Neocons and Gaza

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15 Jun 2007 01:22 pm

The cognitive dissonance on display gets a useful airing by Ralph Peters in the New York Post. In a sign of obvious desperation, Glenn Reynolds linked yesterday. Read the whole thing. On the one hand, according to Peters, Arab culture is obviously permanently incapable of constitutional self-rule. On the other, we have to stay in Iraq indefinitely to ensure a success in Arab constitutional self-rule. Elegantly self-refuting, isn't it? Here's the regional analysis:

Look at Gaza, at the orgy of self-destructive savagery, the macho idiocy, the junkyard-dog religion and the murder-suicide cult sweeping Arab civilization. Then note that, barring a few fringe players, only two sides are fighting in the Gaza Strip.

In Iraq, we have foreign terrorists fighting everybody, Sunni Arabs fighting Shia, Shia fighting Shia, Sunni fighting Sunni, Christians and other minorities persecuted by Sunni and Shia, Kurds struggling to preserve their patch of civilization, with American troops and our allies in the middle . . . on a quiet day.

Of course, not only the Arabs are to blame: We went to Baghdad with a fantasy instead of a plan; Israel tried to compromise with genocidal killers; media commissars abetted terrorists, and our generals placed more emphasis on ducking blame than on defeating our enemies. But for all that, it's the Arabs who failed themselves, again and again and again.

When Lebanon tried to achieve a semblance of democracy, Syria embarked on a killing spree that, to this day, has had no tangible consequences for the Assad regime. When elections came to the Palestinian territories, the Palestinians voted for terrorists. When elections came to Iraq, the Iraqis voted for ethnic separatists or demagogues.

Get the picture? Now what would be the logical inference from this powerful critique of Arab culture for our current policy in Iraq? Obviously: withdrawal.

You can't organize these people; you can't trust them; their sectarian hatred will always triumph over democracy; their local loyalties will always trump any notion of liberal constitutional politics. But naah. In a classic - and utterly incoherent - Instapundit-style move, Peters deduces from this that we merely need to kill and bomb more people more brutally in order to create a non-violent democracy in Iraq. Actually, that sumary is a little too sophisticated for the piece. It ends with a weirdly desperate assertion that the U.S. military only now wants to win in Iraq. Like they didn't for the past four years? Then this:

We're stuck in Iraq, and it sucks. But were we to leave in haste, far more blood than oil would flow in the Persian Gulf. The disaster in Gaza's just a rehearsal for the Arab-suicide drama awaiting its opening night in Iraq.

I don't get it. Is Peters saying that keeping the flow of oil is the real reason to throw more young Americans into the Arab meat-grinder? Is he saying we should leave but not in haste? Or is he simply blathering incoherently like everyone else arguing for the indefinite occupation of the "ungrateful volcano."

We may be seeing the total intellectual collapse of neoconservatism. If that happens, it will be because history has proven their analysis of the Arab world correct.

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