The sleep of reason

It has come to a pretty pass when even avowed Liberal Democrats can't put up with the Guardian anymore. And who can blame Inner West, when this is the kind of bull which it comes out with (emphasis mine)?

The truth behind the diplomatic efforts to stop the fighting in Lebanon, a truth which also lies behind Israel's threat to expand the war if it is not satisfied with the outcome, is that everything now revolves around an attempt to save Israel's face ...

The most fundamental fact is that Hizbullah was, it is pretty generally agreed, on the road toward demilitarisation well before this adventure. The logic of Lebanese politics pointed toward a slackening of the movement's ties with Syria and Iran and the progressive reduction of its military activities. In turn, Israel's logic should have been to put up with the occasional provocation and wait for Lebanon's internal evolution to bring changes. If it did not, there would have been time enough to change policy.

Yes, Israel should have been happy to sit there and wait for the people of Lebanon to rise up and evict Hezbollah from their own Government while rockets and missiles kept killing people in Haifa. This is only "occasional provocation" and as such is not worth bothering with.

This kind of nonsense (it's OK for some Israelis to die, as long as lots of Lebanese don't) is moral equivalence masquerading as realpolitik. And there's been a lot of nonsense around this week. Rather than congratulate our police and security services — and thank the Pakistanis — for their efforts in thwarting what could have been a worse terrorist atrocity than September 11, Joe Public seems intent on foaming at the mouth with rabid conspiracy theories. "Simple fact — if we weren't lapdogs at the beck and call of Bush, we certainly wouldn't have as much to worry about. Of course, whether we really have anything to worry about is another point entirely. The timing is all rather ... convenient, isn't it?" mutters one wacko on the BBC website. "Just another excuse for the government to nibble away at our freedoms," says another. "A very well orchestrated news [sic] just to divert attention from both leaders on the current crisis in the middle east. A job well done from Blair and Bush," argues Karshe from Charlotte (North Carolina, presumably).

It is a sad reflection on our age that people are so willing to be cynical and indulge in conspiracism, but I think that this kind of commentary reflects a deeper malaise. I think that people are so unwilling to consider the existential threat that society faces that they are taking refuge in tired rants against authority; in cries of "Big Brother!" and "1984!" How much easier it is to blame Bush and "Bliar" and bang on about Iraq and imperialism and neocons than to face up to the idea that there is a nihilist cult who want to kill you and destroy your way of life. How much easier it is to condemn the Zionists and their "disproportionate" reaction to having their towns, nightclubs and buses bombed and their people kidnapped than it is to actually hear Nasrullah express his gratitude that we've gathered all the Jews in the world in one place, thus making them easier to kill. How much easier it is to dismiss Mahmoud Ahmedinejad as a diminutive funny man who doesn't really mean what he says, as opposed to actually taking seriously his warped, fascist anti-Semitism. (This kind of nonsense is not limited to Brits — the Yanks are at it, too, sadly, including our brothers and sisters in the Democratic Party.)

All of this amounts to a dangerous self-flagellation which will result, if given free rein, in nothing but people getting killed. It will not result in justice for Palestinians or Lebanese; the "humiliation" of Bush and the USA or anything else that the unwitting appeasers of intolerance and terror seem to want.

Gerard Baker has it right in the Times today:

[T]he cynics will say the plot inevitably has its roots in our own culpability. If we hadn’t invaded Iraq, if Tony Blair weren’t George Bush’s agent of oil-fuelled imperialism, if Israel weren’t killing innocents in Lebanon, this wouldn’t have happened.

It is a neatly comprehensive schema of cynicism. If the plot turns out to be a damp squib, or the police have made some ghastly error, the sceptics will triumphantly claim that it was deliberately overdone to scare us. If the plot is real, or God forbid, as with 9/11 or 7/7 it isn’t foiled in time, then they can switch seamlessly to the claim that we’ve only ourselves to blame.

In this internally pure worldview, the consistent theme is denial— denial of the reality of the mortal threat we face, denial of the reasons we face it. The villain for these people is not the jihadist, with his agenda of destroying our very way of life. It is, as it has always been, that malign continuum of institutions of our own authority that begins with the aggressive police officer and goes all the way up via the credulous media and craven officials to No 10 and the White House [...]

[I]t just won’t do to claim it’s all about bad US foreign policy. It is repetitive but necessary to point out that we didn’t start this war when we invaded Iraq. The attacks on 9/11 were planned not only before we invaded, but during a time when the US was expending extraordinary effort to try to forge a lasting settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.

And if our actions have radicalised the jihadists we should remember that they are animated at least as much by our ridding Afghanistan of their spiritual brethren, the Taleban, as they are by whatever crimes the US may have committed in Baghdad.

The same applies to Israel and Lebanon. Not only is the current war the direct result of Hezbollah’s aggression, its deeper causes lie in the continued determination of Israel’s enemies, increasingly emboldened by Tehran, to liquidate the Jewish state.

Few can look at events in Iraq or Lebanon today with optimism, but it would be dangerous folly to assume, as some do, that the West should retreat, beating its breast and promising never to offend again.

Events such as yesterday’s near-miss should remind us that September 11, 2001, gave birth to a radical and dangerous new world. It required the US — an imperfect country to be sure, but the only one with the power and the will to defend the basic freedoms we too easily take for granted — with its allies to remake the international system. It provided a terrifying harbinger of much larger atrocities to come, when terrorists and their state supporters get hold of weapons with which they can kill millions, not thousands. This new enemy is not like old enemies. It is fundamentalist and suicidal and apocalyptic. The old system, rooted in a liberal philosophy that relied on patient diplomacy and made a virtue of being slow to respond to attacks, was unequal to this new challenge. The new system required rapid action to open up the Middle East, the festering root of all these threats to modernity ... we should not, in our frustration, confuse the real enemies here. We should not mistake the unlooked-for dangers caused by blunders and arrogance in Washington for the targeted threats posed by nihilism and hatred in much of the Middle East, and in some of our own cities.

Yesterday provided us with yet another glimpse of the awful reality of our long war and associated miseries. We must be very careful not to ascribe their creation to our own errors.

In this long war against extremism, the worst thing to do would be to turn on ourselves and wrap ourselves in a comfort blanket believing that our leaders are making it all up. When terrorists then strike again, we will have no-one to blame but ourselves, and our own willingness to let reason sleep.

Comments

[Lola]

well said!

[B4L]

Well said indeed.

Comment Is Free is particularly sleazy at the moment, and recent comments like "A Jew is to a Zionist, as a German is to a Nazi" stick in the mind. I notice they did at least take down the one about the Israeli leadership being like the Nazis, "but at least Hitler could paint".

Sickos. I'll be like Stephen Pollard in a year if this continues.