Friday, April 05, 2002

�Someone left the cake out in the rain��

Do you feel it? That auld MacArthur Park melancholy. In the spring of 1980, or was it 1981? In any case, Limited Inc remembers manning the paint counter at a Shreveport hardware store listening to Donna Summer dirging for this enigmatic gateau, since the radio station that was piped in for our customers� shopping pleasure was very big on Donna Summer. Is it an illusion, or is that same sweet sadness abroad in the US press? a feeling that the splendid little war our commander in chief, bless his 80 percent in the polls, has been all set to spring on Iraq, is now being derailed by a bunch of wankers over there in the Holy Land. I mean, the NYT, and in the Washington Post haven�t quite been open about it � rather, it�s the little asides, the way Tony Blair, for instance, seems to be abandoning ship at the very time we need him to buck us up, or the way the cartoon cutups at the Arab Summit mainstreamed the odious little Iraqis. And Kuwait, my God, what podunk little speed-trap in that whole damn sandbox owes us more? And here they are, closing off the pool, so sorry, boss, find some other place to stage your troops from.

I don't think that I can take it
'Cause it took so long to bake it
And I'll never have that recipe again�

Here�s atypical analysis in the WP from a couple of days ago:


�In the past few days, the president has defended himself against the sharpest criticism of his conduct of foreign policy since the attacks of Sept. 11. He and his advisers now must reckon with the prospect that the Middle East conflict will force a delay in, or substantial changes to, the next phase of the war on terrorism -- apparently aimed at Iraq -- that they have been planning for months.�

For months, folks! All that brain power � and George W. can�t really afford to waste too much brain power � and now the bastards are screwing everything up. The problem is that there are so many of them. We�d love Sharon to make the area Palestinian-rein, but it would be hard to hide the deaths of 2 million. And there are a lot of bleeding hearts out there, lefties and pinkos who will be in the streets, unappreciative that this genocide�s for you.

Yes, for months. The maps, the mock deployment of soldiers (all crafted in plastic and standing 1 ��� high, no doubt, for the president to, um, manipulate at his leisure late at night in the White House basement), the tough talk. It is so unfair!


And here�s the Times way of describing the trip of Tony Blair, who as late as last week was our well beloved sycophant, to the Crawford ranch:


Britain has scuttled plans to publish an intelligence dossier on Iraq's secret arms programs that it had planned to release on Washington's behalf. And Mr. Blair, traveling to Crawford, Tex. on Friday in his favorite role as the bridge between Europe and the United States, is confronting a gap so wide that it now prevents him from openly backing an American attack on Iraq.

"I think so far Blair has gotten away with being pro-American and a loyal European and not having to choose because America has not done something that is so awful that, if he supports the U.S., he will lose Europe," said Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform. "But the Middle East is possibly more dangerous for him now than Iraq, because public opinion across Europe is very, very anti-Israeli, and people all think the U.S. can do something about it. It's the time for Tony Blair to be constructively critical, to be a candid friend."

Yes, our commander in chief, mistaking his office for another episode in that quiz show, Family Feud, has really, really been looking forward to some kind of fall theater in Iraq. Like football, it would have been. His heroic stature in the polls, and the Democrats, the same old numbnuts, kowtowing to any expression of American imperial power we were crazy enough to come up with: yes, Peter, Tom, Dan, we are solidly behind the President�s decision to massacre Iraqi prisoners of war in order to avoid future American casualties.

