EMRACEABLE U.S.:

The Arab defeat (Hazem Saghieh, 2007-06-11, Open Democracy)

Better that we, Arabs and Muslims, should surrender than continue as we are.

Japan's experience in the aftermath of the second world war offers an example of unusual courage. In the first place, the country had two atomic bombs dropped on it, and then General MacArthur imposed a new constitution which shook Japan's traditional way of life to its very foundations. The reaction of Japanese society was to concede defeat unequivocally, recognising that as the losers they must pay the price for their loss. But the Japanese elite went one step further, arguing that Japan should actually "embrace defeat", reconciling itself to its loss and learning from the occupying power that had vanquished it. For it had to be possible to learn from the causes of America's strength, without necessarily accepting the justice of its cause. And the loser in a conflict as complex and protracted as the second world war surely had much to learn.

The lessons the Japanese took from their defeat enabled them to become a global economic power. How different are the conclusions the Arabs have drawn from their own losses. Not one of four Arab-Israeli wars - of 1948, 1967, 1973 or 1982 - was sufficient to convince the Arabs that they had been defeated; nor was even the course of events which led ultimately to the destruction of Iraq, to the jeopardy in which Lebanon finds itself, to the growing tide of fanaticism, to the bland acceptance of bloodshed, to the curtailment of women's freedoms and to widespread economic, academic and institutional decline. None of this has been enough to force an admission of defeat from us or a change in our intellectual mood.

We find ourselves in this bitter predicament largely because we keep trying to overstretch a period that is over.

The question is really just the pace of the embrace. While Yeltsin was able to force one upon the USSR with some rapidity, the French are only just now accepting their defeat, two hundred years after the fact.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 11, 2007 9:11 PM