May 11, 2011 | 12:00 am
by Martin Peretz
Martin Peretz is editor-in-chief emeritus of The New Republic.
There’s just so much press attention the Arab world can receive before even obsessives like me begin to tire of its frenzy, pitilessness, and perfidy. Yes, endless repetition of violence and violation can also seem routine. Which, to tell you God’s honest truth, they are. There is a great deal of exactitude behind this morbid fact. Still, the present upheavals in their cumulative impact are deadening. Not only to the victims of the regimes but to their observers, commentators, rapporteurs.
Actually, many of these observers, perhaps most, are infatuated with the Arabs. But infatuation is really a variant on infantilization. The torment now spreading in the Arab world, however, is an evidential repudiation of this view, a cardinal attribute of which is that whatever difficulties obtained in the vast space from the Maghreb to the outskirts of Baghdad are attributable to Israel, in particular, and maybe even to the Jews, in general. This was very convenient in that it matched with the traditional bigotries of Western diplomatic elites. Yet it had a contemporary ring to it—from Barack Obama’s pastor to the increasingly monolithic editorial view of the liberal press.
One of the reasons that this is so is that this is a field where knowledge is certainly arcane, if not deliberately suppressed. Given the phantasmagoric nature of Arab governmental documents, would you trust material from official archives? In addition to all of this is the haste and fashion of news itself. The “experts” simply do not know much about the topics on which they have to and do pretend expertise. Many who report and interpret for us know exactly zero about their quickly changing subjects. For most, a one-page memo or a quick update will do. Syria is a case in point. I would bet that some of the authoritative press people don’t know the difference between Hama, a town the population of which Bashir Assad’s father, Hafez, bombed to smithereens and killed some 10,000 to 40,000 (a difference that maybe should make a difference) Sunnis in the process, and Hamas, the governing terrorist organization in Gaza that is itself Sunni but is willing to make alliances with anybody—that is, Turks, the Shia of Iran, and the secularized Alawites in Damascus—as long as they are antagonists, loathing antagonists, of Israel. In this sentence alone lay a thousand facts and factoids. And don’t forget that between Turkey and Syria lies a land dispute with a long past and passions aplenty to match it.
What, for that matter, do even the professionals know about the Berbers of North Africa, players in the ongoing Libyan war and the more-or-less pacified Tunisian troubles, too? And what role will they play when disturbance turns to real chaos in Algeria and perhaps Morocco, where Berbers are really numerous but also where an Arab census is not a census at all? (There are no believable numbers for present-day Lebanon where the last calculus was taken in 1932, ten years before the Vichy government terminated the post-World War I French Mandate.) But Algeria will be the real doozey. First, the Algerians threw out the French; then millions of them left for France; now they are competing for France itself They hate one another at home with a civil war in their near history that took about a quarter of a million lives while almost no one was watching. Do you recall the long civil war? No, not the “heroic” one depicted in The Battle of Algiers where “the good guys” won and the French soldiers and the pieds noirs were all Nazis. Yes, I mean the other one that dragged on for a decade between the Salafists and the military regime. Oh, you didn’t notice. Well, the army won. Had the Islamists triumphed it would have been, if anything, much worse. Like Khomeini’s Persia without the pretentious theology but with more blood.
Actually, it is Syria where outside ignorance and inattention have reaped for the regime enormous latitude over the years. And enormous latitude now when it has over just about a month murdered a thousand people, maybe more. Not exactly its own people, by the way, but that is how things are in the body counts of tyrannies. How many wounded have been picked off by snipers (here acting as random rather than precise killers) nobody really knows. But the scandal of this all is the fact that the presidency of Barack Obama has been more or less allied with the dictatorship since it came to power, a part of the liberal idealist’s opening to the Arabs whoever they were. Or, to be precise, the ignominy of it all was that it was a courtship by the paradigmatic democracy of the paradigmatic oppressor which would respond to every overture with insult and scorn. (The Saudis experienced humiliation, too. It’s hard to tell whether they were following us or we them. Anyway, it’s clear that the president likes these royals. What will happen when the successor, Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz, who is in his eighties and does not like us at all, ascends the throne after his brother Abdullah, who liked us a lot and had an ambassador in Washington, Adel al-Jubeir, who likes us even more, departs to his maker and is buried in the anonymous desert sands, no marker, no monument, no nothing. This is—I am serious—a particularly tasteful part of Wahhabi tradition: the monarch dies; the monarch disappears. Poof!)
Of course, the Obama-Clinton diplomacy—oops, I almost typed “Carter” for “Clinton”—with Syria was initially an aspect of the president’s patently foolish diplomacy with Iran about which people nodded sagely but knew deep inside it was twaddle. But long after Obama understood—reluctantly, I am certain—that there weren’t deals to be had with Tehran (neither with Ahmadinejad nor with Khamenei) the president pursued his Damascus gamesmanship with a stubbornness that was born of his sense that he was always right. At least in foreign policy, about which he knows even less than about technical economic issues, his tenacity has been the cause of an almost seamless set of international failures. Alas, very few in the United States notice because we are fixated on our domestic exertions. Now, it may not be that Obama actually desires American authority and grip in the world to slip away, although I suspect that he might see this as a triumph for what old enthusiasts of this disposition call international morality and international law. Still, the decline of America is the sure consequence of his actions.
I have just read two articles about Syria. One, “Hundreds Reported Arrested as Syria’s Crackdown Widens,” is in The New York Times, datelined Beirut. One knows that it is based on sources in Damascus and other Syrian cities. But names can’t be used and, even in Lebanon, informants are better off nameless lest Assad’s long-armed secret police reach over the feeble frontier to silence him, like he silenced Rafik Hariri, the zillionaire Sunni prime minister of the neighboring cedar republic in 2005. “The scale and ferocity of the crackdown” is actually hair-raising, what with young children being arrested with their elders. There were dead ... but no one can make a true estimate. Be afraid! (There are no consolations to be drawn from the fact that the byline of Anthony Shadid, to whom we are all obligated for his sophisticated and textured reportage out of the region, appeared today with a Damascus dateline. He was admitted to Syria for the sole purpose of interviewing Assad’s chief flak. In and out.)
