Hezbollah and the art of Hobbesian persuasion

"Opposition has a gun to my head," Yediot Aharanot. January 15, 2011

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WikiLeaks and unintended consequences

[Updated and edited December 3, 2010]


If we needed further evidence that Julian Assange is a fool and an amateur in his understanding of international affairs (though admittedly technically clever), how about the apparent unintended consequences of this round of WikiLeaks? He claims to have caught the US government in some grand "gotcha" moment of lies, deceit, inhumanity, and generally bad behavior (See cablegate.wikileaks.org  -- when it's not being hacked down that is).  While the USG is embarrassed by the leaks and concerned they will hinder diplomacy going forward, they suggest that the US and other democratic governments are apple-tree cutting George Washingtons compared to their non-democratic counterparts.  The revelations are much more at the expense of the latter than the former. He claims to support government transparency and internet freedom as general principles, but he pushes these principles only in the easiest case--vis a vis a government where such leaks are possible and one does not incur risks to the lives of one's family members.  See his now defunct blog (via Michael Totten). Finally, for all Wikileaks' invocations of free speech and transparency, there is good reason to think American diplomacy will become more secretive and diplomats less frank as a result of the leaks.  Freedom as a form does not necessarily make for freedom as a result, as my man Montesquieu teaches (as articulated by Mansfield).  


Diplomats to start talking like Congressmen, i.e. less honesty in government
I don't think anyone can be sure what the consequences will be to frankness among American diplomats and their counterparts abroad--in large part because the diplomatic institutions of authoritarian countries seem inherently more opaque and more unpredictable.  Nonetheless, I think that the bleak assessments are plausible. Moreover,  it makes sense to emphasize the great risks to deter further leaking and throw cold water on the praising of leakers and leakees (thanks to Gabriel Schoenfeld for that term). I don't blame them for being angry and emphasizing the worst case scenario.


See also, Richard Haass, "How to Read WikiLeaks." Council on Foreign Relations. November 29, 2010.


SEE ALSO: Paul Schroeder, "Op-Ed: The Secret Lives of Nations," The New York Times. December 2, 2010.


The State Department, its own tools weakened, may increasingly have to defer to the tools of Defense and Treasury
James Rubin, "The Irony of Wikileaks: by undercutting diplomacy, the hard left is threatening its own worldview." The New Republic. December 1, 2010.




The US government is not telling any "big lies" about its foreign policy. It's non-democratic countries who are. Gotcha!...Saudi Arabia? China?
Also from James Rubin: 

The Wikileaks document dump, unlike the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s, shows that American private communication with foreign leaders by and large reflects the same sentiments offered by U.S. officials in public. There is no grand conspiracy, no grand hypocrisy to uncover and expose. The big hypocrisies here are not being perpetrated by Americans; they are being perpetrated by foreign governments, namely non-democratic ones.

Relatedly, see Jeffrey Goldberg on what WikiLeaks reveals about the nefarious cabal trying to influence US foreign policy in the Middle East....the Arab Lobby!


And the one country that has got to feel pretty good about the political implications of "Cablegate" is...Israel!  That's what you were trying to do, Assange, right? 
Marc Tracy, "For Bibi and Israel, Vindication." Tablet Magazine. November 29, 2010.

UPDATE: Maybe because it's all he's got to work with, or maybe because his worldview is not uniformly of the illiberal leftist persuasion, Assange is pointing to some of Netanyahu's comments as evidence of WikiLeaks' "public service."


...Which of course boosts Iran's and Turkey's insistence that Wikileaks is a Zionist conspiracy.

These cables make it pretty clear that Israel's geopolitical analysis is actually shared by most of its neighbors, though they don't have the stomach to say so publicly.  Few leaders actually believe the lies they often affirm in public, that Israel is the serious regional threat. In private its Iran Iran Iran. The leaks suggest that Israel is the only country telling the truth in public. Moreover, they suggest that robust American intervention in their region is what Arab leaders want. As Jeffrey Goldberg puts it, turns out Arab leaders are a bunch of neocons.


Whether or not the leaks will actually help address the global threat Iran represents is an entirely different question though. They may clarify understanding of the threat and forge unity of purpose in Western countries, but at the same time make it more difficult for Arab monarchies to participate in efforts to undermine the Iranian regime and its nuclear program. 

See also, Jerrold Kessel and Pierre Klochendler, "Unexpectedly, Israel Welcomes WikiLeaks Reveations."  Inter Press Service. December 1, 2010.