It�s all a big dilemma, as Laura would put it � my God, that woman�s vocabulary! On the one hand, Sharon is clearly insane. As in, at some point that man was clearly bitten by a rabid dog. Hasn�t anybody noticed? His idea of peace has been, consistently, the peace of the grave, on which he could dance, while somebody else wrote the epitaph for the Palestinian �savages.� On the other hand, Mr. Sharon is backed by a powerful, although equally insane, contingent in the Republican party. Powerful, that is, in D.C. The truth is, the main body of the GOP could care less. But the clique around the Weekly Standard, which has become, by the weird alchemistry of betrayal (remember their early embrace of McCain?), the press chorus of the Bushie crowd � and this is of some importance, these people being heavily networked � are all set on killing that Arafat. They have no endgame. Implicitly, they would like the genocide option for the Palestinians mulled over. Perhaps they could be sold into slavery? Ashcroft of course would approve of that: talk about making those genuine reconstructions of Civil War battles even more genuine! But because of the climate of moral looseness since the sixties, the slide in family values, feminism, enviro-nazis, and squishy pinks, we know that isn�t going to happen. So really, the counsels of such bozos as William Krystol are singularly short of an endgame. At least George Will, in a recent column, came out foresquare for the only one consistent with the Sharon plan: the conquest of the West Bank and its annexation to Israel.

Well, our commander in chief isn�t the smartest boy in the class, but even he knows that is stupid. History is not going to rewind, suddenly, to the glorious colonial period when we kept wogs in their places, no matter what Will thinks, sitting in his little Virginia faux plantation. And then there is the little matter of oil. Today, a story from the AP that assures us that the possibility of an oil embargo is remote. And Limited Inc agrees that an oil embargo on the scale of the one that followed Nixon�s weird all points surrender to Israel�s demands in 1973 is unlikely to happen. For one thing, since then, the sheiks have so mismanaged their money that they would be hurt by any downturn in the EU and the USA�s economic indicators. Still, they would certainly do it to save themselves from the Shah�s fate.

And that fate, whether Bush likes it or not, is looming, as he simplemindedly cuts off every Middle East ally the US ever bribed into compliance with our provincial interests. (As a side observation: if Egypt blows up, does anybody really think Israel is going to benefit? Only that Masada strain in the Likud, which Sharon rather likes: toughen up the youth, or something like that.) God loves fools, and who knows, with an idiot at the wheel, we might avoid collisions that a more experienced, a more intelligent leader could not avoid. But the cosmic license that fools enjoy isn�t guaranteed. Bush is definitely on a political holiday, right now, especially for a man who slunk into office illegitimately, and has ruled like a corrupt CEO ever since. His opposition has all the backbone of a wet sand castle, which definitely helps him. Right now, with the emotion that still roils the American populace in the wake of 9/11, Bush can get away with things that in normal times would make his credit plummet in this country. He has, of course, blown it in other countries. But here�s a cruel fact: American interests aren�t the same as Israeli interests. The blowing up of caf�s in Jerusalem, like the blowing up of parlimentarians in New Delhi, is criminal; as, actually, is the assassination of Palestinian youth by the Israeli military (collateral casualties, alas, as the boys in Foreign Service say, going down to the lounge for their scotches). The US interest here, is partly moral, and partly structural: it is time to figure out how to establish institutions that will satisfy both the Israeli and the Palestinian thirst for justice (or, more vulgarly, revenge). This isn�t going to happen if the US doesn�t lean fairly heavily on Sharon. And if, instead of continually, self righteously, calling for Arafat to stop the suicide bombers, the American pitch was also for guaranteeing Palestinian rights �as in property rights, rights to be free from search and seizure of property, etc., etc. That would probably require setting up some kind of intra-state judicial system � in other words, some independent judiciary that could punish aberrant Israeli soldiers and Palestinian franc-tireurs alike.

LI makes this suggestion in the full realization that the sensible thing isn�t going to happen. The situation has really spiraled beyond the point at which liberal, Montesquieu like gestures are going to work. But somebody has to be out there, promoting whacky, stupid, sensible things. One obvious fact about the Israel-Palestine conflict is that, left wholly to the mechanism of the blood feud, it will never stop.


No comments:

Lovecraft

“If Lovecraft was an odd child,” his biographer L. Sprague de Camp writes, “his mother showed signs of becoming even odder. In fact, she gav...