I’m a weak human being; I had walked away from ill-informed academic Juan Cole, assuming that there was nothing he could say that would make me think any less of his views.
In fact, this doesn’t really make me think less of him, but it does highlight the difference in our views of the world.
Update: Al-Jazeerah is reporting that the Lebanese Opposition is now calling for the big demonstrations at Martyrs’ Square to continue until all Syrian troops leave Lebanese soil.
You wonder what would happen if the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza tried the same thing re: Ariel Sharon’s military occupation that they face. They’d be crushed by the jackboot (with convenient allegations that they were a front for terrorism).
This is just risible.
No democratic government – no liberal government – since World War II has been able to withstand peaceful demonstrations for community or national rights. The will to oppress just isn’t deep enough.
It wasn’t the North Vietnamese military that ended the war; it was the monks who killed themselves protesting the regime(s) in South Vietnam that we were supporting and inspired the demonstrations here in the US and in Europe.
It wasn’t the violence of the Sepoy Revolt that freed India, but the Salt March. And in fact, had there been a reprise of the Sepoy Revolt and the slaughter of English colonial bureaucrats and their families, India’s freedom would doubtless have been delayed.
I do not for a moment believe that a democratic Israel could have maintained the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in the face of a determined, pacifistic Palestinian movement.
Among other things, the level of moral and political maturity necessary for the Palestinians to create and sustain such a movement suggests that there is some political readiness to actually govern in some way that does not involve a lot of murders in the dead of night.
Cole is so convinced of the evil of the Israeli government and people that he can’t imagine that; to him, they stand as peers to the B’aath dictators who shelled Hama and executed the civilian population – Cole cites 10,000 dead, but virtually all the accounts I have found suggest that the number was between 20,000 and 40,000.
And there’s the gap. Let’s do a thought experiment…
Imagine if you would a Middle East in which, say, Syria enjoyed the military advantage currently enjoyed by Israel. Give them air superiority, a high-tech army, and heck, you can even toss in nuclear weapons. Ask yourself what the Middle East would look like?
If you think it would look anything like it does today, you might want to go stand next to Professor Cole. I’ll be on the other side of the room.
“I do not for a moment believe that a democratic Israel could have maintained the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in the face of a determined, pacifistic Palestinian movement.
Among other things, the level of moral and political maturity necessary for the Palestinians to create and sustain such a movement suggests that there is some political readiness to actually govern in some way that does not involve a lot of murders in the dead of night.”
I second that. The Palestinians could have their state whenever the want, but they, or at least many of them, don’t want it. Peaceful demonstrations would force Israel to give up its occupation. Fortunately for those Israelis who want to keep Gaza and the West Bank, that isn’t going to happen anytime soon.
100% right.
Though, I have to say, lapses in anti-Likud rhetoric aside, I think Cole is fundamentally on the same side as well. People often say indefensible things when they’re reaching for cheap “You’re a hypocrite!” moral equivalence-type rhetoric.
Well, it makes me think a lot less of Juan Cole, because his Iraq views are a lot closer to mine than to yours. But on Palestine, this is a totally brain-dead thing to say. First, if the Palestinians had adopted peaceful resistance, Ariel Sharon wouldn’t be Prime Minister; it would be Yossi Beilin or Yossi Sarid (leaders of the Israeli Left). And even if it were Ariel Sharon, he would be relatively powerless, especially now that we see he doesn’t have the messianic attachment to “The Land of Israel” of the settler movement.
But the truth is, Yasser Arafat wasn’t Gandhi. Nor was he Mandela. Well, maybe Winnie Mandela.
Keeping in mind that it is Juan Cole, that he has an agenda to flog and a reputation to uphold.
And that he has tenure….
At this stage, one should expect no less. (Besides, sophisticated juxtapositions such as “jackboot” and “Israel”—or for others, “lebensraum” and “Israel”—are a shame to pass up.)
Of course Cole does put his foot in it on a consistent basis; but the “informed” snake oil he peddles will always have many buyers, seeing as you can still get an awful lot of mileage out of Israel bashing (and perhaps especially if criticizing America is becoming an iffier or more tenuous proposition; if).
AJL:
Cole has claimed or at least speculated on several occasions that Israel is responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib, the April 2004 violence in Fallujah, and that Zarqawi is a phantom created by US intelligence agencies so that Bush can claim that Iraq is tied to al-Qaeda. When last I checked, you don’t believe any of these things, so I would argue that while your views on Iraq may be concurrent, they are not very likely not aligned.
The problem with Cole, and I’ve said this before, is that he is unable to divorce his expertise on a variety of useful subjects on Iraq from his monomaniacal hatred of Israel and/or the administration. When he goes off his meds, he goes all the way off. Check out the post on his website where he says that al-Hassan was captured in Beirut. Eh?
