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Martin Peretz
Editor-in-Chief & Chairman, The New Republic
So many mirages have disappeared from our horizon in recent weeks, and even from the horizons of others, that it is difficult to internalize how many mirages remain intact, and that new ones now loom in the distance. The mirage is a central feature of life in the desert, and it is dangerous to mistake a mirage for reality. So we may assume that its inhabitants, that is, the inhabitants of that part of the world, can tell the difference between an illusion and a fact - at least with reference to the Empty Quarter, as the geographers called it, and to the wider swath of territory stretching from ancient Mesopotamia to the western Maghreb, that is, the physical world of the Arabs. But even more dangerous than the mirages of the ocular imagination are the shimmering expanses of history and politics of the past and of the future, of glory and defeat, of heroes and betrayers. Sometimes the mirage is a piece of individual psychosis, as when Saddam Hussein allowed himself to think that he followed in the footsteps of Nebuchadnezzar and Saladin, that he was as great as they. But for individual psychotics to make a social difference they must persuade their polity and their culture that their personal fantasies are actually true.
Iraq is a country invented by a British India office foreign servant named Gertrude Bell. (Someone should do a movie about Gertrude Bell; she is the Lawrence of Arabia of Iraq. At the end of her life in a fit of pique she said, "I'll never engage in creating kings again.") You can tell the country is a contrivance by the sheer fact that it has straight lines. Look at an atlas; those countries which have pretty clear geometrical shapes are usually the result of, at best, indifference, at worst, mischief. In any case these fantasies in a place like Iraq were fed with the milk that children drink day after day, year after year; or for others coerced by the unrelenting terror of the consequences if you disbelieved in public.
Saddam's spell not only worked in Iraq, or seemed to work, it also worked elsewhere, among other Arabs. Disillusioned by their own feckless, corrupt, dictatorial, non-transparent leaders, they somehow found in him, or in his belligerence towards the United States, reason to anoint him as a hero. None anointed him more exuberantly and more consistently than the Palestinians - who, on the day Baghdad collapsed, which was the day Saddam's information minister spoke of the coming victory over the United States - held rallies for Saddam in the disputed territories with placards urging him to bomb Tel Aviv with chemicals, which of course would also mean bombing themselves.
Iraq was and is a humiliation to the Arabs, or at least it should have been. The mirage of its power had been vanquished already once. But as if nothing had ever really happened, Iraq was once again made the index of Arab pride, and once again that pride was shattered. Think what it means that Saddam's Iraq - and that is what is was: Saddam's Iraq - a regime so macabre, so bloody, should be the object of devotion for many millions of Arabs, who, unlike the brutalized Iraqis themselves - those who would not be sent to the dungeons, nor have their tongues eviscerated, nor their genitals wired - these people who had no reason to fear the tyrant, but rather voluntarily and in a sea of brotherhood, adulated him and were enraged when his bronzes were toppled one after one. A polity that adores Saddam Hussein is a polity mesmerized by a mirage, and it is a polity that is sick.
I know one is not supposed to have doubts about Abu Mazen. He is, at least outside Palestine, the man of the hour. I am glad he was maneuvered into office, but maneuvered he was. Although the position of prime minister in the Arab world is not what it is in parliamentary societies - which is why I suspect that not one of you in the audience can tell me the name of one Arab prime minister anywhere, and I can't tell you, either. Still, I do wish Abu Mazen well. And I wish him well for the Palestinians and for the Israelis alike, although once again I feel Arafat has outwitted him and his sponsors, including the United States.
Abu Mazen was supposed to be in control of the security agencies of the Palestinian Authority. It was one of the preconditions, one of the stipulations attendant to his getting the office - that security would be in his hands. Alas, the newspapers today tell us, today, that Arafat remains in control of five of the security agencies, including Force 17 and others which were perpetrators and instruments of terror. How should Israel and the U.S. react to this violation of the very preconditions of the road map? They could insist on abiding by the rules - which they won't do - or they could ignore this flagrant flaunting of the stipulations. They will pretend that this hasn't occurred as they pretended for half a decade after the handshake on the White House lawn that Oslo was in good health and the Palestinians weren't breaking any of the grave promises they had made. You see, mirages are contagious, and if the players pretend well enough, the spectator will look away.
