Wednesday, November 10, 2010 Scott Lucas in EA USA
An admission: while I spent years watching and writing about the Bush Administration, I have not rushed out to buy a copy of George W. Bush's ghost-written autobiography. I have not watched or listened to one of his many media interviews.
All it took was Bush's take-away headline yesterday morning --- the false claim that his approval of torture via waterboarding prevented Terrorist Attacks in the United Kingdom --- to reinforce years of conclusion that the 43rd President was/is a) lying b) immoral c) blissfully ill-informed d) all of the above.
And I do not think that hundreds of pages of text can do more than this Bushian comparison, made in his television promotion on Tuesday: 1) Torture was not wrong 2) What was wrong was pouring vodka into my sister's aquarium, killing her goldfish.
Stephen Walt, however, did have the patience to go beyond the puffery to offer an incisive critique of Bush's "Delusion Points". He begins with an essential case for not giving in to historical revision/forgetting:
Two years into Barack Obama's presidency, it has become a cliché to observe that the newish president, who spent his 2008 campaign promising a U-turn from his deeply unpopular predecessor's activities abroad, has ended up with a foreign policy that looks surprising like George W. Bush's. The United States has more troops in Afghanistan than it did at the end of the Bush years, Guantánamo is still open, efforts to engage Iran have failed, and while American soldiers may have begun pulling back from Iraq, they've left plenty of Western defense contractors in their wake.
In anticipation of tomorrow's release of Bush's memoir, Decision Points, this line of thinking is reinforcing one of the Beltway press corps' favorite rituals: the "was he really that bad?" nostalgia for a president that the same reporters and analysts were happily pummeling only two years ago.
Don't believe a word of it. George W. Bush's presidency really wasthat bad -- and the fact that Obama has largely followed the same course is less a measure of Bush's wisdom than a reminder of the depth of the hole he dug his country into, as well as the institutionalized groupthink that dominates the U.S. foreign-policy establishment.
Mirroring the Bush/ghostwriter approach of 14 chapters claiming a key decision that Bush made in his adult life, Walt puts forth his own list of 14 foreign policy decisions distinguishing the Bush years as President. The Iraq War, the ignorance of Al Qa'eda before 9/11 and then the elevation of Osama bin Laden "to the status of a warrior heroically defying the world's sole superpower", the dismissal of international agreements on law, justice, and the environment, failures in the Middle East and with Iran, and Hurricane Katrina --- "observers around the world saw this debacle as both a demonstration of waning U.S. competence and a revealing indicator of continued racial inequality, if not outright injustice" --- are all here.
However, in light of Bush's decision --- with Oprah, with Fox News' Sean Hannity, with radio host Rush Limbaugh, with NBC television --- to highlight his Torture Is Right approach, here is Walt's Decision 6:
Within days of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration began preparing to authorize a set of practices -- meticulously documented in Jane Mayer's excellent The Dark Side -- that are normally associated with brutal military dictatorships. These measures included the systematic use of torture, the suspension of habeas corpus, secret renditions of suspected terrorists, targeted assassinations, and indefinite detention without trial at Guantánamo and other overseas facilities. These practices were endorsed and approved by John Yoo, a mid-level official in the Bush Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and Bush admits in his memoir that he personally approved the waterboarding of captured terrorist suspects. The sordid debacle at Abu Ghraib prison was hardly an isolated incident conducted by poorly supervised subordinates; it was in fact entirely consistent with Bush's post-9/11 approach to human rights and civil liberties. And as Obama's inability to shut down Guatánamo suggests, it may take decades to dismantle these practices and restore America's tarnished international image.
Below are a number of sources that I compiled this week asI found them thought-provoking, interesting, alarming or just downright scary (see video).
John Mueller, a professor of political science at Ohio State University published a piece entitled "The Rise of Nuclear Alarmism" in Foreign Policy. His thesis:
The only real effect of nuclear weapons is humanity's unhealthy obsession with them, a preoccupation that has inspired some seriously bad policy decisions.
