RubinReports: U.S. Policy: To Understand the Middle East Why Not Study The Real Middle East?

U.S. Policy: To Understand the Middle East Why Not Study The Real Middle East?

This article is published in PajamasMedia.

By Barry Rubin

A lot of people may think that I’m too tough on President Barack Obama and the New York Times. Yet every day they do something that—despite my high suspicions and low expectations—amazes me.

Consider a New York Times article, “Obama Seeks Reset in Arab World. First, the concept of “reset” was invented by the Obama Administration and has been used by it to describe the new policy about to be announced on the Middle East. One could not possibly think of an idea more unsuited to the region.

Reset implies starting over, forgetting everything that has happened before. Yet there is arguably no part of human society that is more obsessed with history than the Middle East. You have people ready to die and kill to realize a vision of society from more than twelve centuries ago, a reborn country that had been destroyed more than nineteen centuries ago, and the world’s longest-lasting continuing conflict that has been going full steam now for more than six decades. And those are only three examples.

Who thinks like this, that you can press a button and have history disappear? Americans, or at least a certain kind of American. The concept of reset is so remarkably ignorant and doomed to fail that it is shocking that the great geniuses who guide America haven’t thought of this problem. To my best knowledge not a single person has pointed out this fatal flaw though everyone in the Middle East innately understands it!

The Arab world isn’t erasing history so much as reliving it, heading back to the 1950s and 1960s, but with revolutionary Islamism replacing Arab nationalism. And that’s even worse.

Then there is this shocking quote from the same article:

"Obama has ordered staff members to study transitions in 50 to 60 countries to find precedents for those under way in Tunisia and Egypt. They have found that Egypt is analogous to South Korea, the Philippines and Chile, while a revolution in Syria might end up looking like Romania's."

I’m not a big fan of this type of political science, which never produces useful results. But leaving that aside, doesn’t anyone notice a few details? Revolutionary Islamism doesn’t really exist as a national factor in those countries. Neither does radical Arab nationalism. The three countries mentioned as being like Egypt are in fact dominated by a basic pragmatic approach, an absence of dominating ideology, a strong social flexibility.

No matter how many degrees he might have anyone who would use such a method as a guide to policymaking on a life-and-death issue is a fool. (Oops! There goes my hope of a job in the Obama Administration!)

Now, in about 400 words and taking about three minutes of your time I have explained why the current policy plans of this U.S. government are doomed. Why not instead study Egyptian history and society, the Muslim Brotherhood, and things like that?

Yet I suspect there is one more hidden factor here. The American government has this thing called the State Department and sections of the Defense Department that do this kind of thing. There are people who have been following Arab politics and ideology and the military for decades. Why not call on them for their analysis?

I think that Obama is instead turning to his clueless National Security Council staffers (the ones who wanted Husni Mubarak overthrown in 24 hours) and left-wing academics or think-tanks, and a couple of pundits (the names Zakaria and Friedman have in fact been mentioned) instead. The result is going to be something of a combination of hilariously stupid and the kind of policy that ends up setting off wars and getting tens of thousands of people killed.

But then if your advisors deny that the Muslim Brotherhood is a radical Islamist anti-American group favoring genocide against Jews—indeed argue it is sort of secular—what can one expect? If the courtiers keep calling you the smartest president in all of history how are you going to correct your errors?

Now if one could only reset Obama’s worldview….

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/12/us/politics/12prexy.html?_r=1

RubinReports: U.S. Policy: To Understand the Middle East Why Not Study The Real Middle East?

RubinReports: The West’s Foreign Policy Theme—Like Me Before You Kill Me—Applied to Israel

The West’s Foreign Policy Theme—Like Me Before You Kill Me—Applied to Israel

By Barry Rubin

Recently, it was revealed that President Barack Obama had consulted Tom Friedman in formulating his Middle East policy. Here’s an example of where disastrous policy comes from.

Friedman writes:

“Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu of Israel is always wondering why his nation is losing support and what the world expects of a tiny country surrounded by implacable foes. I can’t speak for the world, but I can speak for myself. I have no idea whether Israel has a Palestinian or Syrian partner for a secure peace that Israel can live with. But I know this: With a more democratic and populist Arab world in Israel’s future, and with Israel facing the prospect of having a minority of Jews permanently ruling over a majority of Arabs — between Israel and the West Bank, which could lead to Israel being equated with apartheid South Africa all over the world — Israel needs to use every ounce of its creativity to explore ways to securely cede the West Bank to a Palestinian state.”

By the way, the picture of “a minority of Jews permanently ruling over a majority of Arabs” has not been accurate since 1994, that’s 17 years ago. The Palestinian Authority rules over the West Bank Arabs. Hamas, which has now merged with the Palestinian Authority, rules in the Gaza Strip. The only non-citizen Arabs that “Jews” are ruling over are those in east Jerusalem, according to an agreement that Israel made with the PLO.

So a big part of Israel's difficulty is that people like Friedman are perpetuating anti-Israel lies instead of attacking them.

In other words, if your enemies lie about you does that mean that you must take huge risks? There’s a clever bumper sticker that says: Never apologize. Your enemies don’t care and your friends don’t need it.

But leaving all of that aside, let’s start with Friedman’s opening sentence. I certainly don’t speak for Netanyahu and didn’t vote for him, but I really doubt he’s wondering why these things are happening. He knows the reasons, as do most Israelis, even those critical of his policy:

The greater international weight of the Arab world; oil money; well-intentioned but ill-placed sympathy for an apparent underdog; aspects of Islam rejecting ever accepting a Jewish state; Arab nationalist rejection of a Jewish state; a clever anti-Israel propaganda campaign; Western leftist sympathy for its enemies; the rejection of Zionism by some Jews; the honest belief that if you resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict by Israeli concessions the whole world will be stable and terrorism will disappear; antisemitism; and more.

There’s no mystery here.

But there is a problem. If you equate that hostility to one cause and one cause only: Israel is “permanently ruling” over a majority of Arabs. That’s it. Solve that problem and everything else will fall into place.

Yet what if you know that giving up the West Bank will not solve every problem—a viewpoint almost never aired in the Western mass media and universities nowadays? Then Friedman’s concept and that of most Western policies immediately collapses.

Israel has conducted extensive experiments with this concept, experiments that have cost about the same number of Israeli lives as September 11 took American lives. Since the population of the United States is approximately 40 times that of Israel you can calculate the impact of those costs.

After all, Israel already acted “to securely cede” (the split infinitive is Friedman’s) the Sinai to Egypt, with the result that this peace treaty is about to be abrogated. It tried to “securely cede” the Gaza Strip to the Palestinian Authority, getting rockets and mortars and cross-border attacks in return. It also sought “to securely cede” southern Lebanon and got rockets and cross-border attacks. To see what would happen it acted “to securely cede” much of the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority and then received in return incitement to violence, terrorist attacks, and intransigence.

Might there be a pattern here?

Yes, it would be better to have a stable, two-state solution that ended the conflict and made Israel’s neighbors friendly. But here’s where the gap is between Israel and much of the Western political elites today:

We tried it and it didn’t work.

That is not a “right-wing” statement. It is an Israeli consensus statement. And even if Israel tries and tries again, this doesn’t mean that people don’t know that.

Now, there are people in the Middle East—millions of people—who openly make my point every day. These include the governments of Iran, Syria, Turkey, and the Gaza Strip, as well as probably Egypt’s next government and those running Lebanon. Islamists openly proclaim that no matter how much territory Israel cedes they won’t be satisfied until it has ceded everything and gone out of existence altogether.

What Friedman calls “a more democratic and populist Arab world” means a more radical and Islamist Arab world. In fact, the radicals will remain radicals (Syria, Iran) while the formerly moderate become more extremist (Egypt). Why, then, should Israel make dangerous concessions when these will be taken advantage of to attack it more effectively? Why give things to people who want to kill you no matter what you do?

But there’s one point that is so overwhelming in Friedman’s piece, so symptomatic of everything wrong with the Western vision of Israel, the Middle East, and even the entire world (and especially with the Obama Administration’s policy), that it should resound with everyone who reads that article:

Friedman is telling us that a good public relations’ image is more important than material security. Israel will survive an infinite number of nasty articles or sneering professors without great difficulty. It would not survive concessions that make Israel weak and vulnerable, more than ever at a time when—let’s face it—American and European guarantees are worthless.

Golda Meir already dealt with Friedman’s idea decades ago: Better a bad press than a good epitaph.

That’s a principle which North America and European countries should think about adopting as their motto.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal, and a featured columnist at PajamasMedia http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/ His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is http://www.gloria-center.org. His PajamaMedia columns are mirrored and other articles available at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/.