Also, the leaked cables detail corroboration of arguments Israel and its defenders often make, but too many brush aside and even mock as paranoid or fabricated:
-Turkish PM Erdogan and his regime hate Israel with a religious fervor.
-The Iranian government actively supports terrorist operations against Israel via Hezbollah and others, including by commandeering Red Crescent ambulances to smuggle weapons. 

See also, Raymond Bonner, "'By Whatever Means Necessary': Arab Leaders Want Iran Stopped." The Atlantic. November 29, 2010.




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Lebanon on my mind

Things are not looking good in Lebanon. The pending announcement of conclusions from the UN's Special Tribunal on Lebanon concerns all of Lebanon's neighbors as well. 

"MESS Report / Lebanon's response to Hariri probe scandal may be war with Israel," Avi Issacharoff. Haaretz. Nov. 23, 2010.

US Sen. John Kerry was in Beirut (as well as Syria, Israel, the West Bank, and Turkey) a couple of weeks ago in an apparent attempt to show US support for the UN probe of Hariri's 2005 assassination--and reassure the Lebanese that they will not be left to wolves. Let's just note that this tribunal was requested by the government of Lebanon and is assigned to enforce national criminal laws. 

See also, Michael Young, "Trial or error?" Now Lebanon. Nov. 19, 2010.
Q&A with Paul Salem, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Nov. 22, 2010.


And
Hanin Ghaddar, "Southern Exposure."  Tablet Magazine. Nov. 18 , 2010.
Hanin Ghaddar, "My Grandmother Loves Hezbollah." Tablet Magazine. Jan. 20, 2010.


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Walter Reich on why Israelis despair of peace

"The Despair of Zion," Walter Reich.  The Wilson Quarterly. Summer 2010.

Walter Reich sheds some light on Israelis' profound doubts about the prospects for peace after the failure of the Oslo process,  the fallout from recent attempts to withdraw from territories, and the rise of Hamas.  "Any effort to bring peace between Israelis and Palestinians," he writes, "must reckon with the fact that bitter experience has taught many Israelis to doubt that their foes want a lasting concord."

He offers a list of ten beliefs and fears contributing to Israelis' despair over the prospects for peace.

Here are two that I think many self-proclaimed "students of The Conflict" are completely blind to, even as they insist that Americans are always "beaten over the head with the Israeli narrative." Somehow, despite this much-hyped control of the media, Israelis' views about the challenges to peace are not at all on their radar. The two concerns below are at least as relevant to questions of "justice" and "peace" in the  Levant as any other purported fact mustered to implicate Jewish wrongdoing: the systematic indoctrination to hatred of Jews and Israelis and delegitimization of the modern state of Israel throughout the Palestinian territories (and beyond), and the growing exploitation of the language and laws of human rights--by those in no position to call out others, who even mock Israelis' own respect for human life--but invoke them in order turn those who respect human rights against the one nation in the Middle East that also respects and systematically protects human rights.

The Palestinians will never accept the existence of Israel, and systematically teach their children that they must never do so, either.

It’s this belief, probably more than any other, that causes Israeli despair.

Israelis have grown accustomed to being pilloried in the most crude and violent terms in Palestinian mosques. And they’ve grown accustomed to media controlled by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank that regularly undermine the readiness to accept Israel alongside a future Palestinian state—that glorify suicide bombers, quote Muhammad as saying that Jews must be killed, accuse Israelis of poisoning and spreading AIDS among Palestinians, deny that the Holocaust happened, claim that Jews never had a history in the land and that there was never any Temple in Jerusalem, and insist that Jews should leave the area and go back to their “original” homelands—Europe and Ethiopia.

Israelis might feel reassured that peace is possible if it were promoted in the Palestinian Authority’s education system; even if the current Palestinian generation isn’t ready to accept the Jewish state, maybe a future one will. But they know that Palestinian students study maps in their textbooks on which Israel doesn’t exist and watch television programs aimed at young people that identify cities in Israel as being part of Palestine.

Moreover, the other Palestinian territory—Gaza—is governed by a group, Hamas, that is forthright in declaring that it will fight until Israel is gone, and that promotes this ideology in every way it can in its own media and education system. Even if the Palestinian Authority were to foster the ideal of coexistence among its students, what about the students in Gaza?

Palestinians attack Israel from behind civilian human shields, but any response by Israel, however careful, that harms those civilians is condemned, while the tactic itself, which is a crime of war, is ignored.

