles. Wingnuts understand this; why do you think they are willing to concede (if push becomes hard electoral shove) on every single issue but that?

Within our present conjuncture, as they say, this is right, right, right.