RubinReports: The West’s Foreign Policy Theme—Like Me Before You Kill Me—Applied to Israel

RubinReports: A Leading Intellectual Gives The Long-Term Perspective On Today's Problems

A Leading Intellectual Gives The Long-Term Perspective On Today's Problems

This article is published on PajamasMedia.

By Barry Rubin

The incomparable Walter Laqueur was born in Breslau, Germany (now Poland), in 1921. Recently, he had a 90th birthday party that was a very special and enjoyable event. Walter was 12 when the Nazis took power and went through his high school years under the increasingly oppressive regime. He was able to go to the land of Israel (i.e., the British mandatory territory of Palestine) but his parents were killed.

He went through the 1948 war as a journalist, became an expert on the USSR, learned a total of eight languages, and wrote far more books on the Middle East, Europe, terrorism (a subject he pioneered), and even wrote novels. Walter had a lot to do with the development of think tanks. He invented the concept of "contemporary history." He knows everyone, has read everything, and has a remarkable memory and an archive of anecdotes.

At the party, I remarked to him that these are very difficult times we are going through.

His response? "I've seen worse."

We laughed because, of course, it's so true. And that's a good thing to keep in mind as we deal with the phenomena ranging from nonsensical to horrific every day.

RubinReports: A Leading Intellectual Gives The Long-Term Perspective On Today's Problems

RubinReports: A Brief Guide to Why 1948 Was a Palestinian Arab and Arab Disaster

A Brief Guide to Why 1948 Was a Palestinian Arab and Arab Disaster

This article is published on PajamasMedia.

By Barry Rubin

In 1947 the UN voted to partition the British mandate of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. The Jews accepted partition into two states; the Arabs rejected it.

The international community offered to make Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian Arabs' leader, head of a state despite the fact that he and his closest colleagues were the subject of a 1938 British arrest warrant for terrorist activities (not mythical but for killing lots of people), and had spent World War Two in Berlin doing pro-Nazi propaganda, recruiting for SS units, and planning a Holocaust of Jews in the Middle East.

But al-Husseini rejected partition and so did all of the Arab states. While Jordan wanted to make a deal and Egypt’s government wasn’t enthusiastic, they all had to go along with al-Husseini’s intransigence, their hysterical public opinion, and the other Arab states' pressure. The Arab League's leader, a Nazi agent during World War Two, bragged that the Jews would be massacred. The Muslim Brotherhood, which collaborated with the Nazis during the war and were subsidized by them before the war, sent volunteers to fight the Jews.

And so a Palestinian Arab army, whose three chief commanders had all fought for the Nazis during World War Two, went to war against the Jews using Nazi-supplied weapons (provided for the Palestinian Arab revolt in 1939 and for an Egyptian revolt that never happened in 1942). They lost.

Then the armies of the Arab states invaded Israel. They largely lost, though the Egyptian held onto the Gaza area while the Jordanians took east Jerusalem and what became known as the West Bank. Egypt ran Gaza; Jordan annexed the West Bank.

Everything that happened afterward was due to Arab decisions to reject both a two-state solution and Israel’s creation.

That’s the bottom line. So the disaster was due first and foremost to the Palestinian Arab leadership and secondly to the Arab states and publics.

Dealing with the “nakba” would then require that the Palestinian Arabs and the Arabic-speaking world generally would recognize that the disaster resulted from their refusal to accept Israel’s existence and to seek a genuine, compromise two-state solution.

But, instead, in the name of the 1948 disaster they are repeating the same policies that brought it about! Indeed, they are the same policies that led to the self-inflicted disasters of 1967, 2000, and others since then.

For example, as part of the preparations for the commemoration of the 1948 disaster, Palestinian Authority television played repeatedly a music video entitled "On the Way to Jerusalem" The main lines are:

"Jaffa, Acre, Haifa, and Nazareth are ours.

[ I ], Muhammad, sing about the Galilee and the Golan (Heights).
Jaffa, Acre, Haifa and Nazareth are ours."

This is precisely the one-state, wipe-Israel-off-the-map that brought on them the disaster of 1948, disaster every year since then, and more disaster into the forseeable future. Sixty-four years (counting from 1947) of failed policy has not brought wisdom.

Almost every event--Egypt's revolution, demonstrators trying to cross Israel's border, a terrorist attack, Western sympathy, and so on--is interpreted as proving that Israel's destruction is possible and so additional decades should be spent in diplomatic intransigence and the incitement of violence rather than some constructive effort. That's one reason, by the way, why the Palestinians always ultimately lose.



This has also been going on so long that much of the West has forgotten the roots and ongoing causes of this conflict, Palestinian suffering, Israeli suffering, and the terrorist violence and defamation of Israel.

Note: The use of the words “Nazi collaborator” and other mentions of pro-Nazi activities in this article are not name-calling but based on German and U.S. intelligence materials. These points will be fully and in detail documented in the forthcoming book by myself and Wolfgang Schwanitz, to be published by Yale University Press next year.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal, and a featured columnist at PajamasMedia http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/ His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is http://www.gloria-center.org. His PajamaMedia columns are mirrored and other articles available at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/.

RubinReports: A Brief Guide to Why 1948 Was a Palestinian Arab and Arab Disaster

RubinReports: Tell Me What They're Reading and I'll Tell You Who Will Win?

Tell Me What They're Reading and I'll Tell You Who Will Win?

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By Barry Rubin

There's an interesting point about pre-World War One Europe that applies very well to today's international situation as well. In Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman pointed out the difference between what the British and Germans were reading on the eve of the war.

In 1909 Norman Angell, a British member of parliament wrote a pamphlet, "The Great Illusion," that became a best-seller. It argued that since war had become so terrible and governments were rational and would understand this, another major international war was impossible.

But in Germany they were reading Friedrich von Bernhardi's Germany and the Next War, where he argues that "war is a biological necessity" based on the law of nature, the struggle for existence.

Germany was preparing for war; Britain was pacifist. The same process repeated itself before World War Two. And the same process was again repeated in the brief time before the end of World War Two and the Cold War.

Each time, though, the "less prepared" but more democratic side won in the end. Still, because the "fat, materialistic, having a good time" democracies took too long to realize what was going on and the resulting conflict took longer and cost more lives than might have been possible.

In 1940, John F. Kennedy published Why England Slept, a book about how British appeasement helped create an atmosphere where Nazi aggression prospered. Of course, his own father had favored and encouraged those policies. Of course, the war he was "warning" about had already begun the previous year. But the surprise attack that killed about 2400 Americans and brought the United States into the war took place more than a year later.

Twenty years later, Kennedy was elected president.

In 2006, Bruce Bawer published While Europe Slept. It was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. One panel member described the book as "racist," while the group's president lamented, "I have never been more embarrassed by a choice" and called it an example of "Islamophobia." Needless to say, he didn't win the award.

For anyone to have read the book and made such statements is a measure of the intellectual insanity that has seized hegemony in the West. Bawer's book was published not one but five years after the conflict he described had already visibly emerged in the form of 3000 Americans killed in a surprise terrorist attack on New York and Washington. As of today, the United States is engaged in three different wars relating to the issues he discussed.

So far nobody's been talking about electing Bawer president.

We can call this state of being, post-September 11 snoring.


We're in the grip of a new version of Angell's "The Great Illusion," a double-edged title if there ever was one. Surely, nobody could want a radical Islamist state! Certainly, nobody would be willing to sacrifice their life for such a thing! Nor would anyone conceivably prefer martyrdom and murder to having a nice toaster and a hybrid car!

That's why all of this talk about Usama bin Ladin hiding behind women, pleading for his life, doing drugs, and having a pornography library really bothers me. Such things stem from this need to prove the other side doesn't really mean what it says, they're really just sybaritic, materialistic, hedonistic hypocrites. Because if they are, well there really isn't any threat, is there? They can be bought off.

Meanwhile, anyone who examines the real politics, current religious thinking, and actual behavior doesn't get an award but is slandered instead. Or, at best, is ignored and barred from access to the mass media's audience.

Yet every day on the other side, the argument is openly and publicly being made that--in a slight paraphrase of von Bernhardi's theme--that war is a religious necessity (jihad) based on the law of the divine being and natural struggle for existence.

And simply repeating what that side is saying daily is a thought crime.

Last October, I published an article about the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's declaration of war against the United States. A few months before the Egyptian revolution, the speech by the Brotherhood's leader made clear that it was a radical, Islamist, antisemitic, anti-American movement that incited violence.

Not a single mass media television station or newspaper has mentioned that speech to this day, despite huge coverage of the Muslim Brotherhood. The chiefs of American intelligence seem to remain unaware of it. On the contrary, one could find hundreds (thousands?) of claims that the Brotherhood is secular, moderate, pro-democratic, and against violence.

