Middle East Left, Right and Wrong
Over the past three years, the single most frustrating conversation I often find myself in is trying to explain to conservatives how someone (like me, for example) can be against the war in Iraq but not also be a “crazy leftist.” Never mind that there are plenty of critics of Bush from the moderate right (e.g., Richard Clarke, Brent Scowcroft) and the extreme Right (Pat Buchanan), as well as centrists and establishment Democrats (Zbigniew Brzezinski, Madeline Albright). The presumption among Bush supporters is that if you are liberal and against the war, it is because you are a pacifist or, worse, a believer in some kind of ideology that excuses or condones the actions of terrorists.
In most cases, this confusion is willful and deliberate: a tactic to discredit legitimate criticism through “guilt-by-association.” However, like all prejudices, this conservative canard has a kernel of truth. There is a strain of thought at the far edges of the debate, propagated primarily by self-styled leftist intellectuals, that rationalizes the actions of terrorists and romanticizes their violence as part of a justified revolutionary struggle. In my experience, this is an extreme minority view in the United States, although it is much more mainstream in Europe. But it may be fair to say that mainstream liberal opponents of the war have contributed to their own image problem by not being forthright enough in distinguishing the motives for their opposition from these kinds of theories.
The big lie of leftist ideology is the myth of the righteous victim. The late philosopher Edward Said got that ball rolling with respect to the Arab Middle East with his 1977 work Orientalism and in subsequent books such as Covering Islam. Couched in the high moral language of liberation and revolution, Said’s theories drip with self-pity and counter-historical assumptions about cause-and-effect that are as misleading as they are self-serving. He views the history of the encounter between Europe and the Middle East through the lens of Enlightenment (e.g., European) notions of justice and good government, condemning the practice of Western colonialism in terms ironically unique to the Western vocabulary of ethics and morals. He locates the current-day problems of Arab states exclusively in the distortions caused by colonialism and the Western drive for global domination, ignoring any factors internal to Arab culture, religion and sociology which likely serve as better explanations.
Let’s not forget, after all, that when Arab political strength was at its zenith in the 8th-15th centuries, it was Arabs and Turks who extirpated the West from the Mediterranean and colonized parts of Europe. If the Muslim world had experienced an intellectual movement analogous to the Reformation and Enlightenment that propelled material progress in Europe so far and fast in the 16th and 17th centuries, we might today be talking about the negative effects of Eastern colonialism on a victimized West rather than vice versa. The point is that the urge to dominate and impose ideology on conquered people is not unique to the West: it’s an observed condition of human history at all places and times.
But lack of historical perspective is only the beginning of Said’s dishonesty. Typically, the philosophy of the conquering power serves the ends and interests of conquest. There is no ethical position accorded the victim, for example, in militant Islam. Infidels stand against God and the faithful: they deserve their death, and the mujahadeen deserve their victory, end of story. Yet Said (himself a well-educated and thoroughly Westernized Christian Palestinian) finds the language with which to judge the actions of the West and valorize the struggle of the oppressed precisely within the Western philosophical tradition. Odd, isn’t it, that he can criticize Western political philosophy as hypocritical and a mask for self-interested power on the one hand, yet accord it unquestioned legitimacy when it speaks about justice and human dignity for his preferred class of victims.
At least Said’s own interests are fairly transparent. As a Palestinian, he was acutely interested in the issue of Israel and in undermining the moral legitimacy of Zionism by associating it with the (admittedly ugly) legacy of Western colonialism. Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land (not just the West Bank and Gaza, but all of it, according to Said) constitutes an ongoing injustice; the treatment of refugees by the Israelis is cruel and inhumane; and the whole situation is shot through with racist and Orientalist undertones that shame and delegitimize Western pretensions to fair play and equality. But whence come these terms of judgment: “cruel,” “unjust,” “illegitimate”? Said notably underplays the virtues of Western liberalism and ignores almost entirely the historic and sociological cruelty of Arab culture, and not by accident. Does anyone suppose for a minute that had Israel lost any one of the five wars fought against it by its Arab neighbors that today we would be discussing a “Jewish refugee problem” in the West Bank, or arguing whether the Jewish minority was properly represented in the Palestinian Parliament? Said is correct that someone is using the language of Western philosophy and ethics to conceal an underlying power agenda, but not in the way that he intends his readers to believe.
Said was a powerful thinker, excellent writer and a charming fellow. His ideas are provocative, his work worth discussing. What’s unfortunate is that a certain influential academics have internalized his theories uncritically and his rather one-sided analysis of the Middle East has become orthodoxy in many university departments, precluding other sorts of approaches that may equip us better to understand the phenomenon of Islamist violence and formulate effective responses to it. Yes, it’s helpful to understand how colonialism shaped some attitudes in the region, but we also need a clear and critical view of Arab culture as a proactive, not reactive, force. And that’s where the picture gets ugly.
Books like the outstanding Closed Circle: an Interpretation of the Arabs by David Pryce-Jones, Among the Believers and its follow-up, Beyond Belief by V. S. Naipaul, and even Middle East Fears of a Conspiracy by the odious Daniel Pipes, provide a strong antidote to the romantic victim-myths of Said. In them, you will find a terrifying and convincing representation of Islamism consistent with the experience of September 11th and the ongoing problems of the Arab-Western encounter. But you won’t find these books on the shelves of many leftists, and you won’t find ideas from them in their heads, either. This makes it very difficult for orthodox Left academics to contribute much of value to the current debate except knee-jerk opposition. Opinions from this perspective are rightly marginalized, as they are not based on a proper understanding of the issues or on useful experience.
That said, most American critics of Bush and Iraq are not coming from the Said-Leftist perspective. A few are, and they are influential beyond their numbers. Also, their positions on other issues make them hard to distinguish from mainstream liberals whose opposition is rooted in more practical objections about Bush’s strategy, outlook and general competence. As a result, substantive and practical criticism of US policy in Iraq is conflated with the foul gusts of ideological hot-air emanating from the academic Left (and many on the European Left, which is much more ideological than American liberalism in any case), making Bush look sensible and down-to-earth by comparison.
Principled and well-founded objections to the excesses of the ideological Left have pushed more than a few smart people, including Christopher Hitchens, into the arms of the neo-cons, and thus into positions as apologists for the misguided and counter-productive war in Iraq. But it’s a false choice. There is a firm, effective response to the challenge of Islamist terrorism that rejects the simplistic extremism of Bush, but also has nothing to do with the self-defeating and intellectually-dishonest posture of the far Left. It’s time to start recognizing that most serious participants in the policy discussion who are opposed to Bush are advocating for that kind of practical, pro-American and pro-security view, and save the Left-bashing for those few who deserve it.
3:08:22 PM 
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