|
Martin Peretz
Editor-in-Chief & Chairman, The New Republic
Answers to Written Questions from the Floor:
Q: Is there any reason to keep Iraq intact? Why should it not be broken up? The South to Iran, the North to the Kurds and the rest could be the city-state of Baghdad.
A: I want to recommend a reading assignment. Elie Kedourie, a great historian of the Arabs, wrote a book called The Chatham House Version and other Middle Eastern Studies. There is a chapter, a very long essay, called "The Kingdom of Iraq: Retrospect." It has helped me understand - at least I think I'm understanding it well - the Iraqi problem, with the ethnic and sectarian differences. When you think about the differences in Iraq, one of the facts that comes to mind is that there used to be an Assyrian Christian church in Iraq. They're all dead, or in Chicago. Baghdad had a plurality of Jews until 1949. There weren't many cities in the world that had a plurality of Jews: Lódz, Salonica, Baghdad.
The map plays tricks with this design, because the city-state of Baghdad actually has a majority of Shia. We are seeing among the Shia of Iraq so many internal differences that it would be simply cruel to allow it to be annexed to the present government of Iran. The Kurds, who say they are satisfied with a certain form of federal autonomy within the present borders, should not be tempted to want more, because it would be destabilizing not only of Iraq, but of Turkey, and Russia, and Syria (which could probably do with some propitious destabilizing) and Iran. But I have never myself made a fetish of the territorial integrity of Iraq - although it was a fetish of the first George Bush. And it was a fetish of James Baker. And it was a fetish, I believe, on behalf of the Saudis, who feared the Shia of Iraq, and who want every Arab state to be under Sunni, preferably Wahhabi, domination. Having mentioned the first George Bush - this is all speculative. I haven't met the current president - but it seems to me that he went through a life crisis, I would guess, with his father in the last year. His father could not have approved of what he did. So maybe he's a brave guy, too.
Q: A little over a week ago media mogul Ted Turner spoke right here at The Commonwealth Club and said that Rupert Murdoch was fanning the flames of war, that it was a bottom-line issue. Can you comment on the media interpretations of the war in Iraq, particularly in the difference and the comparison between Al Jazeera and their effect, versus the FOX News effect, and how do we find here a balanced perspective?
A: I know this is a television question, but you have to talk about valuable things before you talk about fluff. There are two New York Times reporters - John Burns and Michael Gordon - who should win every award in journalism. You could feel Iraq in their writing, which is hard to do even with the vivid television stuff. I myself watched MSNBC. I found it difficult to watch CNN after Eason Jordan's confession. I had a sense that CNN kind of cottons up to any dictatorship that will give them an office, and let them stay in peace. The FOX network is vulgar, simply vulgar. What do they say? "Fair, fast and balanced?" The News Corporation - aside from the Times Literary Supplement and The Weekly Standard, which is a very serious magazine - specializes in rags; and it has adopted the yellow journalism of the newspapers and brought it to television. It's true with a certain amount of daring and chutzpah that you wouldn't think people would have, and I gather they're the most popular. Anyway, Ted Turner, he's a little bit of a kook himself.
Q: Has U.S. unilateralism in Iraq destroyed whatever international legitimacy the UN had acquired over its history?
A: The United Nations undermined itself, and it undermined itself for, among other reasons, making it seem like the support of the United Nations, or the assent of the United Nations, or the cobbling together of an alliance of states in the United Nations, was the equivalent of a moral judgment. It is not. Moral judgments are made on different grounds other than whether you can cobble together an alliance. This would have been, if it had worked, an alliance of liars and thieves.
Q: It's a commonly held belief that Israel's security, in large measure, is dependent upon the support of the United States. Bill Clinton was a great friend of Israel. Apparently, so is President George W. Bush. Because Al Gore was a student of yours - and you probably know him quite well - assuming that Al Gore had been president of the United States, in addition to Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, which of these men would treat the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the most evenhandedness?
A: I don't think evenhandedness is a virtue in every conflict. Ronald Reagan wanted to be evenhanded between the Apartheid regime and the African National Congress. There were lots of things about the ANC I didn't like - it had a lot of communists in it and so on - but it would be terrible to have an evenhanded America in that situation. None of these three men would be at all evenhanded. They all have shown that they rightly understand the position of Israel in that part of the world.
Q: Does the West have any insight into the general wishes of the Palestinian people regarding the peace process? Do these wishes matter vis-ŕ-vis the process?
A: In the year 2000, at the negotiations in Taba, and at Camp David, the United States, with a rather dreamy, but very smart, Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, were willing to give up 98 percent of the disputed territories. They were willing to split Jerusalem in half. There were all kinds of accommodations that a prudent Zionist, like myself, would never had made. That was taking into consideration the Palestinian grievance, and taking it into consideration very seriously. I don't, by the way, pretend that Palestinians are without valid grievances. They have legitimate grievances that go back 100 years. But those grievances are grievances against the Jews, they are grievances against the surrounding Arab states, they are grievances against their own elites as well.
Q: Iraq is a 5,000 year-old-civilization. Did the secretary of defense make light in one of his recent press conferences of the looting and theft of Iraq's antiquities? Did he indicate during one of those press conferences that the reports of theft have been overblown by the media?
A: The reports of theft actually have been overblown, but that doesn't count, and, I think, legitimately doesn't count. The Army and the Marines should have understood that there would be looting. There is looting in all such situations, as Donald Rumsfeld did say, but it is not an unserious matter. The treasures of Mesopotamia are the treasures of all of us, including the Iraqis, of course. I thought it was a gross statement on his part. But Iraq's treasures have been systematically looted for the last two decades, and they were looted by the ruling elites. I collect Middle Eastern antiquities, and I was called by a private dealer I know who didn't quite say it on the phone…and I said, "Are you kidding?"
Q: The president and his team have said that the Iraqi people are now free. Do you agree? What kind of government will emerge to run this country?
A: Look, the Iraqi people are not free. Freedom is a state into which one grows. The Iraqi probably are not terrorized now as they were. They are not afraid of a knocking on the door at two o'clock in the morning. They are not afraid that their sons are going to be put in the dungeon for a wayward remark. That is an improvement in the life of the Iraqi, a very big improvement.
Q: Why is anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism so much alive as it appears in France? Should Israelis be concerned about how they are viewed by the nations of the European Union?
A: I'm going to take the first question first and expand it to include the European Union and NATO. It's ironic, isn't it, that the countries whose people participated with some enthusiasm in the Holocaust are now rather more friendly to the Jews and to the Jewish state? Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary; they are also part of Europe. I understand why Dominique de Villepin didn't want them as part of Europe. First of all, because the Hungarians make almost as good foie gras. In France maybe 10 percent of the population is Arab. It is significant in Holland. It is significant in Belgium.
Belgium, like France, has two problems: They have a neo-fascist problem, and they have new Muslim residents who are trying to find out how you live in a democratic society, which they never have lived in before. I expect that these Muslims will not be permanent enemies of democratic Europe. But for besieged politicians, being anti-Jewish, since there are so few Jews, is a clever gambit. After all, in France there is a very long and a very deep tradition of anti-Semitism. It took Belgium 20 minutes to surrender to the Nazis. The Jews did not fare well. Belgians didn't make trouble for themselves during the war for the Jews.
I identified myself as an old Zionist. The Zionists understood that European soil was doomed for the Jewish community. They were dead right, and if they were dead right then there is a persistence of those ugly instincts still.
