By Stanley Rogouski, 7/31/06
A
moderate Arab politician (and for “moderate” read “pro-American”) engages
in a complex dance with both the American government and what is commonly known
as “the Arab Street.
For the Western media, you talk about “democracy” and “pluralism”. Behind
closed doors with American power brokers, you give them assurances you won’t
threaten the state of Israel
and that you”ll continue to keep the supply of oil flowing west. For your own
people and for the Arab media, you give fiery speeches denouncing the Israelis
and the American imperialists.
Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister of Iraq, who’s
dependent on the American military for his survival and who is, thus, more
“moderate” than most Arab politicians, is no exception. On one hand, he’s a
founder of the radical Shiite “Dawa” Party, which means he’s basically an
Islamic theocrat with views not terribly different from Muqtada al-Sadr and Hassan
Nasrallah. On the other hand, during an interview with the BBC, he remarked
that he was in favor of “a pluralist Iraq whose various ethnic and
sectarian groups regarded each other as equals”.
Hillary
Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Dick Durbin all know how
the game is played and they rarely object to it. In spite of some window
dressing put out by John Kerry, Russ Feingold and Jack Murtha earlier this
year, the Democrats fully support the occupation of Iraq and vote with their checkbooks
(and our tax dollars). When Kerry and Feingold introduced a bill that would
have had all American troops taken out of Iraq by 2007, it went down in
flames, 87 votes to 13. On June 23rd of this year a vote to approve
a $517.7 billion war budget for fiscal year 2007 (including $50 billion designated
to maintain the occupations of Iraq
and Afghanistan)
passed unanimously.
That’s
right. All 13 Senate Democrats who voted for the Kerry/Feingold Bill, including
Kerry and Feingold, voted to keep the supply of money flowing into the Green
Zone and, consequently, to the government of Nouri al-Maliki.
Nevertheless
last week the Democrats decided to throw a tantrum. Nouri al-Maliki’s statement
condemning the Israeli attack on Lebanon threw them into a spasm of
rage. Democratic Congressional Campaign
Committee Chairman Rahm Emanuel called on Maliki to cancel his planned address
before Congress. Chuck Schumer, who didn’t show up for the July 26 speech at
all, wondered about Maliki’s loyalty to the west: “Which side is he on
when it comes to the war on terror?” Harry Reid and Dick Durbin demanded that
Maliki make some ritualistic statement of support for Israel and
against Hizbollah in Palm Beach, Florida. And Howard Dean turned the volume up to 11, labeling Maliki
an “anti-Semite” during a speech in
The
Republicans, “liberal hawks” like Peter Beinart, and conservative newspapers
like the Washington Times, quite understandably, labeled it “pandering”. The
powerful Senator John Warner, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was
open about his contempt for Dean. “I dismiss Howard Dean,” he told Fox News.
“Really, he’s a disappointment, even to Democrats. I don’t care to deal with
that.” This is strong stuff from a southern aristocrat like Warner, who’s
usually the type who likes to respond to his political opponents with a smile.
Beinart was even more contemptuous. “The Democratic Party’s single biggest
foreign policy liability is not that Americans think Democrats are soft,” he
wrote in his editorial in the Washington Post, “it is that Americans think
Democrats stand for nothing, that they have no principles beyond political
expedience. Given the party’s behavior over the past several months, it is not
hard to understand why”.
That
Beinart, who’s basically a paid employee of the pro-Israel lobby, would denounce
Dean’s clumsy attempt to pander to Jewish voters isn’t surprising. Jewish
voters and the various pro-Israel lobbies in Washington aren’t stupid. They understand
the game with “moderate” Arab politicians as well as anyone else, and it’s
unlikely that anybody at AIPAC wants Maliki to commit suicide by coming out
with a statement in support of Ehud Olmert’s attack on Lebanon. But what
Beinart and John Warner don’t quite understand is that the Democratic Party,
like Prime Minister Maliki, is facing an insurrection of its own. In spite of
his wretched performance in the debate with Joe Lieberman, it now appears that
Connecticut millionaire and nominally anti-war politician Ned Lamont is on the
verge of knocking Joe Lieberman out of the race altogether. The polls have
closed to within the margin of error. In spite of his support by Bill Clinton,
the Lieberman campaign is still faltering, and, just yesterday, Lamont picked
up the endorsement of the New York Times.
Ned
Lamont is safely pro-Israel. The statement on his website leaves no room for
doubt. “At this critical time in the Middle East,”
Lamont says. “I believe that when Israel’s
security is threatened, the United
States must unambiguously stand with our
ally to be sure that it is safe and secure. On this principle, Americans are
united.” But the Democratic party rank and file that’s behind Lamont’s
campaign, the grassroots, or “netroots” as they are popularly known, is not. In
fact, they”re exploding with anti-Israel sentiment. For the first time in recent
memory, the American people are not united and don’t stand unambiguously with Israel.