Recently I was interviewed on a big-city radio station. When I made some of these points, the show's host retorted that their correspondent in Cairo "speaks lots of languages," is very experienced, and hadn't mentioned any of these things. So why should he believe me?

Don't believe me, I explained (without any success in this case). Believe what America's enemies are reading, and saying, and doing. Of course, to do that you first have to know about what they're reading, saying, and doing.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal, and a featured columnist at PajamasMedia http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/ His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is http://www.gloria-center.org. His PajamaMedia columns are mirrored and other articles available at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/.

RubinReports: Tell Me What They're Reading and I'll Tell You Who Will Win?

RubinReports: Be Smarter than the Tiger or You’ll End Up In Its Stomach

Be Smarter than the Tiger or You’ll End Up In Its Stomach

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By Barry Rubin

“I always disagree…when people end by saying that we can only combat Communism, Fascism or what not if we develop an equal fanaticism. It appears to me that one defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one’s intelligence. In the same way, a man can kill a tiger because he is not like a tiger & uses his brain to invent the rifle, which no tiger could ever do.” --George Orwell, March 3, 1949.

Orwell wasn’t just throwing out that last image from his imagination. One of his most famous short stories was about shooting an elephant. He didn’t do it for fun but for two other reasons. First, the elephant was menacing the townspeople.

Second, as a policeman in Burma, he knew that all the people standing and watching in the crowd expected him to take leadership and solve the problem. There was no one else who was going to do it and if he failed his credibility—and that of the British government he represented—would be shot to pieces. And if he and they had no credibility they could achieve nothing.

Orwell’s point, reminds us that what’s most scary about the current scene is that Western leaders are not being smarter than the revolutionaries, the terrorists, the dictatorial regimes, the huddled propagandists yearning to keep others from breathing free.

In fact, the basis of their strategy was to seize hegemony over “intelligence,” so that all the wrong attitudes and policies are defined as intelligent, attracting all people who wanted to be considered smart and intellectual. Or, as Woody Allen put it in “Annie Hall”:

“One thing about intellectuals, they prove that you can be absolutely brilliant and have no idea what's going on.”

Thus, what Orwell foresaw is the opposite of what’s happening now. Today, the West's “best and brightest” are sure good about avoiding fanaticism in fighting the contemporary battle. But for them that becomes an end in itself.

Here’s an example.

Tolerance is good; hatred is bad. Precisely because so many Muslims have been involved in terrorism based on the Islamist interpretation of Muslim religious-political doctrine, Americans might hate Muslims, mistakenly confusing ordinary law-abiding Muslims with revolutionary Islamists who use Islam as the main source of their ideology. Therefore, editors and journalists decide that they must censor the news in order to protect Americans from becoming right-wing bigots forming mobs to burn down the local mosques, and to protect Muslims in America from being massacred in the streets of Connecticut by crazed Islamophobes wearing tee-shirts with American flags on them! They decide that their function is to lie to the audience for its own good.
Avoiding fanaticism on one’s own side is, of course, a good idea. But it should not be accomplished by, in effect, making one’s own side extremely stupid in refusing to recognize the danger or even the identity of the adversary.

It is also not intelligent to fall into the other side’s traps and echo its arguments, or to be so ruthless in criticism of one's own far superior societies' real or imagined shortcomings while subverting many of the foundations of Western democracy and civilization, such as community, self-confidence, and patriotism.

Of course, this is overstated. There are many exceptions as well as signs of change. Yet the truth is bad enough. The revolutionaries and terrorists are both smarter and more fanatical, that's a chilling combination.

Since we are talking about tigers, it’s worthwhile recalling the other two relevant tiger analogies regarding politics, the paper tiger and riding the tiger.

Paper tiger: The view of a seemingly powerful state as in reality quite weak, originally applied by Communist China to the United States. This idea was revived and deepened by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of Iran’s Islamist revolution, who claimed that if Muslims united, had the proper ideology, and were willing to sacrifice themselves the United States could be defeated. The September 11 attacks, among many other events, were intended to demonstrate that fact.

Actually, such American attempts to win over the extremists made things worse. In private life, kind words or a turned cheek may avert conflict, but this was not a valid principle for U.S. Middle East policy. The United States have had only two choices in the Middle East: either the Iranians and Arabs would see America as a real tiger whose interests they would have to respect or they would view it as a paper tiger which might be easily and profitably defied. This was a case, if there ever was one, to prove the maxim that nice guys finish last.

In a sense, many Western intellectuals have embraced the “paper tiger” idea. Not that, of course, they would explicitly or consciously advocate such a thing but it is the consequence of their world view. According to the revised definition, America should go from being world bully to Ferdinand the Bull.

Or to put it a different way, the United States has too often been a ravening wolf oppressing, looting, and taking advantage of others so a bit more of a laid-back eagerness to apologize, willingness to listen to others along with sympathizing with their grievances, and not taking the lead is good therapy.

Actually, while a long list of mistakes can be assembled, the history of U.S. efforts to defeat Fascism and Communism has been overwhelmingly commendable. And some of the “faults” were either understandable on balance—given limited information and tough choices—or even absolutely necessary actions. At any rate, what is needed is to improve, not to transform fundamentally the American role and view of the world.

If, as is daily happening as a result of U.S. policies and statements, the worst elements in the world do conclude that the United States is a paper tiger then war and violence, oppression and repression, the triumph of real bullies is all the more likely.

Riding the tiger: This image fits what the radical side is doing and also is particularly apt for Arab nationalist regimes. Manipulating dangerous demagogic concepts like nationalism and Islamism, antisemitism and hatred of the West, discounting of the institutions needed for real social-economic development (freedom of speech, a reasonably regulated free enterprise system, the use of logic and the scientific method, etc.) unleashes forces that might devour even the dictators. This pattern of behavior will certainly guarantee the failure of the polities and societies that toy with such forces of irrationality and violence.

Here’s a tiny example. Recently, two medical conferences were held in Egypt regarding which the Egyptian government tried to block Israeli experts from attending. In the case of one, a major meeting on breast cancer designed to help Egypt deal with this disease more effectively, much of the financing and organization came from an American Jewish foundation. As for the other case, a meeting of hematologists, the Israeli doctor barred had been one of the supporters of holding the meeting in Cairo, as a step toward promoting peace and helping Egyptian medicine.

This situation led one Israeli blogger to remark that those responsible for these obstacles, “Hate Jews even more than they hate cancer.” Precisely. And if you don’t understand that, forget about comprehending Middle East politics.

It reminds me of an Egyptian government official’s response many years ago to a U.S. offer to pay for a project to clean up the upper Red Sea based on Egypt-Israel cooperation. The man explained: “If it helps Israel we can’t do it even if it helps Egypt.”

By the way, this has been a persistent theme in Palestinian politics that has worked well in recent years. Better suffering than cooperation and compromise. Indeed, it has been a terrific strategy because the resulting suffering then gets blamed on Israel. Recently, a supposedly scientific study blamed spousal abuse in the West Bank on Israel. Perhaps if breast cancer and hematological diseases go up in Egypt this can be used to spur on condemnations of Israel in Europe. (That was said sarcastically but on past occasions when I’ve written something like that, a reader has soon provided a clipping showing that the bitter joke had in fact become reality.)

If I want to end this article on an optimistic note, perhaps it’s possible to suggest that the “intelligence” involved in achieving victory in the long-term comes not so much from individuals but from the innate nature of a superior structure of thought, better and more open social organization, a rationally based science and technology, a freer economic and political system, a framework which more fully uses the talents of women, and general human rights and liberty.

Thus, those who are smart in strategy aren't going to move their societies forward to confront the challenges tht will really determine who will win this conflict: providing a better life and higher living standards. Of course, in history things do, though not always, work out that way.

Given the intelligence deficit at present, one better hope so.

RubinReports: Be Smarter than the Tiger or You’ll End Up In Its Stomach

RubinReports: Walter Laqueur: An Intellectual for All Seasons Brings His History to Life

Walter Laqueur: An Intellectual for All Seasons Brings His History to Life

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By Barry Rubin

Almost one-third of a century ago, I first met Walter Laqueur--one of the greatest historians, thinkers on international affairs, and political analysts of this or the past century--and he remains for me a role model. He is also one of the few remaining exemplars from the golden generation of Western intellectual life with its tremendous Jewish component and dedication to Enlightenment values.

When Walter was already 87 years old, last year, he mentioned to me that he was looking for a topic for his next book. I suggested an intellectual autobiography, to share what he has learned with the contemporary generations, and now the result is available as Best of Times, Worst of Times, Memoirs of a Political Education (Brandeis, 224pp.).

