[Peace-discuss] Liberal opinion (II)

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Given recent discussions on this list on free speech, fascism, humanitarian 
intervention, Obama's plans for increased killing in Afpak, etc., it's good that 
competent professionals re willing to help out with this matter.  --CGE]


	New Think-Tank Seeks to Regulate Historical Analogies
	by Thomas Harrington, August 19, 2009

WASHINGTON – Yesterday, a group of high-profile dignitaries from across the 
political spectrum celebrated the launch of the Society for the Management of 
Historical Reason (SMHR) in the nation’s capital. The all-day seminar took place 
in the headquarters of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and featured 
speeches by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, former secretary of state 
Madeleine Albright, John Nagl of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), 
former Bush speechwriter David Frum, Obama Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke, and 
Iraq surge architect and West Point professor Frederick Kagan.

In his opening remarks, the new organization’s executive director, Michael 
O’Hanlon, a longtime fellow at the liberal Brookings Institution, spoke with 
urgency about the new entity’s mission. "As Isaiah Berlin, the great prophet of 
the Open Society, once said, ‘Analogizing is the lifeblood of historical 
reason.’ We believe this to be true. However, we also know that in times like 
these, allowing anyone, anywhere to establish and publicize parallels between 
the policies of the U.S. and those pursued by other nations in the course of 
history can have far-reaching consequences for American security. We therefore 
seek to aid those habitually engaged in generating historical reasoning (or 
reporting it to the general public after a cursory reading of a commissioned 
think-tank position paper) to channel their ideas toward only those parallelisms 
which affirm that the U.S. and its close ally Israel stand outside the laws of 
causality that have governed the fates of other peoples on the earth."

When asked by a reporter to spell out how this actually works in practice, 
O’Hanlon replied, "Our enemies around the world have long-suggested that when 
the U.S. and Israel attack or invade other nations, they, like every other 
militarily strong state before them, do so in order to gain control of the land 
or resources of the invaded country. When disinformation like this appears, the 
first line of defense is, as it always has been, to greet the assertion with 
utter silence, and if that fails, to condescendingly mock the person as a 
Chomskyite loon. If, after all this, they still get an insufficiently trained 
reporter to put this ludicrous notion into print or on the air, that’s where our 
agents of historical reason spring into action. Within a matter of days, they 
will generate a minimum of five op-eds in the largest American dailies, 
designed, each in their own way, to reaffirm the wholly defensive and 
unfailingly moral underpinnings of American and Israeli foreign policy."

At the close of the day-long session, both the participants and the assembled 
members of the press received a small compilation of some of the more specious 
historical analogies currently being circulated by our enemies as well as the 
SMHR’s talking points for each. What follows is a small sample from that 
publication.

Analogy #1: People who invade other people’s lands have almost always done so to 
aggrandize their own standing in the world. Therefore, the U.S. and Israel are 
probably doing the same.

Talking point for analogy #1: These two nations attack other people’s nations 
for largely defensive reasons. Insofar as they have any broader goal, it is 
always to bring the invadees the gifts of either an advanced economy or democracy.

Analogy #2: All states in the past that had multiple, continuous, and far-flung 
military engagements with other nations (Spain in the 16th century, Napoleon’s 
France, Britain, Portugal in the 20th century) eventually became impoverished to 
point where they could neither maintain their international network of influence 
nor compete economically with the era’s other powerful nations. This is probably 
happening to the U.S.

Talking point for analogy #2: Unlike these nations, the U.S. is peopled by 
individuals with a special, socially programmed "entrepreneurial spirit" that 
will allow them to perpetually invent their way out of the type of decadence and 
decline that has traditionally befallen other nations.

Analogy #3: When the financial, political, and military elites of a country 
generally see themselves as being above the law and demonstrate far more loyalty 
to their fellow caste members than to the population as a whole, this usually 
portends an unstoppable decline into social decadence, factional infighting, 
and, ultimately, various kinds of coup-making. This is probably going on right 
now in the U.S.

Talking point for analogy #3: The U.S., unlike other nations, has a 
constitutional structure that was born in the glow of our founders’ more or less 
perfect wisdom and thus will always, through our court system and its assembled 
jurists, mutate in ways that will safeguard the common good and individual 
liberties over unwieldy concentrations of power. And even when larger than 
desirable concentrations of power do occur in a given moment of history, the 
pendulum will always swing back to correct them in the next generation of 
political actors.

Analogy #4: Since the dawning of the concept of total war in the 1930s and 
1940s, terror has become, for the more militarily advanced states of the world, 
a prime tool for gaining geopolitical advantage. Thus when the U.S. and Israel 
use high-tech weaponry (B-52 bombers, Apache helicopter gunships, and drones) on 
largely unarmed civilian populations in territories that do not belong to them 
and are often thousands of miles from "the Homeland" (from the German Heimat), 
they are probably seeking to terrorize the inhabitants of these places to submit 
to their political will.

Talking point for analogy #4: As we have seen in talking point #1, Americans and 
Israelis almost always attack others for purely defensive reasons. Therefore the 
only real terrorists involved in situations where they operate are the persons 
who are foolish enough to try and fight back against their overwhelming force. 
For example, the Canadian-Afghani teenager Omar Khadr became a terrorist in 
Afghanistan, requiring several years of appeal-free, rehabilitative torture at 
Guantánamo, when he lobbed a hand grenade that killed an invading American 
soldier near his home in Khost. Terrorism will only stop when people like Khadr 
learn to recognize the core benevolence of American and Israeli actions and 
learn to stop reacting against it.

Analogy #5: When, as it did in 2006, Israel launched an essentially unprovoked 
war aimed at destroying the entire modern infrastructure of a neighboring 
country, some compared it to the German Blitzkrieg on Poland in 1939. Similarly, 
when the high-tech Israeli military laid siege to the already isolated and 
already starving population of Gaza at the end of 2008 and the first days of 
2009, some compared it to the terrible tragedy of the Warsaw ghetto at the end 
of World War II.

Talking point for analogy #5: It must always be remembered that the only people 
licensed to make analogies between the horrors of Nazism and any present-day 
cataclysm are Israelis themselves and their many supporters in the American 
press. For example, if the Arab scholar Rashid Khalidi were to compare the 
present-day fate of the Palestinians in any way to that of Jews in Europe 
between 1933 and 1945, he would be immediately guilty of trivializing the 
horrors suffered by the Jews under the Nazis. However, any time Bill Kristol or 
Charles Krauthammer wants to compare Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, 
Hezbollah head Hassan Nasrallah, or Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh to Hitler and 
their followers to the Nazis, no trivialization is involved. This is perfectly 
licit and, more often than not, will be roundly and positively reprinted in the 
mainstream press.

As they were exiting the conference auditorium, participants and observers were 
encouraged to sign a pledge that commits them to the guiding principles of the 
new think-tank. David Gregory (GE-NBC), Brian Williams (GE-NBC), John King 
(Time-Warner-CNN), Guy Raz (NPR), Charles Gibson (Disney-ABC), Mary-Louise Kelly 
(NPR), and Michael Gordon (NYT) were seen chatting amiably among themselves as 
they awaited their turn to sign up.

(Macondo News Service)

http://original.antiwar.com/thomas-harrington/2009/08/18/new-think-tank-seeks/