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CounterPunch
December
7, 2002
Who Hates,
Ya, Baby?
The Baffling Patriotism of Daniel Pipes
by MICHAEL NEUMANN
Daniel Pipes waves Old Glory with an air of menace.
He writes stuff like "Profs
Who Hate America". He names names and asks, "Why
do American academics so often despise their own country while
finding excuses for repressive and dangerous regimes?" These
profs, he tells us, "consider the United States (not Iraq)
the problem". He's much too smooth to actually call them
unpatriotic. He trusts his readers to understand that he's found
a nest of apologists for terror, who turn against their country
in its hour of need. His Middle East Forum also runs the campuswatch.org
site, which outs academics caught in political misbehavior. He
says that "The time has come for adult supervision of the
faculty...". This terrifies me. Jeez, the last thing I
want is adult supervision!(*)
This guy is all the scarier because he
gets to testify before congressional committees, while I just
get to chat with losers at the Suspect Profs Support Group.
Naturally my only thought is to save myself. How can I please
this man? He sounds like a tough guy about to explode: "Especially
as we are at war, the goal must be for universities to resume
their civic responsibilities." Civic responsibility, I can
hardly remember what that is. Patriotism, too: good thing I'm
an American.
Let me begin by trying to suck up to
Pipes. Fortunately, I'm well positioned to do this. I supported
the invasion of Afghanistan. I supported the Gulf War, 100%.
That's a good start, isn't it?
If only I didn't oppose an invasion of
Iraq. At least I oppose it for the same reasons I supported the
Gulf war: the importance of international conventions that are
much more fundamental than 'international law' or the decisions
of the United Nations. The world will never have any peace unless
a basic rule is enforced: you can't just wake up one day and
decide to send your armed forces across someone else's borders.
Iraq hasn't done anything to the US, and no one thinks it's
about to do anything to anyone else. So sending troops across
its border comes too close, for my taste, to just what Iraq did
to Kuwait.
Well, I don't want to get Dan upset;
he seems sensitive. I'm eager for him to know that I share his
mistrust for lefty explanations of why the US wants to
invade Iraq. We agree that it's not about oil and it's not part
of some grand plan to dominate the world. After that, our views
diverge a bit. He thinks the US wants to invade Iraq because
it's dastardly. I think the US wants to invade Iraq because the
US can find Iraq, which is more than you can say about Bin Laden
and the Mullah Omar. The US rightly thinks it faces an extremely
serious terrorist threat, because those Al Qaeda folks really
know what they're doing. It hopes going after Saddam Hussein
will make everyone forget that a few nobodies with box-cutters
destroyed the World Trade Center and trashed the Pentagon, and
the US is still looking for their leaders.
I'm sure Dan will forgive our little
tiff over Iraq, because my views are pretty close to Zbigniew
Brezinski's, who has been certified
100% politically safe by none other than the Chuck Norris of
American policymakers, Paul Wolfowitz. And here's where things
start to get interesting, because a lot of leftist objections
to invading Iraq--unlike leftist objections to invading Afghanistan--speak
directly to American self-interest. What about the claim that
Iraq's weapons are all but useless except for inflicting damage
on invading troops? That means American troops, because it doesn't
look like we'll get much Egyptian and Syrian cannon fodder this
time. And what about the claim that invading Iraq, in these circumstances,
will piss everyone off big-time and hobble the US war on terror?
This too speaks directly to the defense of the United States.
What about the worry that the US will get mired in costly, bloody
nation-building? These are pro-American, not anti-American concerns.
So here one begins to wonder if Pipes is really so much more
patriotic than his targets.
Remember Pipes' ominous pronouncement:
"Especially as we are at war, the goal must be for universities
to resume their civic responsibilities"? Never mind who
died and made him Congress to declare this, I kind of agree that
we're at war. I think it's almost racist to consider Al Qaeda
as a matter for the police, because 9-11 represented a major
military success and a genuine threat to America's control over
its own territory. So yup, this is real serious, we ought to
be serious about what we do. Our policies should not be determined
by sentiment and certainly not by placing the interests of others
before the interests of Americans.
Now I wonder whether, despite Pipes'
veiled threats and patently insincere lip-service to free speech,
we might possibly be permitted to have some opinions on the interests
of our own country, even if we don't have a 25-year-old degree
in medieval Islamic history. (Pipes thinks the profs aren't expert
enough to talk about the Middle East, which means most Americans
aren't either.) I wonder if we're allowed to notice that the
Arab and Muslim worlds deeply resent our support for Israel,
and that the Europeans tend to side with the Palestinians. Could
we please also notice that the Muslim world has a hell of a lot
of oil? And it seems--these calculations are tough for
us little people--like the Muslim world would be a LOT happier
to join the war on terror if we were supporting the Palestinians
and their allies instead of the Israelis. So happy, in fact,
that we'd very likely win our war, as well as more oil contracts
than you could cram into Pipes' doubtless-Made-with-Pride-in-the-USA
briefcase. Islamic fundamentalism itself would be in big trouble,
most of all in Palestine. As for a coalition to remove Saddam
Hussein, why, we could write our own ticket. So it seems quite
clear that we should be siding with the Palestinians rather than
the Israelis--and very aggressively, I might add, sort of like
we're acting towards Iraq. We should, in other words, forge a
military alliance with every country bordering Israel, much as
we did in the Gulf War. The Europeans and Russians and Chinese
and Japanese and, hell, everyone else wouldn't mind, and of course
that trained poodle Blair would skitter along at our feet.