It seems that one has to accede to mirages if one is to be an actor in and with the Arab world. But I alluded to Abu Mazen not just because he will have to pretend to the mirage of actually having the security agencies under his control when they are not, but because, alas, mirages are a part of his history, even with reference to history itself. Abu Mazen, it seems, does not believe that the Holocaust actually happened. This was not an offhand remark. He wrote a dissertation, later turned into a book, about this. And while he does say that 896,000 Jews were killed during the Second World War, he does not attribute these deaths to a specific German policy against the Jews, but to the fact that many were killed during the fighting - and not only Jews, but that Jews were among them: "Regarding the gas chambers which were supposedly designed for murdering living Jews, they were only for incinerating dead bodies out of concern for the spread of disease and infection in the region." This too is a mirage. Does he believe it? Does he not? Who knows? The ugliest of lies dealing with Jews in the modern age - but it is not directly related to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, so let's decide that we will just ignore it. But Abu Mazen also believes that Jewish temples did not exist in Jerusalem, and that is a mirage that affects our politics today. Still, no one here believes what Abu Mazen believes about either the Jewish catastrophe or the Jewish temple. So are we mirage free?
I think not. No one here presumably made a hero out of Saddam Hussein. No one, certainly, wanted Saddam Hussein to stay. That is John Kerry's position, and I suppose also Bill Clinton's, who had some choices in these matters but refused to take them. My former student and good friend Al Gore gave a notable address at this very Commonwealth Club laying out a coherent opposition to the war, but opposition it was. My wife, who is a very smart woman, said something to me that puzzled me. She said, "I would be for this war if Tony Blair were our president."
This issue is not about George Bush. There have been many presidents who were not exquisitely literate. Our president is his advisors. And a president who has Colin Powell, with whom I have my differences, and Donald Rumsfeld, with whom I have less differences, and Condi Rice and Paul Wolfowitz - he's a pretty well-positioned president. In any case it's a diversion - it's a comforting diversion - to fix on the president who it's easy to ridicule in some quarters, but I don't think it's fair.
So how was one to rid the world of the Iraqi Baath and Saddam without a war? Almost everybody's answer, and even of some who thought a war was sort of justified, was that you had to do it through the UN. It is, after all, we were told by Kofi Annan and virtually every Democratic candidate, the body that "confers international legitimacy." But does it really, or is that legitimacy itself a mirage?
Let's think about the history of the United Nations. In conception it was established - very much like the League of Nations - to guarantee the territorial integrity of established states. In this ugly world, that is a peculiarly narrow and impoverished conception of peace. It's what immobilized the United Nations as the former Yugoslavia was disintegrating. And it is also what put the United Nations on the side of Nigeria against Biafra. It's what put the United Nations on the side the Congo against Katanga. Maybe one could argue still about the Congo and Katanga, but who will argue here, now, that the territorial integrity of Nigeria was worth the killing and the death in Biafra, and for that matter who will argue about Iraq ten years from now?
The threat to peace and human life in the world is more from brutal internal arrangements than from cross-border aggression, more from surreptitious traffic in terror than actual interstate warfare. The UN has no conception in its very structure about how to deal with this issue. The world is always flooded with refugees - not like the Palestinian refugees who last forever - but there are always refugees. But in the conception of the United Nations there are no refugees within states where the refugees actually are. A legitimate refugee is only someone who crosses the borders to another state. But if you define someone who has been torn out of his home, who has been threatened, whose cousins and brothers and sisters have been murdered, if you call them refugees in the lingo and in the logic of the United Nations that would be interfering in the internal affairs of nation-states. In the United Nations, everybody's form of government and every ideology is equal: democracy or dictatorship, monarchy or revolutionary junta. There is no way of making a distinction between the normative value of one state and another.
Organizationally, the same moral wantonness is replicated. Everybody is represented equally. The UN General Assembly is a democratic assembly: It has the United States, it has China, it has India, it has Pakistan, it has Germany, it has São Tomé and Principe, Nauru, Vanuatu, Kiribati and Tuvalu. On the other hand, the Security Council is really the power in the United Nations. It is representative of the big powers, or it is representative of some big powers and some who used to be big powers. Japan is not a permanent member with veto power, and neither is India, the largest democracy in the world - but France is. Nostalgic for its glory of the past, but hardly a power, its exercise of military will is in soft countries from which it took out its troops and puts them back occasionally to show that it's still around.
Dominique de Villepin was a star of our television screen who raged against violations of international law, which he saw being the result of the U.K., the U.S., Australia and Poland. (There's something quite quaint about the Poles. But you know one shouldn't laugh, because in the vast coalition, or in the larger coalition 12 years ago, there were a lot of people who said yes, but not a lot of armies who had soldiers who sprained an ankle.) De Villepin wrote a book (reviewed in The New Republic, as loyal readers will recognize) called Les Cent-Jours, ou l'Esprit de Sacrifice - a 600-page book on Napoleon, whom de Villepin very much admires, even though there wasn't a country whose sovereignty in Europe Napoleon did not violate. Napoleon committed so many atrocities against Spain and Portugal and Egypt that one wonders why de Villepin has him so high in his pantheon.
