I join those urging that the Bush administration bring in highly experienced mediators like James Baker, Madeleine Albright, George Mitchell, Bill Clinton -- add, or substitute, names to the list -- to stop this Middle East madness before it is too late:
ISRAEL'S air, land and sea blockade of Lebanon, which includes jet fighter strikes against the airport in Beirut, presages a new era in the Middle East, one in which the center has collapsed and Muslim and Jewish extremists, capable only of the language of violence, determine the parameters of existence. These strikes, like the suicide bombings carried out by Islamic militants in Iraq or Israel, expose the Ahab-like self-immolation that now inflects the region. And unless it is halted soon, unless those fueling these conflicts learn to speak another language, unless they break free from an indulgence in collective necrophilia, the Middle East will slip into a death spiral. -- Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter for the New York Times and author of the best-selling book, "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning."
I am not optimistic. Hedges says the Bush administration has an extremely limited, "binary worldview" and has "never had any interest in helping to broker Middle Eastern peace agreements." The administration's binary worldview is further limited by its reliance on force: Yesterday, on
Democracy Now!,
Ron Suskind explained that "what you see throughout the book [
The One Percent Solution] is
the administration's belief in the value in almost the mystical kind of power of the use of force."
By the way, Suskind was invited on Democracy Now! to discuss the Bush administration's decision to bomb Al Jazeera into more favorable press coverage. As if bombing Al Jazeera's offices and murdering its reporters were the only way to deal with imagined slanted press coverage.
There was great animosity toward Al Jazeera at that point. It was felt inside the administration they were the mouthpiece for bin Laden, and that was a lot of what bin Laden was doing at that juncture. And they wanted to send a message. They asked Al Jazeera to proscribe things it was doing. Al Jazeera said we're a media organization, we don't do that sort of thing. And the headquarters was bombed.
I ask you: In any kind of sane world, is this how a democracy responds to whatever irks its particular administration in office at the moment? Is this not a crime? Must not this kind of mad response be stopped? Mustn't we all revolt and -- growing up, and beyond, our typical isolated American behavior of bemoaning price increases at the pump, while ignoring the deeper issues -- demand that diplomacy and relationship-building be at the fore of our international relationships?
There are so many of the big, and little, things that have gone missing from this particular administration ... the little things like having people in the administration who have great relationships with a variety of powerful people around the world who matter:
RON SUSKIND: We are in a global battle here. Intelligence often comes from human sources and personal relationships. George Tenet had those relationships. No one else [IN THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION] kind of does now.
One of them was with the Emir of Qatar. He, of course, owns Al Jazeera. And at a moment, a key moment, in the summer of 2002, their star reporter, Yousri Foudah, comes to his bosses at Al Jazeera with the biggest scoop they had had up to that point. He had visited the safe house in Karachi where Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the 9/11 planner, and his deputy Ramzi Binalshibh were hiding. He says, well, it was a whole, you know, skullduggery where he went, you know, through various channels. He delivers it to his bosses. They all say, "We must keep this secret." Of course, it goes up the ranks to the Emir. The Emir summarily tells George Tenet exactly what the reporter has said.
I mean, just in terms of how reporters feel about the primacy and privilege of information they receive, it's extraordinary. It's arguably the most important piece of information we got up to that point. Three months later we raided that safe house in Karachi. We almost caught Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. We did catch Ramzi Binalshibh, and we caught Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's wife and children, children who we he later threatened to try to get Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to talk. ..
There's nobody who wants more than I to quell the worldwide spread of Islamic extremism.
But I know enough about fanaticism to assure you that the maniacal psychopaths who run jihadist groups will remain isolated so long as U.S. policy doesn't encourage their potential recruits.
We cannot ascribe equal amounts of moral blame to all sides. Israel is the oppressor in Gaza, the West Bank and now Lebanon. America is the oppressor in Iraq. And there can be no hope for a peaceful resolution to these conflicts until Iraqis are freed from American occupation and Palestinians are allowed to build a viable state. It is the distorting and dehumanizing effects of occupation that made possible the proliferation of extremist groups that, albeit on a smaller scale, simply hand back to the occupier some of their own medicine. The numbers, after all, make clear that most of the victims are Palestinian, Iraqi and now Lebanese civilians, although the numbers game can also obscure the fact that the murder of any innocent by any group is indefensible. -- Chris Hedges
Bush, quite obviously, has no comprehension of the complexities, nor can he see -- with his own limited, brutish tendencies -- how his hard-line, over-simplistic pronouncements fuel hatred, and attract ordinary people to the jihadist-type movements.
George Mitchell's statement last night on Larry King Live isn't the most profound I've seen, but it shows Mitchell's capacity to see the BIG PICTURE, including a move towards toning down the rhetoric, stopping the bloodshed, and talking to the principals:
LARRY KING: George Mitchell, who is the villain of the peace?
MITCHELL: Oh, I think, Larry, there's plenty of blame to go around but clearly the initial action by Hezbollah crossing the border and killing a group of Israeli soldiers and kidnapping two was a reckless act which has triggered this.
I think the problem with trying to assign blame is the action proportionate, is it disproportionate, was the bigger mistake the initial action or the later, is that it deflects attention, energy and resources from trying to solve the problem and bring it to a conclusion.
I think all of the effort now should be first to halt the escalation, reverse it, bring about in effect a status quo and then to move as aggressively as possible to deal with the underlying questions which lead to this kind of continuous eruption in the region.
An old hand himself told me the other day that what's missing from the Bush administration -- especially during this crisis -- are the "old hands" in the State Department and elsewhere who KNEW how to talk to the principals.
Just as Ron Suskind pointed out that there's no one left in the Bush administration who develops those key, long-term relationships with major players around the globe, there's no one left in senior positions who knows how to massage crises effectively.
Tragically, for the Middle East and for the entire globe, binary thinkers like George Bush don't reach out to masterful negotiators like James Baker (or whoever -- you name them -- I don't have a particular preference).
"In this demented world, friend and foe need each other," writes Chris Hedges in his new article, "Mutually Assured Destruction in the Middle East."
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A variant has been posted at No Quarter.