Notice that this has nothing to
do with blaming the US or Israel for 9-11 or anything else: moral
responsibility is a complicated matter and yes, Pipes, I do happen
to be an authority on it. I can even figure out that the primary
responsibility for the 9-11 attacks lies with those who planned
and executed them. But responsibility for 9-11 has no bearing
on the simple truth that US interests lie in opposing Israel,
not supporting it.
Notice too that I don't allege any conspiracy,
or cabal, or Jewish lobby. I have no knowledge of such things.
I admit I'm puzzled by how America could be so blind to its own
interests, but maybe that's because Israel used to be seen as
a partner in the fight against communism in the Middle East.
That might have made sense forty years ago, but today it's as
rational as keeping a garlic wreath handy in case vampires bust
into your house. As for Israel's value in fighting terror, or
Islamic fundamentalism, or Saddam Hussein, or anything else,
where's the beef? Every time we want to fight any of these things,
we have to bring Israel wheelbarrows of cash, bribe it to keep
its head down. Some valuable ally, huh?
So let's put our cards on the table,
Pipes. Don't go all candy-ass on me and talk about blown-up babies
or our moral obligations to the wonderful state of Israel. This
is war, you tell us; it's the defense of America. Well then,
defend it, for Christ's sake. Don't bleat. The time has come
to dump Israel, hard. America's defense demands it. And if you're
not with America, of course, you're against it.
The funny thing is, this isn't even callous.
The best thing that could happen to Israel is for America to
back the Palestinians, because only then could there be a real
peace settlement. Even if you discount its small but primo-quality
nuclear arsenal (enhanced by cruise missiles, satellites, ICBMs
and missile-firing subs), Israel comes out so powerful that US
support for the Palestinians wouldn't do too much more than level
the playing field. That's what it would take to get Israel out
of the occupied territories and within its own borders, so it
can live in peace.
And it gets funnier. Throughout the cold
war, throughout the Vietnam conflict, one could at least understand
why right-wing pundits thought they were advancing American interests.
The worst excesses were justified as anti-communism and indeed,
as long as the Soviet Union was around, fear of communism was
never completely crazy. Even assuming the government or the right-wingers
were really out to advance the interests of American corporations,
one could easily read this as misguided patriotism.
But it's different now, isn't it? It's
not just that backing Israel damages US interests; it's that
this is so obvious. You don't secure oil supplies by supporting
the country which has no oil, but antagonizes your suppliers.
You don't fight a formidable terrorist enemy by allying yourself
with an essentially useless power, one which alienates the very
states whose support would almost certainly turn the tide.
You can't even suppose an obsession with
Islamic fundamentalism has blinded Pipes and company to America's
real interests. He can't be all that obsessed, because he doesn't
seem to mind that the US isn't helping out much against the Chechens.
And even if you overlook direct harm to US policy objectives,
the alliance with Israel still impedes the fight against Islamic
fundamentalism. After all, by far the most murderous Islamic
fundamentalists operate in Algeria, where over a hundred thousand
people have died at their hands. But you don't hear America's
so-called hawks calling for extensive military aid to that country--you'd
think the Algerian government would be buried under a mountain
of American arms by now. Pipes has plenty to say about how bad
the Algerian fundamentalists are, but his recommendations concerning
American support for the Algerian government are inexplicably
tepid. This couldn't be because Algeria sides with the Palestinians,
could it? These experts, they sure know how to send a message:
"You may be fighting the same enemy as the US, but if you
care about Palestine, you can just fuck off and die."
I can understand how US Presidents, badly
advised, would make a ruinous alliance with Israel, but I cannot
understand the mentality of their advisors. I cannot imagine
why any patriotic American would want the US to get itself hated
in Israel's occupied territories, let the world's most deadly
fundamentalists run amuck in Algeria, and guarantee anti-Americanism
a brilliant career throughout the Islamic world. I also can't
understand how any patriotic American could subordinate our vital
strategic interests to Israel's territorial ambitions: an anti-Israel
alliance would make mincemeat out of Al Qaeda and instantly neutralize
Saddam Hussein.
So let's look before we smear, shall
we, Pipes? Because two can play that game.
Michael Neumann
is a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario,
Canada. He can be reached at: mneumann@trentu.ca
-----------
(*) Pipes' own site proudly presents
evidence of his maturity at http://www.danielpipes.org/article/475.
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