I knew the book was going to be great when reading some of the draft chapters. Yet only when I sat down with the published book did I realize how truly great and important it is and why you should definitely read it. I’ll explain that in a moment but first some background.

Laqueur was born in Breslau, then in Germany and now in Poland, in 1921. When he was a boy the Nazis came to power and he lived for about six years under that regime. He escaped by becoming a student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, soon leaving to work on a kibbutz where—among other things—he quickly learned Russian and served at times as a mounted guard. He covered the 1948 Independence War as a journalist.

In the 1950s he began writing books, with his scholarly focus over the next 60 years including the USSR, German intellectual and cultural history, Zionism, the Middle East, Europe, guerrillas, the role of intelligence in Western decisionmaking, how news of the Holocaust reached the Allies, and terrorism. He practically created the field of terrorism studies. His career has stretched long enough that I own two books he wrote a half-century apart. The first was entitled Out of the Ruins of Europe, as the continent recovered from World War Two; the more recent called, The Last Days of Europe. He covered the full length of that up and down cycle.


Living in Jerusalem, London, and Washington, he created the Institute for Contemporary History, played a central role in the development of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and taught in several of the world's great universities. Indeed, Laqueur, as much as anyone, created the field of political analysis which has been my profession since the day we met.
If you think this is too effusive, remember I’m holding back because he is going to read this and tease me by saying: You exaggerated as usual.

But from the standpoint (or low point) of intellectual life in 2010 how can one possibly exaggerate what a role model Laqueur is for us today. There is the breadth of his experience and the breadth of his knowledge (it is hard to bring up a name of an author he hasn’t read or intellectual figure he hasn't known), or of his modesty.

And the mere thought that one could become a great international intellectual figure without even having a BA from a university makes one want to cry in our era of credentialed buffoons.

I once sat in on a chat between Walter and a famous Soviet expert who bragged that he spoke eight languages. Walter, who at least equals that, remarked: “Oh, you’re including Bulgarian! Well, everyone who knows Russian can understand it already so that doesn’t count.

His flexibility is also something I admire, and his constant demonstration of the interconnection of all knowledge--he's also a photography and film enthusiast--is a vital reminder in an age of narrow scholastic specialization which is predictably arid and unimaginative.


When I bought my first computer (a Lexitron behemoth consisting of a television screen mounted on a big table and one step beyond the type of thing seen in 1950s' science fiction films), he teased me that the greatest works of literature were written with a quill pen. Today, he puts most teenagers to shame given his computer literacy.

And so you should read all his books. But I want to get back to why you should read this latest book. One of the greatest deficits today is the ignorance or distortion of history (most often into an anti-democratic, anti-Western, anti-capitalist narrative), especially the last 90 years since the end of World War One. Walter has lived through this and it has left him with sound and sober judgments.


"Some of the main sources of error [in comprehending history and predicting politics include] mirror imaging ["They are people like you and me"]; the belief of academics that the main assignment of an intellectual is to be critical; the contention that conflicts can always or almost always be evaded; the idea that in the case of a conflict, truth is more often than not to be found somewhere in the middle and that one's own country is very likely to be in the wrong." (p. 17)

The romance of extremism is one of the greatest of temptations. He compares Rosa Luxemburg, the failed quasi-Communist who is celebrated today though she led a disastrous uprising that ultimately contributed to the triumph of fascism, with Eduard Bernstein, the democratic socialist who is forgotten but did so much to create the modern democratic state and improve the lives of workers. (p. 47) Why does the revolutionary failure become a heroine and the successful former a non-entity?

Laqueur explains why the concept of totalitarianism is needed to understand the Soviet Union. He shows what Nazism was actually like and how that name should not just become some insult to be hurled at anyone with whom one disagrees politically. (“One of the Nazi slogans was, “The individual is nothing, the community—everything.”)

There is one story Walter tells in the book that particularly haunts me given attitudes today. During the period before the Nazis came to power, his parents took him on a river cruise. One of the passengers jumped off the boat, swam around for a while, and climbed back. He used the boat’s Weimar Republic flag as a towel to dry himself. Some of the passengers laughed and applauded. When people no longer appreciate their democratic country and the freedom it provides they are well on their way to losing it.

And he also writes why the West was right and the USSR was wrong in the Cold War. Indeed, I think this analysis is very useful for today in considering states like Iran today:

“Of course the Soviet leaders were, on the whole, not prone to act recklessly. When there were great risks involved they would not take the offensive. Someone compared them to a hotel thief trying all the doors on a certain floor. When he found a door locked he would not persist but instead would pass on to the next door.”

He has taught me about the importance of boredom and incompetence in shaping history, of the ridiculousness of “experts” who prattled on about matters they didn’t really understand. He also taught me that being prolific is not a sin and that the best way to be really productive is to avoid going to meetings whenever possible.


In this present day, his career is a reminder that a scholar should be someone who does creative and insightful work rather than someone driven by a passion to be a celebrity.

You should read this book, then, for his charming style, eyewitness accounts, and most of all his sound judgment. Walter writes:

“I thought of myself as a person of the center-left, and in most ways I continue to do so….The problem is, of course, what is left?….I did not believe that Stalin was a left-winger, nor his followers, nor the various post-modernist schools, such as postcolonialism, nor the German or the Italian terrorists of the 1970s, nor North Korea, nor the Albania of Enver Hoxha or the Cambodia of Pol Pot, nor the Islamists whether following Osama bin Laden or other versions of that ideology.” (p. 70)

These are all excuses for authoritarianism or totalitarianism against human liberty and they should not be allowed—this is my sentiment—to dress themselves or be prettified as anything else.

In other words, if you read this book you will be given a quick and entertaining (in the best sense of the word) course on how we arrived where we are today (“how did we reach this impasse—proceeding from the optimism of Victor Hugo to the dire prospects of the early twentieth century”) and how to think reasonably about that recent past, a field that Laqueur practically created and which he called contemporary history.

He doesn’t give easy answers but always persuasive ones. Go and read this book and as many of his earlier works as you can, including his novels, then thank me for recommending them. You can find a list here.

RubinReports: Walter Laqueur: An Intellectual for All Seasons Brings His History to Life

RubinReports: It’s A Mystery! An Alternative, Satirical History

It’s A Mystery! An Alternative, Satirical History

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By Barry Rubin

Although a revolutionary Islamist Jihad has been ongoing against the United States for more than a decade—involving thousands of attacks—and the Afghan Taliban announced that it was behind the Times Square attack, many observers seem to find it hard to understand what might be going on.

In tens of thousands of articles, sermons, speeches, broadcasts, Internet sites and every other known form of communication, revolutionary Islamists have declared that they want to overthrow the existing regimes in their countries (except for Iran and the Gaza Strip), transform their societies into ones governed by their interpretation of Islam, expel all Western influence, destroy Israel, and—if possible—reestablish the caliphate, take over the entire Middle East and even rule the world.

Apparently, however, some have not yet heard this message. For example:

Mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg: The Times Square bomber’s motives “could be anything,” perhaps a reaction against the new health care law.

Associated Press: “motive mystery”

USA Today: “Motive…remains a mystery.”

What if such thinking had prevailed in the past? For example:

April 19, 1775: “This is the BBC. Armed militiamen in the American colonies opened fire on British forces today in the small towns of Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts. The grievances compelling the colonists are a mystery.”

April 12, 1861: “South Carolina artillery has opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, though their motives are a mystery. Some of the gunners may recently have had their mortgages foreclosed.”

September 1, 1939: “Germany has just invaded Poland. Some think that this is in response to recent Polish health care legislation which left parts of the German minority without proper coverage.”

September 17, 1939: "The Soviet Union has just invaded Poland. Many observers believe that the goal is to rescue that country from German occupation since Communism and Nazism could never become allies.

December 7, 1941: “The motives of those Japanese pilots remain a mystery. The attack on Pearl Harbor might have been due to an outbreak of temporary insanity, perhaps because of something in the food on the Japanese aircraft carriers where they were based.”

“American isolationists said that they were opening the attack on Pearl Harbor was a domestic operation as otherwise the United States might have to fight a war with Japan.”

September 11, 2001: “The motives of the terrorists, er, militants who hijacked planes and flew them into the World Trade Center remain a mystery. Most analysts believe this is proof that the United States did something wrong and offended them.

"A number of journalists have expressed the hope that the attackers were members of Midwestern militia groups in order to avoid triggering bigotry against foreign Muslim revolutionary Jihadists and focus it where it really belongs: against Republicans.”

“Intensive discussions are underway on how to fundamentally transform the United States in order to fix the problem so this will never happen again. If such attacks do happen again they can be attributed to Islamophobia, attempts to enforce immigration law, the housing market, mental problems, or other excuses that will be formulated as necessary.”