While I am certainly not an expert on anything nuclear related, he makes some convincing (and some not too convincing) arguments about the hysteria surrounding nuclear weapons. In an apt comparison, he mentions the hysteria in the 1960s when China was acquiring nuclear weapons, and the United States believed China would use the bomb to blackmail its enemies. Rather, China acquired the bomb, and kept it quietly hidden away, much as the US and Soviet Union had done (with a few exceptions). He does not make the exact comparison, but I think this will apply to Iran as well should it acquire the bomb.
The second article is a blog post from Al Jazeera correspondent Jacky Rowland. Writing in a very personal style, she examines continued Israeli efforts to change the demographic makeup of East Jerusalem by driving out Palestinians, demolishing their homes and destroying their very way of life. The post can be found here.
The third article, also addressing US political options with Iran is an article by the eminent political scientist Steve Walt. In this article, he examines the arguments made by neocon Eliot Cohen, who says the only choice in Iran is this: either Israel bombs Iran or the United States does. The second op-ed examined comes from the NYT and is written by Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett. This op-ed calls for robust diplomatic options with Iran, as everyone knows the military option will not work with Iran. Overall, an interesting analysis. It can be found here.
Finally, a rather frightening piece found on YouTube, courtesy of my Arabic professor. It is a six second clip of a Star Trek episode, with a guest appearance by a certain Middle East figure. I won't tell you who it is, but I'll give you a hint (He is currently king of Jordan). Enjoy.
In Every War Must End, his classic study of war termination, Fred Iklé coined the term "treason of the hawks" to describe those tragic situations where hardliners stubbornly refuse to make peace and thereby lead their countries to disaster. Iklé, who served as Ronald Reagan’s under secretary of defense and is certainly no dove, recognized that obstinate opposition to making peace is as dangerous to a nation's future as naïve pacifism and potentially as damaging as deliberately selling out to the enemy.
After pointing out that "treason" is a word that carries especially harsh moral connotations, Iklé noted:
[T]he English language is without a word of equally strong opprobrium to designate acts that can lead to the destruction of one’s government and one’s country, not by giving aid and comfort to the enemy, but by making enemies, not by fighting too little, but by fighting too much and too long. 'Adventurism' -- much too weak a word -- is perhaps the best term to describe this 'treason of the hawks.' ... Treason can help our enemies destroy our country by making them stronger; adventurism can destroy our country by making our enemies more numerous."
I was reminded of Iklé’s insights when I read about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ideas for resuming the peace process with the Palestinians. Netanyahu clearly wants to avoid an open rift with the Obama administration, which has forcefully reiterated its commitment to negotiating a two-state solution. To do that, he has to pay lip service to the peace process. But because Netanyahu has long opposed the creation of a viable Palestinian state and instead wants to extend Israel's control of the West Bank, he has to lay out a set of demands that will endlessly delay the process and make it hard for Obama to put meaningful pressure on him.
According to Ha'aretz, Netanyahu will insist that the Palestinians go beyond their prior recognition of Israel's right to exist (as expressed in the 1993 Oslo Accord) and explicitly recognize Israel as a "Jewish state." Furthermore, he wants the United States to agree that a future Palestinian state be barred from possessing its own army and forbidden from making alliances with other countries, while Israel is permitted to monitor its borders, its airspace, and its use of the electromagnetic spectrum, presumably in perpetuity. In the meantime, the expansion of Israeli settlements will surely continue, and in ways that will soon preclude any possibility of a territorially contiguous state on the West Bank. Lastly, Netanyahu wants to link progress toward a two-state solution with an end to Iran's nuclear program. As I've noted before, this condition would allow Tehran -- purposely or inadvertently -- to derail a two-state solution by stonewalling on the nuclear issue. Ironically, this outcome might suit Iran and Netanyahu alike: Israel could keep expanding settlements and the Islamic Republic could continue to play the Palestine card against its Arab rivals.
