[Peace-discuss] Liberal opinion (II)

[John W.]

This is the work of SPIN, of course - Satire for the Politically Inclined
Nerd.  Did you write this under an assumed name, Carl?  :-)


On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 1:45 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>wrote:

[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/
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