--Extra Credit--Guess which of the above items accurately describes what many people did say at the time.

Note: Of course, one shouldn't leap to conclusions immediately after a crime has been detected but that means not speculating in any direction. Moreover, as it became clear that the size of the attack was hard to attribute to a single person, that the man in custody was a Pakistani Muslim, that the Taliban claimed responsibility providing some credible details, etc., the truth became pretty clear. The desperate attempt to avoid admitting that this was an Islamist attack--see also Arkansas recruiter murder, Fort Hood, Detroit underpants bomber, etc., etc., etc.--arose not from a laudably responsible desire to get the facts first but rather from fear of dealing with a very real international conflict and its roots.

RubinReports: It’s A Mystery! An Alternative, Satirical History

RubinReports: Who Stole the People's Money? The People Did, Sort Of

Who Stole the People's Money? The People Did, Sort Of

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By Barry Rubin

In violent demonstrators that killed three people in Athens, the rioters shouted, “Thieves! Thieves!” as they protested new taxes and government spending cuts. Greece is near bankruptcy and before bailing out the country with their own money, other European countries demand that Greece stop the massive spending that has brought it to this point.

So who are the thieves? The protesters are voicing the old-fashioned, outdated idea that rich and powerful capitalists have taken all the country’s money for themselves.

Yet as early as 1948, George Orwell pointed out that there was only one way to raise working class living standards: “Even if we squeeze the rich out of existence, the mass of the people must either consume less or produce more.”

And that is precisely what happened starting in the 1950s. A proper combination of free enterprise and regulation—a balance which has been lost in recent years—new technology, better ways of organizing production, the development of a strong service sector, education, and other changes created a high level of working class consumption in the West. Many members of the working class also moved upward socially. Western Europe and North America flourished at the highest level of democracy and prosperity known in world history.

Orwell had also pointed out a series of lies the Left told others and itself. One of these was that “the lowering of wages and raising of working hours [must always] be dismissed in advance, whatever the economic situation may be. To suggest that they may be unavoidable is merely to risk being plastered with those labels that we are all terrified of. It is far safer to evade the issue and pretend that we can put everything right by redistributing the existing national income.”

And that is precisely—precisely—what is happening today. In the aftermath of World War Two, everyone in Western Europe had to tighten their belts, even accepting rationing of the most basic commodities, to deal with the emergency and undertake reconstruction. That strategy worked.

Since then, government spending and employment has soared, more and more burdens have been added to the economy, the productive sector has shrunk. The result is unsustainable, and Greece is only the first place where this outcome can no longer be ignored.

Nowhere have I seen made the obvious connection between what’s happening in the West and both the chronic financial problems of many Third World countries and the failure of Communism.

True, the level of corruption in these two types of countries was higher and the level of democracy much lower. But the principal causes were huge unwieldy governments that strangled the society, spending money on unproductive things, and stifling initiative.

In 1871, Thomas Nast drew one of the most famous cartoons in American history, in response to a series of scandals in New York, Under the question, “Who stole the people’s money?” he drew the leaders of the Democratic party political machine pointing at each other and saying, “It was him.”

Today, an equivalent cartoon would have to respond to the question of “Who stole the people’s money?” with the answer: The people did.


Well, in a sense. But we are not back in the nineteenth century, when powerful corporations like Standard Oil and U.S. Steel held monopolies and owned governments. That is why the liberals of the day understood that the government had to be stronger, break up monopolies, help trade unions come into existence to protect workers, and regulate some economic and social matters.

That was, however, a long time ago. The balance has long since shifted too far in the opposite direction.

Today, the problem isn't voracious corporations but rather a voracious government and politicians who try to buy support by promising to pay for everything one can imagine. In Greece, more than one-third of the work force is employed by the government. They generally don't produce revenue, they just absorb it. True, they put their income into the economy as consumers but that also puts up prices and either doesn't add to--or even reduce--income-making exports. And all the local plus EU regulations makes it harder and harder for the private sector to generate a profit, pay taxes, and hire people

The ideas that there can be no limits to government size or power, that the supply of money is endless, that the richer can be squeezed and strangling regulations increased with no effect on productivity are leading to disaster for both freedom and prosperity.

Rather than deal with those realities, however, the Left is using the same tool Orwell mentioned: "those labels that we are all terrified of." Here's how he wrote about it in 1948 (sorry it is so long but it's too good to cut:

"These people have a regular technique of smears and ridicule--a whole specialized vocabulary designed to show that anyone who will not repeat the accepted catch-words is a rather laughable kind of lunatic....If from time to time you express a mild distaste for slave-labor camps or one-candidate elections [in Communist countries], you are either insane or actuated by the worst motives. In the same way, when Henry Wallace [the candidate of the left-wing Progressive Party in 1948] is asked by a newspaper interviewer why he issues falsified versions of his speeches to the press, he replies: `So you are one of these people who are clamoring for war with Russia?' It doesn't answer the question, but it would frighten most people into silence. Or there is the milder kind of ridicule that consists in pretending that a reasoned opinion is indistinguishable from an absurd out-of-date prejudice. If you do not like Communism you are a Red-baiter, a believer in Bolshevik atrocities, the nationalization of women...."

You can update those labels for the ones used during the current age of Political Correctness.

And the answer is the same as the one Orwell gave back in 1948 as well:

[But] after all, what does it matter to be laughed at? The big public, in any case, usually doesn't see the joke, and if you state your principles clearly and stick to them, it is wonderful how people come round to you in the end."

RubinReports: Who Stole the People's Money? The People Did, Sort Of

RubinReports: Fred Halliday: A Tribute to a Uniquely Brave Middle East Scholar

Fred Halliday: A Tribute to a Uniquely Brave Middle East Scholar

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Fred Halliday: A Tribute to a Uniquely Brave Middle East Scholar

By Barry Rubin

Fred Halliday was a unique person, a man of courage, creativity, and spirit, which is rare in anyone and especially in Middle East studies. He was a dear friend for thirty years. And although I only realized it on hearing news of his untimely death, he is the person I’ve ever known who comes closest to being like George Orwell.

In his honor, I’d like to tell a few Fred stories and talk about why he was such a significant person. In the course of doing so, I’m going to make a few mild remarks about shortcomings in his work, but nothing I didn’t say to him personally and all with deep and genuine affection.

Fred was profoundly a man of the Left, in a way so fully possible only in a British person. Given Fred’s pride in his Irish ancestry, I know he’d wince at that phrase. He was thoroughly socialist, a strong supporter of the Labour Party, a self-defined rebel, and someone who could never imagine himself holding stances other than he did.

Here’s a story Fred told me. When he was a student at university in the 1960s, inclining toward Maoism at the time, he led in the heckling of a visiting Soviet speaker. Years later, he was in Afghanistan on a Soviet military base, with no other Westerners around and surrounded by elite Soviet soldiers armed to the teeth. He was introduced to the provincial governor. Fred realized that this was the man he had shouted down years ago and wondered if the Soviet official would recognize him and have him disposed of with no witnesses.

Fred was amused that the man didn’t recognize him.

In my opinion, a pivotal event for Fred was something that happened to him during the Iranian revolution, in 1979. As a doctrinaire leftist in the 1960s and 1970s, he saw the main enemies as American and British imperialism, the main solution as Marxist revolution in the Middle East. Indeed, I teased him several times that the problem was his typewriter—that’s how far back we go—was defective and merely automatically typed the word “imperialism” each time he typed the word “American.” He laughed.

When he wrote an important book about Iran in the late 1970s, Islam wasn’t mentioned at all and the name of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini appeared once in passing.

Fred went to Iran to hang out with his leftist friends there in 1979. One day, as he visited the leftist newspaper there, run by people who supported the revolution but opposed Islamism, the new regime’s police arrived, destroyed the newspaper office and arrested all his friends, who were probably tortured in prison.

So Fred became even more of an enemy to the revolutionary Islamists. That’s why he was a firm supporter--yes, quite a contradiction but that's the Middle East for you--of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and ended up visiting that Soviet base.

You might be thinking by this point that Fred was just a stereotypical leftist ideologue. But that wouldn’t be true. He would talk to anyone, kept an open mind, and was willing to change his thinking in the face of experience. Fred was a firm supporter of freedom and an enemy of dictatorship and oppression, even if it claimed to be on the left. Like many British leftists of the Labour party old school, his hatred of class snobbery made him a passionate champion of liberty and fairness.