My question is this: What is Netanyahu thinking? Doesn't he realize that time has nearly run out for the two-state solution, and that failure to achieve it is by far the most serious threat facing Israel? The prime minister and his allies keep harping about an "existential" threat from Iran, but this bogeyman is mostly nonsense. Iran has zero -- repeat, zero -- nuclear weapons today, and even if it were to acquire a few at some point in the future, it could not use them against nuclear-armed Israel without committing national suicide. Let me say that again: national suicide.
And could someone please explain to Netanyahu that a group of devout Muslim clerics aren't likely to fire warheads at a land that contains the third holiest site in Islam? Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said some remarkably foolish things about the Holocaust and repeatedly questioned Israel's legitimacy (as in his oft-mistranslated statement about Israel "vanishing from the page of time"), but he's never threatened to murder millions of Israelis (and Palestinians) with nuclear weapons. Just last weekend, he even told ABC's George Stephanopolous that if the Palestinians reached an agreement with Israel, then Iran would support it. Moreover, as Roger Cohen has noted, there is no evidence that Ahmadinejad has any particular animus toward Iran's own Jewish community. Despite his many offensive statements, in short, Ahmadinejad is not Adolf Hitler and we are not living in the 1930s.
The real threat to Israel's future is the occupation, and the conflict with the Palestinians that it perpetuates. To see that, all you have to do is look at current demographic trends and poll results and then ponder the consequences for Israel. There are presently about 5.6 million Jews in "Greater Israel," (i.e., the 1967 borders plus the West Bank) and about 5.2 million Arabs (of whom nearly 1.5 million are citizens of Israel). Palestinian birth rates are substantially higher, however, which means they will be a majority of the population in "Greater Israel" in the not-too-distant future. To put it bluntly, it is Palestinian wombs and not Iranian bombs that pose the real threat.
Netanyahu ought to be equally concerned by signs that the Zionist ideal is losing its hold within Israel itself. There are reportedly between 700,000 and one million Israeli citizens now living abroad, and emigration has outpaced immigration since 2007. According to Ian Lustick and John Mueller, only 69 percent of Israeli Jews say they want to remain in the country, and a 2007 poll reported that about one-quarter of Israelis are considering leaving, including almost half of all young people. As Lustick and Mueller note, hyping the threat from Iran may be making this problem worse, especially among the most highly educated (and thus most mobile) Israelis. Israeli society is also becoming more polarized -- which is one reason Netanyahu had such trouble forming a governing coalition -- with the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox at odds with secular Israelis, to include the more recent immigrants that form the core of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman's support.
So what are Israel's options? One alternative would be to make the West Bank and Gaza part of Israel, but allow the Palestinians who live there to have full political rights, thereby creating a binational liberal democracy. This idea has been promoted by a handful of Israeli Jews and a growing number of Palestinians, but the objections to it are compelling. It would mean abandoning the Zionist vision of a Jewish state, which makes it anathema to almost all Israeli Jews, who want to live in a Jewish state. The practical obstacles to this outcome are equally daunting, and binational states do not have an encouraging track record. If the choice were between this option and a genuine two-state solution, there can be little doubt about which Netanyahu would prefer.
A second option would be for Israel to retain the West Bank and expel the Palestinians by force, there preserving its Jewish character through an overt act of ethnic cleansing. A few Israeli extremists have proposed something akin to this, but to expel millions of Palestinians in this fashion would be a crime against humanity. The Palestinians would surely resist being driven from their homes, and such a heinous act would take place in full view of a horrified world and damage Israel's reputation far more than the recent carnage in Gaza did. No true friend of Israel could support such a course of action, and one hopes that Netanyahu has the good sense to recognize that it would be a tragic mistake to go down this road.
The only other option to a genuine two-state solution is some form of apartheid, in which the Palestinians are granted limited autonomy in some disconnected and economically crippled enclaves whose borders, airspace, and aquifers are controlled by Israel. The Palestinians' fate, in other words, would remain in Israel's hands, even if some modest efforts were made to improve their living conditions. This outcome seems to be what Netanyahu has in mind, but it is not a viable long-term solution either. The Palestinians are not going to accept being permanent vassals -- especially once they are a majority in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean -- and they will continue to demand either a viable state of their own or full political rights within Israel. Over time, this option is going to be an increasingly difficult sell around the world, and especially in the West.