With
their systematic destruction of the infrastructure of Lebanon, the Israelis have failed
to destroy Hezbollah, but have done enormous amounts of collateral damage to
their own reputation, and it’s not only the stray leftist diary on the Daily
Kos that reflects it. Unlike the American occupation of Iraq, images of the civilian casualties coming
out of Lebanon
are not being censored. This will change, of course, but, as of now, CNN has
over 20 people in Beirut
and mainstream journalists like Tucker Carlson seem surprisingly willing to
call Israeli propaganda for what it is. Lebanon is a western country and
the Lebanese look and act like Europeans. The constant stream of images of dead
Lebanese children and oil soaked beaches shock us in a way that similar images
coming out of sub Sahara Africa or out of the Gaza strip do not. Carlson, in
fact, seemed genuinely taken aback by the thuggish Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempt
to compare the entire country to a host body in the horror movie “Aliens”.
In other words, the American street is starting to get restless. We don’t like
the idea that those same beautiful Lebanese girls we saw last year protesting
the Syrian occupation might now be the targets of Israeli bombs. The hype
around the elections in Iraq
and in Palestine in 2005 failed to achieve their
objective of putting dependable American/Israeli puppets in power, but they did
succeed in calling into question Israel’s
claim to be “the only Democracy in the Middle East”.
George Bush had opened the Pandora’s Box that all of those Kissingerite
realists and dour, pessimistic Democratic politicians had predicted he would.
The configuration of the Middle East is rapidly changing and not in a direction
that benefits Israel.
Damage control had to be done. A line in the sand drawn for anybody in the rank
and file of the Democratic Party who might expect the victory of Ned Lamont to
signal a more “even handed” American policy towards the Israelis and
Palestinians.
Who
better to play the role of taskmaster than Howard Dean, once as much a darling
of the Democratic left as Ned Lamont is now? Dean, who famously got into
trouble with the pro-Israeli lobby for his “even handedness” remark in 2004 is
no ideological soul mate of the pro-Israeli right or the neocons. Instead, he’s an opportunistic politician
whose views change with whatever audience he happens to be addressing at the
time. In 2003 and 2004 when he was running a grassroots anti-war campaign and
was dependent on the anti-war left for his support, he tilted away from the
Israelis and ever so mildly towards the Palestinians. In 2006, as chairman of
the DNC and as the Democratic Party’s primary fund-raiser, he’s cranked up the
pro-Israel, anti-Arab rhetoric to a deafening level. And yet, Dean is still
widely mistrusted on the pro-Israel right (note Beinart’s contempt for his
“pandering”) and still has a good deal of credibility on the anti-war left. So
his statements denouncing Maliki’s utterly reasonable denunciation of the
Israeli attacks on Lebanon
were bound to have a dampening effect on the debate within the Democratic
Party.
Let’s
look at what Maliki actually said.
“The Israeli attacks and air strikes are completely
destroying Lebanon’s
infrastructure. I condemn these aggressions and call on the Arab League foreign
ministers” meeting in Cairo
to take quick action to stop these aggressions. We call on the world to take
quick stands to stop the Israeli aggression.”
What’s
striking about this statement is not that it’s anti-Semitic but that it’s
decidedly not anti-Semitic. If this is the most anti-Semitic thing that the
Democratic Party could dig up from the Arab world than the problem of
“anti-Semitism” we hear about so much in the Middle East
is a lie. Indeed, for an Islamic theocrat and Shiite politician, Maliki sounds
an awful lot like a secular leftist politician in Western
Europe, and that was what so angered Howard Dean, Hillary Clinton,
Harry Reid and Dick Durbin. Any of them could have easily gone to the Memri (an
organization set up by Israeli intelligence to publish the most inflammatory
anti-Semitic and anti-American statements coming out of the Arab world) website
and picked out something from the platform of the Dawa party about the status
of women or gays, or about the Sunni minority in Iraq that would make your hair
stand on end. So why pick out a rare statement by an Arab politician which
denounces the Israeli government but says nothing about Jews or Zionism or anything
else we”d find offensive?
The
Democrats weren’t interested in denouncing anti-Semitism but in keeping the
American people in line. Maliki’s sin was not in being an anti-Semite (which he
may or may not be) but to break the framing that “moderate” Arab politicians
are supposed to stay inside. A “moderate” Arab politician is allowed to give
blood curdling, anti-Semitic rants about Israel that stay inside the Arab
world. He’s not supposed to speak in a way that both the Arab street and the
American anti-war left can both understand. He’s not supposed to address the
American people. And we”re not supposed to listen. Whether or not we will is
still open to question. But if we do, we can expect to have Howard Dean and the
Democratic Party’s elites screaming in our ears that we should “la la la la
don’t listen” all the way. And it’s doing to get a lot louder and more vehement
as Lebanon
continues to burn.