One of my most vivid memories of Fred was his performance at a conference on Iraq at Exeter University that was, though I hadn’t realized it before attending, paid for by the Saddam Hussein government. The time was days after Iraq had invaded Iran in 1980. The speaker before Fred was a typically lithesome (and well-known) sycophantic Middle East studies type who had given a truly disgusting speech on how great Saddam Hussein was, comparing him to Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Fred strode confidently on the stage, in front of an audience full of Iraqi agents and toadies, and began by saying that if Saddam Hussein was so much like Nasser he should resign because he was going to lose the war. He then proceeded to tear apart the Iraqi regime as a repressive, aggressive dictatorship. It was a superb performance in every way.

By the 1990s, Fred had reconsidered his attitude toward Israel and wrote a really courageous article skewering the left for its hostility. He supported peace and truly tried to understand Israel, as well as going out of his way to invite Israeli speakers. For someone on the British left what Fred did was something akin to a Mississippi professor loudly announcing his support for civil rights to anyone who would listen.

Now I must confess my puzzlement at what was pretty much his last major speech, as president of the British society of Middle East studies, which I thought pretty much an apologia and back-patting exercise at how wonderful everything was in a domain he had often criticized.

But one can only ask so much of an individual. Fred was a really brave person who despite his powerful ideological beliefs—which he struggled to ensure never blinded him--did his best to meet real scholarly values, try to engage the facts, and scorn hypocrisy or cowardice. Fred was a man you could respect even when he was an adversary. He should be a role model for today’s leftist academics, but unfortunately they have chosen far worse exemplars.

I’ll keep thinking of him on that stage at the University of Exeter.

If there were more people like Fred Halliday, Western intellectual life and Middle East studies might be tolerable today.

RubinReports: Fred Halliday: A Tribute to a Uniquely Brave Middle East Scholar

RubinReports: Mrs. Teasdale Joins the Revolution: Frank Rich and the Dictatorship of the Downtrodden Snobs

Mrs. Teasdale Joins the Revolution: Frank Rich and the Dictatorship of the Downtrodden Snobs

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By Barry Rubin

Margaret Dumont whose best-known character was as Mrs. Teasdale in the Marx Brothers movies; Chatsworth Osborne Jr.; of the Dobie Gillis show; Richie Rich of comic-strip fame; the Howells of Gilligan’s Island; and countless others.

They're stock characters in American culture. Rich, society people who speak with exaggerated accents, look down their noses at the masses, and take their privileges as being due to their superior virtue. This is a particularly American response to class difference: laughing at these pretenses. Communist cartoons portrayed fat, top-hatted plutocrats in hope of stirring a proletarian revolution against privilege; Americans ridiculed its pretensions.

Yet what if those very people were to take over the revolution, seize control of the left, and laugh at the masses who suffer from their policies? That's what's happened.

It's as if the stuffy Mrs. Teasdale were to put down her copy of the Social Register, pick up a copy of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, and proclaim herself leader of the revolution. Indeed, not just any revolution, but of a progressive revolution against privilege and for the suffering masses. How could she simultaneously ridicule—even demonize--average people while pretending to be the standard-bearer of social justice?

In other words, how can you simultaneously be an arrogant, privileged snob and a freedom fighter against the fascist hordes?

Enter Frank Rich. For those fortunate enough not to know, Rich is a minor—but as we will see highly symbolic—American cultural figure. He was New York Times theatre critic, a job where he became famous for destroying the hopes, dreams, and shows put on by people who are actually creative. Some say he played a central role in decimating Broadway, though I’m in no position to tell. Then he became a cultural columnist at the newspaper and now holds forth both there and on MSNBC.

Rich has become notorious in his new role as a polemicist extreme even by contemporary standards in ridiculing and demonizing everyone who isn’t on the left (a far left that has temporarily hijacked the liberal label). Critics of President Barack Obama are, to him, merely fascist racists who have nothing legitimate to complain about.

Debt high, spending sky-high, health bill unsatisfactory, foreign policy failing? No actual discussion of these issues is permissible. The debate is over. And no decent or respectable person could possibly disagree. (My personal grievance is the claim that these radicals embody liberalism. I'm confident that Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Hubert Humphrey would be on my side.)

Having had the misfortune to have attended secondary school with Rich and having seen his thinking and methods close up, I can add another dimension to the story. Rich’s father owned Rich’s Shoe Store. As far as I knew, and this was a very well-off neighborhood, his family was the wealthiest of all those in the school. With his friend, Jeremy Pikser, son of secret Communist party members who once explained to us that Joseph Stalin was a really good guy, he ran the dominant clique among the honor track students.

So here we have the perfect combination: the wealthy snobbish bully, who looked down on everyone, and the Communist offspring, who accepted that ideology. Rich was vicious toward everyone outside of his clique. To this day, I’ve never met anyone who could get such sarcastic hatred into his tone of voice. Those he denounced were not bad in his eyes for reasons of politics or morality but simply that they were unfashionable or, even better, couldn't defend themselves.

This circle, where no one thought of punching him out for the endless insults and his coterie would laugh appreciatively at his ridicule, was a risk-free bullying environment.

Sort of like MSNBC.

Rich would later write an autobiography in which he claimed to be the real victim. His step-father, you see, was mean to him. (George W. Bush equals stepfather? You said it, I didn't.)

Having been present at a number of the incidents Rich describes I can tell you that he is not all that accurate on key points. But the bottom line in judging Rich's honesty, however, is the following story. In the book, Rich claims that his parents so neglected him that after he graduated high school they went off to England and left him home alone. Funny about that, says a friend who spent a lot of time in the United Kingdom, I was in London at the time and ran into him there, on that very trip with his parents.

Rich would also say, in a television interview about his book, that he was that he had always been a friend of the underdog. So here we have it: an over-privileged snobbish bully who feels superior to everyone else while at the same time perceiving himself as victim of an uncultured vulgar capitalist. Here we have the makings of the modern, Obama-era radical.

Whatever talent Rich has, the road for him was still easy. Out of university he landed a job at a short-lived magazine and then straight to the New York Times. He has enjoyed every privilege and suffered few hardships or setbacks. Rich has no idea how most people in America think and live or what they have to do to survive. He's never met a payroll or struggled to pay his bills. And he has no interest in knowing. His long career shows that empathy is not among his virtues.

But our modern intellectual culture prizes the rebel, the underdog, the man of the people. Once, those who came from backgrounds like Rich donned workmen’s clothes and went to work in factories to organize unions or, earlier, went to peasant villages in Russia, shared the impoverished life of the people, and preached revolution.

Today, however, you don’t have to make any sacrifices. Bring together your arrogance and snobbishness and your pretense at being a heroic battler for the downtrodden. People who work for a living, who have small businesses, who dare differ from the dominant ideology—the old downtrodden –are now evil reactionaries, while the Park Avenue (or is that Upper West Side?) fashionable privileged elite are the progressives. Quite a neat reversal.

Old style: Please pass the caviar, Natasha. And did you hear what those dirty, ignorant peasants are up to now? They want to kill us all and seize our estates!

New style: Please pass the caviar, Natasha. And did you hear what those dirty, ignorant Tea Party people are up to now? They want to kill all the African-Americans and let poor people die without medical care!

In short, the other side has no case and merits no respect for Rich who dehumanizes them politically and culturally: they’re not only evil but they talk and dress funny! Haw-haw-haw, as the Upperclass Twit of the Year in the Monty Python skit would laugh.

What has happened here is quite comprehensible. In 1953, after the East German workers revolted against the “worker’s state,” the Communist playwright, Berthold Brecht remarked, “Would it not be easier in that case for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?"

Well, the proletariat—the downtrodden masses of the Marxist phase of the left’s history—let down the left. Workers and peasants preferred a nice living standard and more freedom rather than Communism. So the left-wing elements of the elite and intelligentsia elected a new proletariat: themselves.

Here’s how George Orwell explained it in 1946:

"Scientists, technicians, teachers, journalists, broadcasters, bureaucrats, professional politicians: in general...people...hungry for more power and more prestige [are looking for] a system which eliminates the upper class, keeps the working class in its place, and hands unlimited power to people very similar to themselves."

Their secret wish, he continues, is to: "Usher in a hierarchical society where the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip." Yeah, that’s Frank Rich all right.

Imagine the scene! It’s the grand political correctness fundraising ball. Everyone who’s anyone is there, none of that common riff-raff allowed. But the Marx Brothers crash the party.

In a great huff, Mrs. Teasdale denounces Groucho, Harpo, and Chico as reactionary, racist, neo-fascists who don’t respect the environment but instead advocate violence and teach hate. All the guests in tuxedos and designer dresses applaud wildly.

The servants pick up the trio, gag them so they can’t speak in their own defense, and throw them out.

Good grief! Let them eat cake has become a slogan of the left!