That is why former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Ha'aretz in 2008, "if the day comes when the two-state solution collapses," Israel will face "a South-African style struggle for voting rights." Once that happened, he warned, "the state of Israel is finished." Despite his long career as a Likud Party stalwart, Olmert finally recognized that if the two-state solution becomes impossible, Israel will be stuck defending a political order that is anathema to prevailing Western and American values. Although lots of other democracies have behaved abominably towards minorities in the past, such behavior is not legitimate in the 21st century. Americans favor self-determination and our own political traditions emphasize liberal values and the virtues of a melting-pot society. Even a lobbying group as powerful as AIPAC will find it hard to defend Israeli apartheid.
A two-state solution is not an ideal outcome; it is merely the best available alternative. If Netanyahu wants to safeguard Israel's future, therefore, he would not spend his time inventing new conditions and doing his best to make the peace process a charade. Instead, he would get on the phone to the White House and urge them to get moving as soon as possible to establish a viable Palestinian state, and he'd ask Obama to commit the resources necessary to make it work. He'd also be on the phone to Abraham Foxman of the ADL, Malcolm Hoenlein of the Conference of Presidents, David Harris of the American Jewish Committee, and Howard Kohr of AIPAC, urging them to pressure the White House and especially Congress to broker a two-state solution before it's too late. While he's at it, he'd denounce false friends like the Reverend John Hagee of Christians United for Israel and he'd invite Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street to come to Jerusalem and help him map out a strategy to turn the Titanic around before it hits the approaching iceberg.
There would still be lots of hard bargaining to do, of course, and Netanyahu would have to make sure that a final-status agreement protected Israel's legitimate security concerns. But by acting in this way, Netanyahu would be helping preserve Israel's future instead of putting it in jeopardy.
If Netanayahu can't figure this out, then Barack Obama and George Mitchell are going to have to sit him down and explain the situation to him. And if they do, one can only hope that Israel's supporters here in the United States abandon their usual modus operandi and back Obama and Mitchell up. If they don't, they may someday have to explain to their grandchildren why they watched Israel drive itself off a cliff and did nothing to stop it.
Stephen Walt, quickly becoming one of my favorite bloggers and political scientists
Interesting article below -
Iran contrary Thu, 04/16/2009 - 3:09pm
Here's what our Secretary of State had to say about a certain prominent "rogue state":
[Tehran's] present state of mind is a combination of aggressive arrogance and obsessions of its own making. There are doubtless many reasons, cultural, historical, political, for this state of mind. . . . I would be inclined, however, to advance the view that a country whose behavior is as violent, irascible, unyielding, and hostile as that of . . . [Iran] is led by leaders whose view of the world and of life itself is unreal."
Pretty scary, huh? No wonder some people think extreme measures are needed to prevent those mad mullahs from getting a nuclear capability, because people with such an "unreal view" could not be deterred from using them, either against Israel or against us.
But wait -- I misled you. Hillary Clinton never said that, it was Secretary of State Dean Rusk in 1966. Rusk wasn't talking about Iran, of course; he was talking about Communist China (I just switched the names).
One can understand why Rusk described China in this way: Mao Zedong's decisions during the "Great Leap Forward" killed millions of Chinese citizens; the leaders of the PRC were outspoken advocates of world revolution at the time; and Mao himself made some truly alarming statements about the acceptability of nuclear war in the years before China acquired its own bomb. On the whole, however, China's military and nuclear weapons policy was fairly restrained (indeed, more so than ours). And six years later, Nixon was on his way to Bejing and the U.S. and China were on their way to becoming tacit allies.
In fact, there is well-established tendency for Americans to view potential nuclear foes as irrational fanatics who cannot be deterred. In 1950, NSC-68 maintained that Soviet acquisition of a nuclear capability would encourage them to run greater risks. In the 1970s, a rather hysterical cottage industry later emerged claiming that Soviet leaders genuinely believed they could "fight and win" a nuclear war and thus might not be deterrable. Both Soviet and American leaders had similar worries about Mao, and both countries considered taking preventive action against China's nuclear forces at different moments during the 1960s.