Lee Harris has a TCS piece on just this topic.
http://techcentralstation.com/022805A.html
I blogged it here
http://liberalempire.blogspot.com/
I agree with most of this, and Cole provides daily examples of his disconnection from reality and intrinsic hostility to freedom. Which is why I love the fact that the “reality-based community” embrances him, and so hastens the transition of that term from a useful political tactic to a backfiring mockery.
But I think you’re flat-out wrong on one point.
Actually, dude, it WAS the North Vietnamese military that ended the war.
The Viet Cong were massacred in the Tet Offensive (as in, 80% losses), and NVA generals admitted after the war that there just wasn’t much there after that… it was pretty much an all-NVA production, and without them the war would have been largely over. South Vietnamese units fought well when defending their home areas, but they had too large a front to cover (thanks to idiotic policies that let North Vietnam use other countries as staging areas with impunity), and were inept at mobile warfare.
A better south Vietnamee government might have survived even this… but that is a simple truism for the losers in any war. From where I sit, the government they had could have survived if they had not been handicapped at all levels, and saddled with a strategy that virtually guaranteed defeat no matter what their government was like.
Meanwhile, the North Vietnamese won because they HAD the will to opress. Famines killing over a million? No worries. Massacres on a regular basis? Sure, and they work for us. Weapons in hospitals? Absolutely. Any level of sacrifice? We’ll send whatever it takes to put our boot-heel on the South, then send hundreds of thousands to re-education camps and trigger a mass exodus of “boat people” whose volume STILL shapes America today. The North Vietnamese had the will to oppress, all right – and that was all they needed.
In the end, it WAS 3 armored divisions that sealed South Vietnam’s doom, and pushed on to Saigon while the USA refused to get involved.
This was undoubtedly the scenario and the calculus of the Islamofascists in Iraq as well. They hoped for a repeat, with an Iraqi government similarly abandoned and handicapped thanks to the work of their friends abroad (like Mr. Cole), just as the North Vietnamese had done. “They didn’t get that, and now they want to deal.”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/006399.php
Which is fine with me – in fact, “Let’s Make a Deal” is the name of the game in Iraq right now. There are only so many Sunni tribes, and we have some nice stuff, and there are big discounts if you buy early. Show up late to the sale, and oh well, so sorry, your neighbouring tribe got all the best stuff.
The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.
I’ll have to look up what Cole said about Israel in Iraq. He may have a point about Abu Ghraib, if he hasn’t exaggerated it. There’s some evidence that lacking enough Arabic-speaking interrogators and translators we borrowed some of theirs. And they would at least have been aware of the practices of Abu Ghraib (which I don’t think were dreamed up by a corporal on the night shift and secret from everyone else, and I don’t think you do either). It’s a long leap from there to think that they suggested the torture, but it’s also true that Israel has a history of augmented interrogation techniques available to share, that have only recently been reined in by their court system.
Joe,
I rather thought AL’s point was that South Vietnam never would have been at that point absent the anti-war feelings in the US.
Cole is just plain demonstrably wrong. Palestinians demonstrate _all the time_, peacefully and not. It was Yassir Arafat that kept the demonstrations in line with his agenda, not Sharon. How many funerals or murdercide celebrations have we seen with thousands of Palestinians marching in the streets carrying rifles and masked? Did Israeli helicopters swoops down and machine gun the crowds, most of which were made up of militants? Cole’s biggest problem is that he is just a ordinary fool.
“It wasn’t the North Vietnamese military that ended the war; it was the monks who killed themselves protesting the regime(s) in South Vietnam that we were supporting and inspired the demonstrations here in the US and in Europe.”
Bah humbug. Those monks would have had zero effect without the massive support they received from the American MSM, who used them as one club of many (including the witholding of essential facts) to beat the proponents of the war and support the lefties of the world.
Joe Katzman says it better above.
AJL:
Take a look and decide for yourself. His “proof,” once you get through all the BS, consists almost entirely of anecdotal evidence and the fact that General Karpinski at one point encountered an Israeli general. That’s it.
Also, check out his trying to blame Israel’s invasion of Lebanon for the radicalization of 9/11 hijacker Ziad Jarrah. There is no evidence to support this, as if you read the 9/11 commission report you’ll see that Jarrah was from an upper-class background and didn’t become radicalized until he got to Germany. This is at least the second time that Cole has tried to blame Israel/Sharon for Jarrah’s radicalization without proof. Like I said, whatever expertise the guy has goes completely out the window when he talks about Israel or the administration. So while your views on Iraq may be concurrent, I doubt they’re very close.
Ghandi and Martin Luther King, two of the most powerful men in the history of the world. Why, because they held the moral highground and never surrendered it. We can all learn from that.
I have to admit I find this really pathetic. don’t you guys have something better to do than discuss the beliefs of Juan Cole?
As an aside Armed Liberal you should take a look at the at the Truman Project.com and PPI.com for a look at Democrats looking to make a security policy.
