January 16, 2007
WAITING ON THEIR ANTIETAM:
Jimmy Carter's heart of dorkiness (Spengler, 1/17/07, Asia Times)
It is easy to dismiss Carter as the most egregious dork in US politics. He nearly lost the Cold War, and nearly destroyed the US economy. By the most objective measurement of failure, namely margin of loss in a failed bid for re-election, Carter stands at the absolute bottom of the list of all US presidents. In 1980 he lost to Ronald Reagan with 49 electoral votes to Reagan's 489. The next-worst performer, Herbert Hoover, had a stronger showing against Franklin D Roosevelt during the depths of the Great Depression in 1932 (49 electoral votes to FDR's 472).John Lewis Gaddis summarizes the Carter administration as follows:
Americans seemed mired in endless arguments with themselves, first over the Vietnam War, then Watergate, then, during Carter's presidency, over charges that he had failed to protect important allies like the Shah of Iran ... The low point came in November of [1979] when Iranians invaded the United States embassy in Tehran, taking several dozen diplomats and military guards hostage. This humiliation, closely followed by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan a few weeks later, made it seem as though Washington was on the defensive everywhere, and Moscow was on a roll.
After Iran let the diplomats go, the provincial peanut farmer who stumbled into the presidency flew to the US air force base in Germany to meet them. He asked the Central Intelligence Agency psychiatrists who were debriefing the hostages, "Didn't the Iranians know what they were doing was wrong?" Call it the heart of dorkiness: Carter was so horrified by the Iranians' capacity for evil that he could not absorb the information, even when it grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and threw him out of the White House.
Where the Palestinians are concerned, Carter keens the same trope. It is repulsive to think that a people of several millions, honeycombed with representatives of international organizations, the virtual stepchild of the United Nations, appears doomed to reduce its national fever by letting blood.
Spengler's own point seems to elude him when he compares Palestine to the Confederacy (we might also compare it to Vietnam). No matter how devastated it is at the end of its war with Israel (the dustup between Hamas and the PLO is too bloodless to even earn the name "war"), it just isn't that hard to develop a functioning economy based, initially, on providing cheaper labor than your more developed neighbor. Posted by Orrin Judd at January 16, 2007 8:22 AM
The linked article is worth reading in its entirety. Read the Spengler piece closely from the point of view of the spiritual jailhouse as psychopathology. As some of us have beem putting forth for some time, the unreformed inmate of this or any other failed and failing jailhouse is tortured by the consciousness of failure.
This is the story of cultural "irredentism" in Spengler's word, from all the King Phillips and ghost dancers, Boxers, Leninists, "anti-imperialists" down to all the "Mahdi armies."
As I have pointed out, the mentally ill intombed in the various jailhouses are quite candid about their illnesses, if we listen to what they have to say. It is their own consciousness of inferiority, compounded by their realization that others share their evaluation, which drives them to destruction.
Where does this take us? The Spengler essay correctly raises the question but suggests no answer. We should wish health to the sick. This is not advanced by enabling their delusions. They may change, grow and adapt, once they understand their alternatives.
Which is why our helping the Shi'a to triumph is sop important from a psychological, not just geo-political, perspective. Whether the Sunni Arabs have a future is an open question.
Posted by: oj at January 16, 2007 8:51 PMCurious that for all his sophistication (or should that be pop psychology"? or should that be exaggerrated economic determinism?....), Spengler refuses to actually SAY that the Palestinians are suffering because they and their leaders have wished and continue to wish to destroy Israel.
That the true tragedy of the Palestinians is their failure---so far---to destroy the Jewish State.
And since the destruction of the Jewish State is their DREAM ("I Have a Dream" and yes, the Palestinians too have a dream), why shouldn't all of us, since we are all shaken to our cores by the "horror" of their existence, do our best to make it happen. And what's a few white lies, deceptions and inaccuracies---not to mention elaborately constructed delusions?---compared to eliminating such horrors? Of righting such injustice? Of making the world work according to our conceptions of it?
We are all Jimmy Carters, now.
Posted by: Barry Meislin at January 17, 2007 4:48 AMOj: Right. The Shi'ite partisans, by institutions and doctrine, are slightly more open to growth and adaptation than the other mob faction.
There is such a thing as a cultural wrong turns, a turn into a dead end, as it were. Since adaptibility is the key to growth and change, the more frozen a culture is the less likely it is to survive and prosper. Consider how the Mormons, once convinced that advocacy of polygamy were a lethal maladaptation, received and promulogated a further revelation permitting them to change.
The Partisans of Ali just might be able to make changes; the others are merely tools of temporal orders, and cannot.
And if the Shi'ites, in the end, cannnot adapt? Why, as the wackiest denizens of Wackistan, they are the easiest to beat.
Posted by: Lou Gots at January 17, 2007 8:25 AM