Today, advocates of preventive war against Iran offer a similar set of claims, suggesting that Iran's leaders are irrational religious extremists who would happily embrace martyrdom and take millions of fellow humans with them. The only problem with this argument is that there is no convincing evidence to support it. Even the offensive anti-Israel rhetoric offered up by certain Iranian leaders doesn't suggest a desire to launch a suicidal nuclear war against Israel's citizens (a war that would also kill millions of Palestinians and destroy Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem). There are plenty of good reasons to try to convince Iran not to go all the way to a nuclear weapons capability, but Iran's alleged "irrationality" isn't one of them.
So what do we do? Writing last week in The Nation, Robert Dreyfuss reported that Iran special envoy Dennis Ross wanted to put U.S.-Iranian engagement on a tight leash and a short timeline, an approach that makes genuine diplomatic progress less likely. If diplomacy doesn't work, of course, then voices calling for the use of force will grow louder.
I don't know if that's what Ross is now recommending (thought it's consistent with some of his past views), but John Tirman of MIT has just provided a different way to think about fixing the troubled U.S.-Iranian relationship that deserves a wide airing. Instead of a hyper-cautious, incremental, carrots-and-sticks approach to Tehran, Tirman calls for an active effort to transform the relationship, much as Nixon transformed relations with China and Reagan and Gorbachev transformed U.S.-Soviet relations. (Another historical analogy might be Anwar Sadat's 1977 trip to Jerusalem.) Although these precedents are somewhat different from the situation the United States now faces with Iran, Tirman makes a strong case against incrementalism and for a bolder strategy. Money quote:
Transforming the relationship means taking very significant actions to alter the fundamental dynamics that have so long impeded progress or caused setbacks. Naturally, one would like to see such actions coming from both sides, and eventually this must be so. But initially, in the coming year, the new approach can be adopted by the United States and put into practice. The risks of doing so are very low-Iran cannot hurt the United States in any significant way. The benefits, should Iran join us on this path, would be enormous: enhanced security for the region, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and Israel; a new partner for the United States in a crucial part of the world; trade expansion; and an improvement more indirectly in American-Muslim relations worldwide."
In short, think of Iran as a country whose leadership is at least as rational as America's, that has its own interests and historical sensitivities (just as the United States does), and that has some common interests with Washington as well as some important areas where interests conflict. And for goodness' sake, don't forget that the United States is a global superpower, and have the confidence to believe that it can offer bold proposals for changing the relationship without being taken to the cleaners, and without putting itself or its allies at risk.
Below are a series of blog posts from the world-renowed political scientist Stephen Walt. As the epitome of a realist, and a giant in the field, he offers some interesting perspectives.
Each blog is a "thought experiment" helping readers to more deeply reflect on the current war occurring in Gaza.
Imagine that Egypt, Jordan, and Syria had won the Six Day War, leading to a massive exodus of Jews from the territory of Israel. Imagine that the victorious Arab states had eventually decided to permit the Palestinians to establish a state of their own on the territory of the former Jewish state. (That's unlikely, of course, but this is a thought experiment). Imagine that a million or so Jews had ended up as stateless refugees confined to that narrow enclave known as the Gaza Strip. Then imagine that a group of hardline Orthodox Jews took over control of that territory and organized a resistance movement. They also steadfastly refused to recognize the new Palestinian state, arguing that its creation was illegal and that their expulsion from Israel was unjust. Imagine that they obtained backing from sympathizers around the world and that they began to smuggle weapons into the territory. Then imagine that they started firing at Palestinian towns and villages and refused to stop despite continued reprisals and civilian casualties.
Here's the question: would the United States be denouncing those Jews in Gaza as "terrorists" and encouraging the Palestinian state to use overwhelming force against them?
Here's another: would the United States have even allowed such a situation to arise and persist in the first place?