RubinReports: Mrs. Teasdale Joins the Revolution: Frank Rich and the Dictatorship of the Downtrodden Snobs

RubinReports: A Visit to Texas: How Can You Remember the Alamo When You've Never Heard About It?

A Visit to Texas: How Can You Remember the Alamo When You've Never Heard About It?

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By Barry Rubin
San Antonio, Texas

We go to Texas for a vacation trip. On the way, I ask my son what he's learned in school about the southwestern part of the United States. He replies that the only thing he has learned is that the Mexican War (1846-1848) was unjust and the United States stole a lot of land from Mexico. The students in this class are certainly aren't going to remember the Alamo, or how Mexico's dictatorship was unjust to Americans because they'll never have heard of it.

Others have held that view of the Mexican War, though. If you ever get the chance to read the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant--a truly remarkable book in terms of its writing and overall accuracy--you will discover that Grant was somewhat ashamed of having participated in it. Still, one would hope that Americans in Maryland would be taught that there was some good in California, Arizona, and New Mexico being added to the union along with Mexico being forced to acknowledge that Texas was part of the United States. Not to mention the stirring confirmation of the freedom-loving American spirit and the dire confirmation of how ruthless dictatorships behave that took place in the Texas revolution

Texas is perhaps the ultimate antithesis to the current dominant thinking in Washington. It has done fairly well despite hard economic times and people from other states are flocking there. One guide recounted that she had recently moved from Michigan where there were no jobs available.

It is always interesting to visit a place about which you have heard so much. So it was with the Alamo in San Antonio. After the dictator of Mexico had withdrawn rights that the American settlers in Texas (then called Texians) enjoyed previously, they--along with some of the ethnic Mexican inhabitants--revolted and declared their independence.

There is something very basically American about the story--though, of course, especially Texan--of around 200 men who faced a seige outnumbered a dozen to one, then chose to die for the cause of liberty. There really is--or should I say, has been?--a fanatical devotion to individual freedom at the core of America, and opposing powerful government that takes away liberties formerly possessed by citizens has been a major feature of that creed. This can go too far, of course, but perhaps in a lot of privileged circles in the country it doesn't go far enough nowadays.

Incidentally, when the Texans captured Mexico's dictator, even after he had personally ordered that the defenders of the Alamo and later 300 more Texan fighters who had surrendered at Goniad, be massacred, they let him go after he agreed to end the war and accept Texas's independence. The American side was not bloodthirsty; the dictatorship it fought was.

History should not consist of learning only that your side was good. But it is even worse if history is taught as your side having only been bad. History should teach about the shortcomings of democratic societies. But it is even worse if it is taught to demonstrate only the shortcomings of democratic societies. And students should certainly not be deprived of knowledge about the depredations of dictatorships, including those conducted under the name of Communism as well as fascism.

One thing I've learned to appreciate is that the educational systems in the country vary widely. The shocking indoctrination I've seen in one county of Maryland does not necessarily extend elsewhere. Indeed, Texas seems to be going too far the other direction, with the right-wing exercising excessive power. This is not good either. There is something really important about being able to stay toward the center--and that applies to resisting pulls in both directions.

Still, it's disgusting hypocrisy to see en route to Texas a big story in Yahoo headlines about how conservatives are creating historical myths. Not one word is said about the far-left version of history presented elsewhere. Why is one extreme derided while another is embraced? Depending on the state, both sides are going too far, though I'd bet that the swing to the left--especially on the university level--is more widespread. For one thing, those on the right are more likely to give up on public schools and send their kids for home-schooling or private schools.

At the Alamo, there is a nice modernization of the account of what happened in the museum there without becoming self-hating, ridiculous, or just plain wrong. There are prominent write-ups about ethnic Mexican participants in the Texas war of independence--they didn't like being ruled by a tyrant even if he was from the same cultural background--and even at the Alamo itself, as well as women and the sole African-American participant. Yet there is no rapturous exaggeration either to create events that didn't happen or tell the story out of proportion.

One saw something similar at the Nimitz Museum on the Pacific war in Fredericksburg, Texas, the hometown of the commander of the U.S. Navy there during World War Two. There is a clear sense of the Japanese side of the story, a section on the internment of Japanese-Americans, a lot of stuff on the home front and the participation of African-Americans, women, etc., without any pandering being done at all. It is a splendid museum, one that I hadn't even known existed until 24 hours previously.

Some details of what I saw there struck me as relevant especially to the modern day.

--In June 1945, the U.S., British, and Soviet leaders declared--to try to persuade Japan to end the war--that they were using the phrase "unconditional surrender" only in reference to Japan's military. They weren't, the intent was to show, seeking to destroy Japan's people or culture or even remove the emperor. But the unintentional effect of this effort was to convince key Japanese leaders that the Allies were weakening and made them redouble their determination to continue fighting until all Japan was destroyed.

It is a fitting reminder that concessions can lead to the other side, especially if an ideologically radical one, interpreting such steps as fear and lack of true grit, thus making them even more militant and ultimately costing more lives on both sides.

--U.S. bombing of Japan was relentless, with bombs falling on civilian areas. In one raid alone, between 80,000 and 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo were killed. This compares today to a view of warfare--especially where Israel is involved--that killing one civilian (even if in self-defense, even if one has tried to minimize such tragedies) is equivalent to a war crime.

--U.S. forces lost around 120,000 killed in the Pacific. Japanese dead were around 20 million. No one thought this 200-1 ratio killed indicated the United States was waging some kind of genocidal war. (Of course, if Chinese and other casualties are added the result is more even, and not all Japanese casualties were inflicted by U.S. forces. Still, the point remains valid.) It is not a sin to win a war nor is it a sign of evil to inflict more casualties by far on the enemy than it did on you. This merely shows that the other side was foolish to start the war and even more foolish not to end it by negotiation or surrender earlier.

--Japanese racism and atrocities against Filipinos, Koreans, and Chinese were pointed out, along with American sympathy for these Asian victims. The simplistic argument that everything is about race and that Americans have been racist was shown to be nonsense. In addition, history reminds us that you don't have to be "white" to be a racist, national chauvinist, or imperialist. That's a very valid point in dealing with Middle Eastern and some other polities.

--Finally, if you are facing an aggressive and bloodthirsty tyranny, it is better to overthrow that regime. Only by destroying the Nazi regime in Germany, the Fascist regime in Italy, and the fanatically imperialist regime in Japan was it possible for the people in those countries to have better lives as well as for the fighting to end.

In this context, the way the West prevents any possibility of Israel winning militarily over Hamas is quite remarkable. It would have been better by far if Israel had been able to bring down the Hamas regime in January 2009, though I should stress that Israel wasn't trying to do this, knowing that it would never be accepted. Not only better for Israel but for the Palestinians of Gaza and for the prospects of a peace process and the creation of a Palestinian state.

But I don't mean to make this all about contemporary issues. We cannot possibly study the experiences and course of World War Two enough, nor take for granted the outcome. Hopefully, the next generation not only of Americans but of people all over the world will understand this giant historical event.

And Americans at least should understand that the Texas War of Independence against a Mexican dictatorship almost precisely a century earlier was also a part of the great struggle for democracy and liberty against tyranny. But how many students in school today are going to be able to remember the Alamo or understand World War Two?

I can't resist adding something else from this aspect of the story that applies so well to the present day. After his humiliating defeat against the Texans and his raising taxes higher and higher, the Mexican dictator, Santa Anna, was forced out of office and had to flee the country.

When the U.S.-Mexico war broke out, he made a secret deal with a naive and credible American government, promising if he was allowed to pass through the U.S. blockade to get back to Mexico he would sell America the land that it claimed. The U.S. government engaged the former dictator and made a deal with him. But once in Mexico, Santa Anna broke his promise and led the Mexican army against the American forces. Engaging with dictators and making deals with them often results in betrayal and your leaders looking very foolish indeed.

Remember that fact as well as the Alamo.

RubinReports: A Visit to Texas: How Can You Remember the Alamo When You've Never Heard About It?

RubinReports: Splitting Alliances: Why the West will Fail with Syria as it once did with Italy

Splitting Alliances: Why the West will Fail with Syria as it once did with Italy

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By Barry Rubin

Reading history I realized a marvelous analogy for current Western attempts to pry Syria from its alliance with Iran. While few remember it today, there was a strenuous British and French campaign during the 1930s to lure Benito Mussolini’s Italy from aligning with Germany. They flattered the dictator and ignored his repression at home and aggression abroad--including his unprovoked assault on Ethiopia--in this effort.

Of course, they failed. One could say that failure was inevitable because of the similarity between the regimes in Berlin and Rome. Consider three additional factors.

