[Mb-civic] Credit for Mideast 'Climate Change'

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Published on Tuesday, March 22, 2005 by the Daytona Beach News-
Journal
Credit for Mideast 'Climate Change'
by Pierre Tristam
 

As walls were falling all around the Soviet bloc in 1989, east 
Europeans were either dancing on the rubble or rushing west by the 
trainload. Two years later the Soviet Union was history, and with it a 
74-year blight on humanity. Naturally, Cold War hagiographers gave 
Ronald Reagan all the credit. Forty-five years of containment couldn't 
possibly have been more than a warm-up act and 100 million eastern 
Europeans couldn't have budged history their way like a good old 
Hollywood story line. Reagan himself believed that in 1945 he'd been 
among the soldiers liberating Nazi death camps even though his war 
experience was restricted to a few movie studios in Burbank. So it was 
more a sequel than a stretch to make him the world's savior.

His apostles claimed that deploying the Pershing II medium-range 
nuclear missile in Europe, his "evil empire" branding of the Soviet 
Union and his missile defense scheme had pushed the Soviets toward 
bankruptcy and the bargaining table. The claims weren't without their 
grainy truths. But the "evil empire" was long past its evil peak in the 
1980s and was as rotten and desiccated economically as every Soviet 
leader going back to Leonid Brezhnev had looked physically (until 
Mikhail Gorbachev's brief botox era known as glasnost). And star 
wars? It will be 22 years ago Wednesday that Reagan made his 
famous "Strategic Defense Initiative" speech promising to make 
nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete" with a space-based shield. 
More than $135 billion and a trail of failed tests later, the missile 
defense system is the punch-line to every suitcase terrorist's favorite 
joke. It will sooner bankrupt us than protect us, and may well endanger 
us for still diverting $1 billion a month on the wrong threat.

Then again bankrupting diversions posing as favors to the world have 
a long tradition in the Good Empire. Which brings us to Iraq, the Middle 
East's fibrillating tyrannies and George W. -- Bush or Washington, it 
doesn't matter which. The projectionists of Middle East freedom are 
happy to make the superb confusion. It is one of many, beginning with 
the cause-and-effect mania linking Bush to elections in Iraq and 
Palestinian territories, democracy demonstrations in Beirut, lip-service 
elections in Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

To say that Bush's policies had nothing to do with what The New York 
Times called a "Mideast climate change" is, of course, stupid. But to 
give it more than token credit is equally stupid. When the world's only 
superpower invades a fourth-rate tyranny and plunks down $300 billion 
along the way, you expect some payoff. The disgrace is how little the 
payoff has been, how poorly thought out, how bloody. The pro-
democracy stirrings elsewhere in the Middle East don't vindicate 
Bush's policies so much as they prove how much he could have 
achieved politically and diplomatically, if he'd had the will and the 
diplomatic skills.

The whole region is like the Soviet bloc in the 1980s. It is a collection 
of corrupt, bankrupt, politically reprehensible societies held together by 
totalitarian perversions of Islam (and lavish American and western 
indulgence). Like the Soviet bloc, it was a matter of time before the 
crumbling began. Containment and pressure were the key. Invasion 
was the trap. The Middle East has a long, deeply scarred memory of 
western meddling, for good reason. The West's treatment of the 
Middle East since the Crusades, through colonialism's bludgeoning 
and up to the Reagan administration's coddling of Saddam Hussein 
has been a blight of its own. Whatever the aims of the Iraq invasion, 
the American occupation is as likely to retard the crumbling of 
Mideastern tyrannies as to hurry it along, or foment new ones. 
American credibility is suspect, and any western occupation gives 
regressive maniacs of the Hezbollah and al-Qaida variety a rallying 
point.

The Iraq war's diversion from the so-called war on terror and the 
occupation's effects on the U.S. Treasury, which we will all feel soon, 
are the other rising tides of this supposed climate change. So maybe 
the Middle East is warming up to democracy. But at what cost?

An Arab thaw will mean nothing to me -- an ex-Lebanese who'd like 
nothing more than to see his ancestral land reclaim its cedar-like 
dignity -- if it compromises the freedoms and economic solidity of my 
adopted land. I suspect it will mean nothing to my compatriots from 
here to Kansas to the Cascades, either. And yet with every deficit, 
every renewed tax cut while war bills pile up, every enforcement of the 
Patriot Act, every excuse for Guantanamo and an archipelago of 
torturers, every blank check for Iraq and every scaled-back social 
commitment at home, the compromises are piling up. A democratic 
renewal would be a wonderful thing. I'd like to see it in America first.

Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. Reach him at 
ptristam at att.net.

© 2005 News-Journal Corporation 

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0322-27.htm


-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
   ---   George Orwell


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20050323/3b92557c/attachment.htm