Several readers took issue with my "thought experiment" asking how the United States would have reacted if the Arabs had won the Six Day War and if Israeli Jews had faced similar conditions to the Palestinians in Gaza and had responded in a similar fashion.
It's a thought experiment, folks, not history, and my aim was to challenge the moral certainties and tribal loyalties
But if you don't like that "thought experiment," here's another, offered by philosophy professor Joseph Levine at University of Massachusetts: what if Hamas was hiding out among the civilian population of Tel Aviv, and attacking Israel from within? Would the IDF be using massive force to eradicate them? Unless you think that Palestinian and Israeli civilian lives are not equal, what justifies the current policy? that normally dominate debates on the whole Israeli-Palestinian morass. Obviously, it's child's play to identify differences between the hypothetical that I sketched and the way history actually turned out, though I didn't see how any of the ones raised in the comments invalidated my basic point. But it is hardly far-fetched (let alone anti-Semitic) to imagine Jews engaging in acts of resistance against an oppressor. That's what I would expect any group to do, regardless of their ethnic or religious background. It is precisely what the Zionists did against the British during the Mandate period, and it was Irgun leader (and later Prime Minister) Yitzhak Shamir who wrote that "neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat."
Israel is hardly unique in placing a higher value on its own citizens' lives than it places on the lives of others, and we should not forget that U.S. forces have caused plenty of civilian casualties in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. "The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must." But that doesn't make it right, and there are good reasons to question whether it will even be effective in this instance.
Courtesy of Philip Weiss's blog, here is another thought experiment from New America Foundation's Daniel Levy. Note: it's not a transcript; it is Weiss's summary of a portion of a conference call that Levy conducted two days ago:
[Levy] said: We all hear, oh, the U.S. would do the same thing if Canada or Mexico were firing rockets at us. We would have a duty to respond. And yes, I think, Israel has a duty to respond, Levy said.
But then he went on to explode that analogy, and get at the core issue: Lack of Political Sovereignty. Canada and Mexico are states. Palestinians have no state. Remember, he said, that Gaza is just 4 percent of the Palestinian territories. The other 96 percent are still occupied. They have been for 40 years. And imagine that the 4 percent had been under siege, since they were unoccupied 3 years ago. And the occupied parts were crisscrossed with checkpoints and colonies.
Would it really be that surprising if in Canada or Mexico there was a hardline opposition that took over the government? And was deeply opposed to the occupier? 'I'll leave that to your imagination.'"
It bears repeating that the real value of these analogies (or "thought experiments") is not to justify any particular course of action (although plenty of politicians have been using them that way). Reality is too complicated for that, and its usually easy to argue that a particular analogy doesn't fit the concrete case one currently confronts. Rather, the real purpose is to help us examine the facile, good-versus-evil stereotypes and conventional assumptions that constitute much of the discourse about difficult political issues, and especially the Israel-Palestine conflict.
My new FP blogging associate David Rothkopf objects to my initial thought experiment, which asked whether U.S. policy might be different if the Israeli and Palestinian situations were reversed. In doing so, he demonstrates how hard it is for some people to retain their objectivity and rhetorical poise on these issues. He accuses me of being on an "jihad" against Israel (note the loaded language), and claims that I've joined an "anti-Israel lobby" whose ranks include former President Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski.
I'm flattered to be placed in such distinguished company, but here Rothkopf is committing the all-too-common error of assuming that critics of certain Israeli policies (and critics of the current "special relationship") are "anti-Israel." In fact, the special relationship (i.e., the policy of nearly-unconditional and uncritical support) is increasingly harmful to the Jewish state, as it makes it almost impossible for the United States to oppose Israeli actions that are misguided (such as settlement-building, or Israel's ill-founded strategy in the Lebanon War of 2006). The United States would be a better friend to Israel if we had a more normal relationship, and if U.S. leaders could talk more openly about these issues.