First, there was no way the British and French were able to offer Mussolini more than Hitler did. They had neither the power nor the stomach to sell out more countries to Mussolini. Germany could always offer more because it was ruthless and wanted to destroy the status quo.

Second, Mussolini understandably concluded in 1940 that Germany was winning. For years he'd watched Western appeasement and diplomatic retreat. He saw Germany getting powerful weapons without the Anglo-French bloc stopping it. And he witnessed German military victories. He hopped on the German bandwagon.

Third, the West wouldn't ever act in such a way that Mussolini was more afraid of it than of Hitler.

Analogies can be misleading, of course, and analogies to Germany are overworked. Still, this one might have some use in explaining why the West isn’t going to flatter, concede, or pay enough to split an alliance which, after all, has persisted for thirty years and now believes itself the wave of the future.

RubinReports: Splitting Alliances: Why the West will Fail with Syria as it once did with Italy

RubinReports: Why Many Western Intellectuals Hate Their Own Countries, Want to Change a Successful System, and Idealize Third World Tyrannies

Why Many Western Intellectuals Hate Their Own Countries, Want to Change a Successful System, and Idealize Third World Tyrannies

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We depend on your tax-deductible contributions. To make one, please send a check to: American Friends of IDC, 116 East 16th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10003. The check should be made out to “American Friends of IDC,” with “for GLORIA Center” in the memo line.

By Barry Rubin

George Orwell wrote prophetically in 1943:

“In the last twenty years Western civilization has given the intellectual security without responsibility….It has educated him in skepticism while anchoring him almost immovably in the privileged class. He has been in the position of a young man living on an allowance from father whom he hates. The result is a deep feeling of guilt and resentment, not combined with any genuine desire to escape. But some psychological escape, some form of self-justification there must be....These creeds have the advantage that they aim at the impossible and therefore in effect demand very little….The life of an English gentleman and the moral attitudes of a saint can be enjoyed simultaneously….

“The fact that the eastern nations have shown themselves at least as warlike and bloodthirsty as the western ones, that so far from rejecting industrialism, the East is adopting it as swiftly as it can—this is irrelevant, since what is wanted is the mythos of the peaceful, religious and patriarchal East to set against the greedy and materialistic West….We shall be hearing a lot about the superiority of eastern civilization in the next few years.”

In the first paragraph, Orwell was focusing on how intellectuals transfer their allegiance to their country's enemies. At the time, he was talking about the Communist USSR and Nazi Germany. But he might just as well have been talking about their resentment of the existing system. It's interesting to approach this issue from a traditional kind of socialist or even Marxist approach:

Large sectors of Western intellectuals, culture producers, and unproductive segments of the upper middle class (the kind of people who work in higher-paid government jobs and non-profit organizations included) have long been deeply resentful of the capitalist ruling class. But rather than join with the toiling masses in an alliance (the historic Marxist view), they see the masses in their own country--the contemporary working class, small businesspeople, white-collar workers, and farmers--as reactionary materialists.

They see their chosen allies instead as those who are expected to be discontented with the system: the poor (who Marxists contemptuously called the lumpenproletariat), the young, racial minorities within the country, and a huge pool of new immigrants, legal or otherwise. There are also sympathies with radical regimes or revolutionary movements (today, often radical Islamist ones) abroad. That is not to say whether or not this alliance makes sense or can work. There are many weaknesses in this conception but this discussion will be left for another time.

By the way, one interesting feature here is the dropping of women's liberation issues, which is a subject that could also be analyzed at length. It is a return of the old left and radical nationalist practice of subordinating women's interests to a "larger" cause. One aspect that is important is that issues involving women's equality in Muslim-majority states or communities can thus be ignored.

Today, the basic strategy of this movement is a statist policy to gain control of society through bureaucratic power rather than revolution. Having already seized the commanding heights of idea production (culture, education, media), they would become an effective ruling class by centralizing power in a government (or European Union bureaucracy) that provides massive employment for them (directly and through grants or payments) and governs on the basis of regulations they produce. Who needs control of the means of production directly when one has control of a government body that regulates the means of production or huge amounts of capital?

Incidentally, Orwell dealt with this issue also in an essay. See how what he says corresponds to what's going on now, most clearly through the European Union which is replacing elected governments in its control over society:

"Lissez-faire capitalism gives way to planning and state interference, the mere owner loses power as against the technician and the bureaucrat, but Socialism--that is to say, what used to be called Socialism--shows no sign of emerging." Orwell viewed this system as an enemy of democratic socialism--as he did Stalinist Communism--since it is designed to benefit a new ruling class rather than the majority of the people.

A major tenet of this strategy is to gain popular support by offering "free" tax-funded benefits to supporters funneled through the government. But the main "redistribution of wealth" is not to promote some socialist-style equality but merely a way of buying votes and ensuring the new ruling class's power.

Here's a simple proof: If the goal was redistribution of wealth, a very large portion of the Stimulus and other money would be going for projects to rebuild inner cities, provide jobs for poor people, and train them for productive employment and to open small businesses. Why is the Stimulus and the "jobs' bill" that followed doing so much less for working people and the poorer of society than the New Deal (which provided massive employment far more effectively on far less money) and President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty campaign?

Orwell writes: "Power can sometimes be won or maintained without violence, but never without fraud because it is necessary to mke use of the masses and the masses are led on by vague dreams of human brotherhood...."

Today, this how "social justice," "multiculturalism," and "political correctness" function as slogans used by the would-be new ruling class to mobilize popular support against the old ruling class. Lenin bragged that he would get the capitalists to sell him the rope by which to hang them. Today, the equivalent goes much further: persuuading the capitalists (or their offspring) that they have to give up power because they want to be good, moral, fashionable, progressive people.

Of course, the result can be seen today in countries like Greece. As the economy's unproductive sector grows, luxury policies (including excessive environmental regulations) and pay-outs become too burdensome; business is strangled and over-taxedl and society inevitably heads into a downward spiral. Escape is nearly impossible because those receiving massive benefits rebel against the cuts needed to save the country, while politicians are too fearful to take the required measures.

Conservative and right-wing groups that portray these people and their strategies as socialist and Marxist--much less liberals--are missing the point, using ideas decades out of date. One result of making this mistake is that their opponents can persuasively ridicule them as inaccurate and make appeals for support to large numbers of liberals and centrists who might otherwise be horrified by what's going on.

Back to Orwell. Note particularly the last sentence of Orwell's first paragraph: "The life of an English gentleman and the moral attitudes of a saint can be enjoyed simultaneously."

So you can drive your SUV and save the earth; enjoy a high living standard while telling average Americans and Chinese or Indians that they cannot morally have the same thing; cheer on totalitarian regimes and movements to oppress others (it's their culture to have dictators and torture dissidents, you see [sarcasm]) while yourself enjoying freedom. Even better, you can look down on those "uneducated," "backward," and "primitive" people with whom you have to co-exist who don't recognize that you know everything and they know nothing. And given that situation, there is no reason to listen to those people at all, even to take seriously and honestly rebut their arguments.

Regarding Orwell's second paragraph, imagine the stir if Orwell made such a remark today. Yet we are indeed living in a time when the West has rejected dictatorship, intolerance, and imperialism, though we hear endlessly about its real or alleged past history as defined by such categories. Meanwhile, elements of the Third World have adapted these same things. Imperialism is now operating in a reverse geographical direction. On the basis of past misdeeds, which have been corrected, the West is asked to countenance current misdeeds which endanger its survival.

An example that bears keeping in mind is as follows. Britain and France treated Germany terribly in the immediate aftermath of World War One, demanding it admit war guilt and pay huge reparations. Yet using these past sins as a rationale for giving concessions to Germany in the 1930s, a decade later, led to disaster. The situation, to put it mildly, had changed.

On the question of industrialization, I was taught this point almost forty years ago, on my first visit to China, when a Chinese worker explained to me that the dream of everyone in that country was to have a car, a big house, and other luxuries that people enjoyed in the West. And why shouldn't they have that dream if they are willing to work to fulfill it?

Here, though, are a couple of ideas that should be at the center of serious debate today but aren't:

--The true nature of the ideology and movement currently enjoying hegemony in Europe and North America, and why has it turned against the interests of the great majority of its own people, including the working class.

Someone should do a serious study of how the views of the 1960s-1970s radicals--not Marxism but rather new working class theory, viewing the American masses as benefitting from imperialism, and revolutionary youth movement ideas--are embodied in the current ideology.

--How the West has abandoned imperialism, hatred of other groups, chauvinistic nationalism, and aggression while elements in the Third World have taken on these characteristics, using them against the West and other Third World peoples.

RubinReports: Why Many Western Intellectuals Hate Their Own Countries, Want to Change a Successful System, and Idealize Third World Tyrannies