Writing about Juan Cole is a waste of time. It merely gives the ranters on the r/c an opportunity to and diverts answering the questions you pose. The question you asked was what the Middle East would look like if Syria was comparable to Israel in weapons, tactics and capablity? It would probably mean the type of Caliphate Osama wants except under Alawite control which would be interesting given the sublties of Islam as a religion(Alawite vs Wahhabism vs Shia). They could possibly control the oil regions of Iraq but not the Persian Gulf. Israel would be so financially broke maintaining armed parity it could collapse. It would definitely push Iran into seeking nukes.
Assuming this parity occurred recently I see several scenarios regarding oil and its impact on the world economy. My basic assumption here is that the current price of oil has nothing to do with anything in the Mid-East. I think the current price of oil is a reflection of the disbasement of the dollar vs other world currencies.
So on the whole economically it would be a push to the world, a nightmare for Israel and a massive reordering of US geopolitical interests.
Rumor has it that the Palis are stockpiling heavy weapons.
Who do you suppose they will be used against? IJ? Hamas? Hezbollah?
Sharon is letting them re-arm with the intention of driving the Palis from “their” land. Any one who thinks Sharon has given up his goal of “greater Israel” is nuts.
He has no intention of taking the land from the Palis. What he intends is to get the Palis to “give” him the land.
I do not think he will be disappointed.
Giving up strategic control of the crossings from Gaza to Egypt looks like a serious military error. Sharon is no fool militarily. That can only mean that he intends to gain from it.
As yourself how? And What?
My guess on how? He will get the Palis to start the next war. What will he gain? Gaza. At minimum.
Ghandi and MLK gained stature because the recognized the fundamental morality of their opponents.
If they had pulled such stunts in the Third Reich they would be just another couple of statistics.
On a related note I remember hearing one Palestinian stating if he called Yasser a pig to a PA policeman he would be in jail. He then noted if he said Sharon is a pig to an IDF soldier the soldier would say “Yeah, so tell it to Sharon yourself” and leave it at that
The only way to ‘gain’ Gaza would be to ethnically cleanse about a million and a half Palestinians, a colosal undertaking that Sharon might be ethically cabable of, but the logistics are another matter. Such an act would surely bring complete sanctions from Europe, and likely a majorly displeased US that holds the purse strings. Lot of work for such a dump. A far better solution would be ceeding it to Egypt and building a bigger wall.
It wasn’t the North Vietnamese who ended the war. It was Watergate.
M Simon:
bq. Giving up strategic control of the crossings from Gaza to Egypt looks like a serious military error. Sharon is no fool militarily. That can only mean that he intends to gain from it.
Sharon is a corrupt politician looking to stay out of prison. It takes an unbelieveable amount of faith to assume that this is actually a sleight of hand.
And frankly, if it is, f*ck him for waiting so long. Four years of war, and you think he’s waiting for another one? Is 1,000+ dead not enough?
Cole knows it, of course, but terrorists and their fans turn out in the thousands pretty regularly. Sometimes to celebrate that slaughter of Jews, sometimes to yell about slaughtering Jews, and sometimes to “wave bits of dead bodies about”:http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=13246.
I suppose we should be happy that Cole isn’t trashing the Lebanese liberation movement, out of sheer bass-ackwards contrarian spite.
So Cole moves up a notch in my estimation. He’s now one notch above Lyndon LaRouche.
It is easy to fight fair when your opponent is so weak.
Gandhi had experienced South Africa so had seen that the great British empire had lost a war against a small force. Britain was the small force compared with India so it was obvious that the British would take the smart way out and capitulate. It just would take some time for the British to get used to the idea that India was independant
MLK could only win with the backing of the North and that was only possible by being non-violent.
The non-violent methode simply wouldn’t have worked in Algeria, Vietnam or for that matter Israel as was shown by the first intifada.
Ethnically cleansing Gaza is an option but i know the Arabs will send them linea recta to Europe. In which case Israel shouldn’t fear sanctions but an invasion in a generation.
M. Simon in comment #17 pointed out that Gandhi and MLK were successful because they had moral opponents who had to answer to the rule of law. Back in 1971 when I was a student at Hebrew University, I participated in an off-campus study group organized by David Bedein, now principle of the Israel Resource news agency, in which we read the correspondence between Gandhi and Martin Buber in the 1930s. Gandhi claimed that the Jews should resist the Nazis using his methods. Buber wrote back that the Nazis would crush them like flies and get commended for it because they had no morality. Skip to 1988 in the early months of the first intifada. Bedein interviews Palestinian ideologue Mubarak Awad, who claimed, with intent to deceive, that he was following in the footsteps of Gandhi. Awad said the Jews shouldn’t be in Palestine, they should have followed Gandhi’s methods in Nazi Europe. Bedein countered with Buber’s answer to Gandhi. Awad said he thought they still should have done it, and had a nasty laugh.