As for Carter, consider what former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami writes in his excellent book Scars of War, Wounds of Peace:
Carter did not hesitate to criticize Israel publicly, threaten her and even put pressure on her. As it turned out, it was this kind of President—George Bush [the elder] in the later 1980s is another case in point—who was ready to confront Israel head on and overlook the sensibilities of her friends in America that managed eventually to produce meaningful breakthroughs on the way to an Arab-Israeli peace" (p. 167, my emphasis).
The current President Bush is often described as the most "pro-Israel" President in history. Yet his policies have helped make Hamas stronger and more popular, and his cheerleading for Israel’s ill-advised war in Lebanon in 2006 ended up costing more Israeli lives and left Hezbollah in a stronger position in Lebanon. His policies also facilitated settlement expansion and made a two-state solution harder to achieve, and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 ended up improving Iran's strategic position, which is hardly good for Israel. All this reinforces a point I made a few days ago: it is high time to redefine what "pro-Israel" means.
I had not intended to devote this much space to Middle East issues when FP launched this new site, but events in the region have made that resolution rather hard to keep. Here are a few more "thought experiments" (not mine).
First, over at Mondoweiss, Jerome Slater of SUNY-Buffalo offers his own Swiftian alternative history of the situation. Find it here.
Second, from Israel, Uri Avnery presents a typically sharp-edged set of historical alternatives. I don't have a link to it yet, but here's a short excerpt of a longer column:
NEARLY SEVENTY YEARS ago, in the course of World War II, a heinous crime was committed in the city of Leningrad. For more than a thousand days, a gang of extremists called "the Red Army" held the millions of the town's inhabitants hostage and provoked retaliation from the German Wehrmacht from inside the population centers. The Germans had no alternative but to bomb and shell the population and to impose a total blockade, which caused the death of hundreds of thousands.
Some time before that, a similar crime was committed in England. The Churchill gang hid among the population of London, misusing the millions of citizens as a human shield. The Germans were compelled to send their Luftwaffe and reluctantly reduce the city to ruins. They called it the Blitz.
This is the description that would now appear in the history books if the Germans had won the war.
Absurd? No more than the daily descriptions in our media, which are being repeated ad nauseam: the Hamas terrorists use the inhabitants of Gaza as "hostages" and exploit the women and children as "human shields", they leave us no alternative but to carry out massive bombardments, in which, to our deep sorrow, thousands of women, children and unarmed men are killed and injured."
And finally, via e-mail from a correspondent in Florida, yet another thought experiment from a rather different perspective:
Here is an analogy you may find interesting... very real...and a little closer to home.
If after the second World War - all the Germans were evicted from Germany - litteraly [sic] - their population decimated - their people scattered
As the Germans were away (the brandenberg gate still standing there, and the main city is still called Berlin) the French and the Poles then move in and create a country called "FrancoPol".
As the Germans find themselves without a home, always labeled the "The Hitler people" - they are shunned, killed, and scapegoated - even after 1800 years
After @ 1800 years, the Germans realise that the only way to survive, and thrive again, would be to return home to Germany...
So they begin to settle small tracks of land in "FrancoPol"...their lands thrive, and they are happy - their goal is to restore Germany - all of it
The Francopolians are not very happy about seeing the Germans again, they call them "Settlers" and "Occupiers" and begin to kill them...
The Germans begin to fight back, and repell attacks, and yes, begin to "reclaim" more German land - always accused of stealing "francopolian" land
The UN decides to split the land between the Germans and the francopolians - the Germans Accept - the Francopolians dont - and continue to attack them
As the more land comes under German control, the Francopolians do everything they can to destroy this re-born Germany..but to no avail..
As the German people finally return to Berlin, reclaim it, rebuild it, makes it live and thrive again...
Would the Germans be "Occupiers" of Berlin?
Would the Germans be "Colonisers" of Berlin?
Would the Germans be "Usurpers" of Berlin?
Comment by me: There are plenty of obvious ways one could challenge each of these "thought experiments," but I still find them useful spurs to our thinking. This is a subject area where people's views frequently get etched in stone -- and all the more so when violence is raging and the PR machines are working overtime -- and that makes it even more important to look for devices that force us to think more carefully and critically.
