"Washington’s state of denial claims yet more casualties"
By Tony Karon
You’d be surprised how much can be revealed in a 140-character “tweet” on the Twitter social network. Octavia Nasr, a 20-year veteran editor at CNN, has managed through one such mini-message to demonstrate the extent to which the Middle East discourse in Washington is shrouded in a bubble of delusion that entirely precludes rational policymaking.
Nasr, in keeping with her company’s policy for journalists to express themselves on social media platforms, last week tweeted on the death of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, calling him “One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot”. That statement would scarcely have seemed controversial in the Middle East.
Her tweet (as tweets do, given their miniature scale) may have mischaracterised Fadlallah’s relationship with Hizbollah – he had inspired the movement, but was independent of it, and was widely recognised as a moderating influence. While Hizbollah is dismissed in Washington as nothing more than a terrorist organisation, in Lebanon it’s in the government and an intractable part of the democratic process.
While Fadlallah’s advocacy of violence against Israel counts him as an extremist in Washington, in the Arab world his views were hardly beyond the pale. Here, he was more noted as an opponent of theological intolerance, an advocate for women’s rights within Islam, and perhaps the most credible counterweight to Iranian influence in the Shiite world.
Britain’s ambassador to Lebanon, Frances Guy, was far more loquacious than Nasr, lamenting on her own blog that “Lebanon is a lesser place” for Fadlallah’s passing, and declaring that “the world needs more men like him willing to reach out across faiths, acknowledging the reality of the modern world and daring to confront old constraints”. Those comments enraged Washington, and the British Foreign Office apologised for them, even though these days Britain has quietly opened up a conversation with Hizbollah, much to US chagrin.
But what might seem perfectly reasonable to those who deal with Middle East realities can be deemed apostasy in the US mainstream, where domestic politics dictates that the region must always be viewed through the prism of Israel’s preferences. So there was no surprise when hawkish Israel advocacy groups demanded that CNN act against Nasr’s “impropriety”, pointing out that the US had designated Fadlallah a terrorist and that he “was a vocal supporter of terrorism against Israeli targets”. CNN dutifully dismissed her for what it called her “error in judgement”.
Israel’s staunchest backers in Washington must wish it were as easy to get an Iraqi prime minister fired as it is to get a CNN editor cashiered. After all, Nouri al Maliki didn’t bother to tweet on Fadlallah; he flew to Lebanon to attend the funeral of the man whom he had taken as his own spiritual guide. Fadlallah had, in fact, helped form the Dawa Party which is at the centre of the government whose creation the US had enabled in Iraq.
Nor was that the first time Mr al Maliki had rocked Washington’s Middle East fantasy bubble.The Iraqi prime minister enraged many on Capitol Hill during a visit in 2006 at a moment when Israel was pummeling Lebanon, and the US-backed Iraqi leader refused their demand that he denounce Hizbollah and instead blamed the crisis on “Israeli aggression”. That no popular or democratically elected leader in the Middle East would do otherwise was utterly lost on those who make America’s laws.
Hawkish ignorance on the Middle East hardly disqualifies someone from political office in Washington. During a recent speech at a synagogue in Washington DC, for example, the New York senator Charles Schumer complained that “Palestinian people still don’t believe in the Jewish state, in a two-state solution”, and that “they don’t believe in the Torah, in David”. He added: “Since the Palestinians in Gaza elected Hamas, while certainly there should be humanitarian aid and people not starving to death, to strangle them economically until they see that’s not the way to go, makes sense.”
A relatively liberal US senator not only betrays his ignorance of Islam, but also advocates throttling the Palestinians until they choose leaders more acceptable to Israel. That which is unacceptable to Israel, as the Nasr saga demonstrates, cannot be tolerated in Washington – even if the result is that the US isolates itself from mainstream opinion within the Middle East.
Where once it was deemed prudent for the US to mediate between Israel and its Arab neighbours, today the requirements of political survival appear to require a parroting of Israel’s own positions – as President Barack Obama’s capitulation to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week demonstrated.
Inside Washington’s bubble, those in the Middle East who advocate confronting Israel are the radicals who must be crushed; those who co-operate or passively accept its behaviour are deemed moderates to be propped up at all costs. Lately, we’re told that even Turkey, by virtue of its willingness to stand up to Israel and challenge US orthodoxy on Iran, has crossed into Tehran’s orbit, its Nato membership, efforts to join the EU and recent vote to admit Israel into the OECD notwithstanding.
Before the Iraq invasion, neoconservatives had hoped US military power could force the Arab world into embracing Israel and marginalising those who would challenge it. If anything, the opposite has occurred. But the response in Washington has been to retreat further into the shell of denial, where the the rising influence of those it dismisses as radicals can simply be wished away, and where those who allude to that influence can simply be stomped on.
By avoiding reality, the US has diminished its own influence in the Middle East – because many of the key players in the region have realised that they’re doomed if they rely on Washington to make rational choices, much less give a lead. After all, if Mr al Maliki, to take one example, had worked for CNN, he too would long ago have been fired.
Tony Karon is an analyst based in New York who blogs at www.tonykaron.com.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Jerusalem Fund.