Israelis have concluded that this new form of warfare has undercut the effectiveness of the military strength on which they long relied. They know they have a powerful army—the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF—that faces, in the cases of the Palestinians and Hezbollah in Lebanon, adversaries that lack tanks or planes. But Israelis have discovered that their military superiority is blunted, even useless, when their adversaries are willing to use the very people whose cause they claim to champion as shields behind which to fire rockets. That’s what happened during Israel’s three-week incursion into Gaza in the winter of 2008–09, which it launched after being bombarded by thousands of rockets. And that’s what happened during the 2006 war with Hezbollah, the Palestinians’ ally on Israel’s northern border, which hid its rockets in schools, mosques, and hospitals, so that Israel couldn’t target the rockets without also destroying those schools, mosques, and hospitals—and killing civilians. Like the United States and other countries fighting in the Middle East, Israel doesn’t know how to fight such a war. And when it tries, it’s accused of war crimes. Israelis worry that the military they built to defend their country can’t do it without bringing upon Israel international condemnation.

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Hollow Men -- Lee Smith's column in Tablet this week

"Hollow Men: Why Israel's enemies will always be the darlings of Western intellectuals," Lee Smith. Tablet Magazine (July 14, 2010).

Smith is on a roll these days, here exploring why it's so fashionable to be anti-Israel among today's intellectual elite.

In reality, of course, Israel isn’t all that heroic. No one and nothing is. Israel’s men and women of honor do not accomplish Homeric deeds in south Lebanon or Gaza to the beat of martial songs, like the resistance; instead they ride the bus home on the weekend to see their parents, go out drinking with friends, and pick up the wrong guy or girl in a smoky bar with awful pop music. “Our warriors,” says one former tank driver, “are Jewish boys who are bossed around by their wives.” And yet during the war with Hezbollah four years ago, the country’s incompetent political and military leadership sent too many of those Jewish boys to their deaths, without sufficient training or a strategy for victory. It seems like almost every day there is news that another of Israel’s chief political leaders is under investigation for corruption charges, which is to say the system is rotten and the system works. To say that Israel is normal is to say that it is, like all democracies, mediocre.

Intellectuals are not interested in the quotidian mediocrity of a functioning democracy. They are interested in ideas. Once an idea is realized in the form of a political organization that must function on a day-to-day basis, it is difficult for men and women of ideas to stomach the result.

 Read the whole thing

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Lee Smith's (sort of) defense of Octavia Nasr at The Weekly Standard

"The Western Press and Hezbollah," Lee Smith. The Weekly Standard. July 13, 2010.

I think he's right that Nasr is, in a way, a scapegoat for a much more profound problem that the Western media is unwilling to address in earnest.

"Who knows what Octavia Nasr really thinks about Fadlallah, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that she fell prey to minority politics, twice over. As a Christian journalist working in a Muslim majority region, she imagined her profession of respect for a theorist of terror would win her bona fides as an “objective” reporter. And as an Arab she’s taking the fall for a conviction held by virtually all of her Western professional peers."

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Lebanese Ship Plots Course for HypocriSea

Here comes another batch of useful idiots and aspiring martyrs to try to break the naval blockade of Gaza. A few fun facts about this latest publicity stunt: 

*Their ship is named after an ancient Israelite lady, Miriam. Irony bonus points! 

*Probably no Palestinians are more marginalized than the 425,000 whom Lebanon has kept in refugee camps for 3+ generations, denying them citizenship, banning them from working in most professions, denying them access to public education, health care, and social services. All in the name of "preserving their identity"--the cynical abuse of the Palestinian cause in sharp relief. Please excuse me if this outpouring of solicitude for Gaza strikes me as hypocritical and more about sticking it to the Jews than about helping Palestinians.  (Don't believe me about that Lebanon would be so cruel to its "brothers?" A powerful case comes from even the most unlikely corners...)

*Hezbollah banned Lebanese singer Haifa Wehbe's request to join flotilla on grounds that
her 'nudity, degradation and immodest dress' would shame passengers. (Wehbe denies the story). I guess this means there won't be any racy floorshow, the staple of any good Mediterranean cruise.

*Hezbollah's Executive Council Chief, Hashem Safieddine (what is up with all these crypto-Zionists names?), is already claiming victory; says Zionists are quaking in their boots at the prospect of this "women's flotilla." "Zionists fear boat carrying women who want to deliver aid to Gaza, so how will they be able to face rockets in next war?" It's always nice to hear terrorists at least be honest about the level at which they are operating--that old medieval nexus of honor, fear, and shame.  

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