France, which threatened to exercise its veto so forcefully, only has its veto because that stiff-necked Charles de Gaulle (Charles de Gaulle called the Jews stiff-necked, so there's historical context here) personally persuaded a slightly addled Franklin Roosevelt and Churchill to pretend that France actually had fought Hitler. But France is a permanent member, and Russia is a permanent member. But they couldn't have actually evaluated on the merits humanity's stake in Saddam's Iraq being overthrown because they had for years been propping Saddam up; trying to help him give the slip to sanctions; sold him weapons and technology, the records of which they are mortified are already seeping out. Moreover, a military coalition of the big powers and the small gives inordinate authority to the small: vetoes in the Gulf War, hindrance in Kosovo.
The United Nations has a sorry record almost everywhere it has been inserted: on Israel's border with Lebanon, in Cambodia, in Haiti, in Kosovo, in Bosnia. But it's hard to imagine, isn't it, that the United Nations could make a contribution to the problem of Kashmir, to the problem of Sri Lanka, to the problem of Ireland. Still, with all the incompetence, unreliability and corruption, the opponents of the war now want the UN to organize the peace in Iraq, or else. It won't happen. It is another mirage of Iraq; like the intrepid resistance of the Republican Guard; like the war that lasted for many months; like the quagmire in which we were mired; like the massive civilian casualties - all these certainties, all of these mirages of the sophisticated classes, turned into nothing, empty fears. Even if the choice in Iraq were between the United Nations and the Pentagon, or the State Department and the Pentagon, I would, as a liberal nationalist, choose the Pentagon. Its vision is more daring and more humane; its aspirations are more democratic; its view is more complicated; the apparatus which is imagined - a federal apparatus - is more intricate and appropriate than any other vision put forward either by the State Department or the UN bureaucracy.
Ahmed Chalabi and Kanan Makiya are very intelligent and brave democrats. Kanan Makiya writes for The New Republic, so that's an added star. But it is certainly better to have people like this than the Baath second echelon taking over power in Iraq. My view of these democrats, I think, is not a mirage.
There are, however, many mirages in the cosmopolitan view of how to solve the Israel-Palestinian issue that mirror the mirages of Iraq. The most central of the procedural considerations is the matter of who should be at the table of the road map. The internationalists, once again an unrelenting troupe, have one answer for everything: the "Quartet" - that off-key ensemble - the UN, the European Union, the Russians plus the United States; it is a mirage that three of the four have credentials for this task. The UN blue helmets stand at the Lebanese-Israeli border, and those blue helmets watched while Hezbollah kidnapped Israeli soldiers from the other side and killed them. UN Special Envoy to the Middle East Terje Roed-Larson wrote an article in the May 5 Wall Street Journal about the road map. He is the one who, without evidence - it turned out to be completely false - charged Israel with a massacre of thousands in Jenin. The European Union is pretty much the same. The French, the proppers-up of Arafat, the European Union, wants in because it wants to use Israel as a lever with their own, always slightly different, Muslim problem. The notion that Russia, with its own war in Chechnya, and its little wars on the periphery of the vast country, has credentials to put this historic antagonism and these historic antagonists together reads to me like preposterous.
The road map itself presents problems because it assumes that a democratic Palestine would accept the two-state solution as a permanent solution. I do not think that is the case. It is, in any case, a mirage to believe that Israel can, or will, or should revert to the armistice lines of 1949 - which is what is meant by the lines of 1967. Fifty-four years cannot be annulled. The fact is that at Taba and Camp David nearly three years ago Israel went virtually back to those frontiers, and they were rejected by the Palestinians. And met with a very bloody infitada, accompanied by the most humanly costly campaign of terrorism, which seems to have spoken from the Palestinian heart.
The ground has shifted in the Middle East, and so inevitably will the ground rules. Some Iraqi leaders, and not just Kurds, have already said that they expect to have good and normal relations with Israel.
The Arab world made virtually nothing of the great transfer of oil wealth to its accounts, and its societies are more poor and turbulent than they were 30 years ago. No country in the Arab world, from the deserts outside Baghdad, to the deserts of western Morocco, has ever truly experienced the Industrial Revolution - certainly not Saudi Arabia, from which the United States is clearly distancing itself. Syria also is to be watched. I am willing to give Dr. Assad the benefit of the doubt. When he came to power, everybody gave him the benefit of the doubt. Was he not a doctor, a scientist? And Iran, too. If there is a democratic insurgency there, as I believe there is an indigenous one, and we help it, the whole map of West Asia already looks utterly different. Turkey, Israel, Iraq, Iran, India - it is not the Old World, and it is not a mirage.
