Bollettino

Our Palestinians

Andrew Sullivan is not often quoted in these pages, because we think it is the height of pointlessness to quote Andrew Sullivan. But he does represent a golden mean of Bush-ism, and for that reason we find one of his posts for
Monday extremely interesting. Here it is:

"THE TACTICS OF FAILURE: The setbacks the allies have suffered these last couple of days are all due to one thing: some Saddam units acting as terrorists. By pretending to surrender and then opening fire, by relocating in civilian neighborhoods, by shooting prisoners of war in the head, the soldiers apparently still loyal to Saddam are not reversing the allied advance. What they're doing is trying to inflict sufficient damage to improve their morale and increase the costs of the invasion. They want us to fire into civilian areas; they want us to panic at a few atrocities (as in Somalia); they are counting on an American unwillingness to persevere through serious casualties. And they intend to use the Arab media and their Western sympathizers, i.e. the BBC, NYT, NPR etc., to get this message out. The lesson to learn is that we have cornered the equivalent of a rabid dog. It will fight nastily, brutally and with no compunction. Those units who will go down with this regime will not go down easily. After an initial hope that this thing could be over swiftly, I think it's obvious by now that we're in for a nasty fight - and the Saddamite remnants will ally with the anti-war media to fight dirty and spin shamelessly."

Beyond the standard vitriol about the media, the logic, here, is beginning to appear in the mainstream press too. The steps go like this.

1. Our liberation of Iraq seems to have been shockingly non-floral. The cakewalk through a grateful population doesn't seem to have materialized.

2. The resistance to liberation can only come from evil units "acting as terrorists."

3. Notice how those evil terrorists endanger civilians, which we, all unwillingly, have to shoot.

4. So any terrorist act that seems to emerge from those endangered civilians is probably some kind of disguised Saddamite terrorists. Thus, no reason not to liquidate them.

Now, we don't want to dispute about whether Saddam's troops and militia are using the civilians as shields or not. That seems pretty likely, given Saddam's history. And our point isn't that there are other causes that might be behind Iraqi resistance. Our point is what happens when this kind of logic becomes the dominant way of explaining the war. What is obviously wrong with Sullivan's analysis is that it emphasizes the evil of the tactic at the expense of the success of it. What is secondarily wrong about Sullivan's analysis is that it defines evil in terms of opposition to America, which is good. This is an ideological fantasy; as it infiltrates the cool thinking necessary to analyze events, it skews them until they assume a moral incorrigibility -- they become simply evil, or simply good. This always leads states to disaster.

We think that probably some Iraqis are feeling the prod of the fedayeen bayonette in their backs -- whereas we also think that some Iraqis are resisting on their own, for reasons that range from nationalism to religion. As Americans, to use Kanan Makiya's words, orchestrate the music of liberation -- or in plain english, bomb the shit out of various Iraqi towns -- there is every chance that the mood will turn against the Americans. The sequence of it is foreseeable, the structure is there, and certainly the propagandists, like Sullivan, have armed themselves with justifications. As it does, Iraqis will increasingly be treated as either friends or terrorists. The Iraqis, in other words, will become Our Palestinians.