James Kirchick: Off the Fence

Gregory Scoblete of the RealClearWorld blog believes he’s discovered a contradiction in my writing. Last week, I posted in this space about a recent Brookings Institution survey that found a sharp rise in Arab support for the Iranian nuclear program. The cause of this newfound fervor in the Arab world for a Persian nuke is that it would be seen, rightly, as a finger in the eye of the West. Of all the reasons to be insouciant, never mind enthusiastic, about Iran getting the bomb, this has to be the most puerile and cynical. As I had argued in the past, there are many things that are popular in the Arab street that are fundamentally irrational and illiberal and that no American government could in good faith support as a policy matter merely because Arabs think we should, and the Brookings poll validates that contention. To take just one issue on which Arab and American public opinion diverge drastically, and which I always stress to liberals who obsess about how America is viewed on the “Arab Street”: the criminalization of homosexuality.

Scoblete points to a column I wrote in April regarding the revolution that ousted Kyrgyz president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev. The United States had supported the Bakiyev regime to the hilt so as to protect its Transit Center at Manas, a crucial link in the supply chain for the war effort in Afghanistan. It had all the aspects of the classical “but he’s our son-of-a-bitch” relationship: tens of millions of dollars paid in what was essentially an extortion racket between us and the Russians, all the while Bakiyev jailed his opponents and shut down avenues of peaceful dissent. That uncritical support arrived with a cost, as I discovered on the streets of Bishkek in the days after the revolution. As I wrote at the time:

Soft-pedaling criticism of dictators who assist this or that American foreign policy objective, ­whether it be hosting a military base or supplying us with oil, may bring promised “stability,” but it is always illusory. As the behavior of Kurmanbek Bakiyev demonstrated, authoritarians are by their nature irrational and unpredictable. Worse, when an authoritarian regime falls, the people who take over naturally feel resentment toward anyone who supported those who oppressed them.

From this, Scoblete concludes: “Got it: we should worry about the trade off between authoritarian dictators and their put upon citizens unless those citizens happen to be Arabs, whose views are irrational, paranoid and ignorant and should thus be ignored.”

But Scoblete is mixing unrelated points, akin to comparing watermelons (a staple of Kyrgyzstan) and pistachios (for which Iran is famous). In his view, you either follow the dictates of “global publics” — an approach to which Scoblete seems to subscribe — or ignore them in the pursuit of some wicked, unilateralist, neocon agenda.

A brief examination of the substantive issues being polled would be useful. With respect to Kyrgyzstan, the US policy of near limitless support for Bakiyev directly harmed American national interests. In the aftermath of his ouster, we are left with a country led by former opposition figures rightly wary of American intentions, because America did little as they were being persecuted by a kleptocratic regime. Never mind the immorality of propping up a loathsome autocrat; the five years of American support for Bakiyev will redound harshly against “hard” American interests like bashing rights.

As for Arab public opinion on the Iranian nuclear program, there is widespread consensus, across the political spectrum in America (and the rest of the free world), that Iran should not have one. Of course, there is major disagreement about how this problem should be dealt with, but on the fundamental question of whether or not it is desirable for the regime to possesses nuclear weapons technology, only those on the hard left and paleoconservative right are unbothered by the prospect. There is no contradiction, none whatsoever, in arguing that Kyrgyz public opinion should be duly considered when it comes to our relations with a reviled dictator who abuses the citizens of that country, and that ever-capricious Arab public opinion should be duly ignored when it comes to Iran’s quest for a nuclear bomb.

I’ve belatedly watched the 2009 documentary Mugabe and the White African, a harrowing perspective on the campaign of terror that Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, has unleashed upon his people. The film tells the story of a white family, led by its patriarch Mike Campbell and his son-in-law Ben Freeth, fighting to keep their farm from the clutches of Mugabe’s land redistribution policy. Enacted in 2000, the scheme has resulted in astronomical inflation, the utter collapse of the country’s once-prosperous commercial agriculture sector (which has made most Zimbabweans dependent on international food aid), and the creation of some 2 million refugees. Early on, Freeth asks whether it is possible for a white man to be considered an African, and it is this question, among others, that fuel the film.

Mugabe and the White African’s narrative arc concerns the Campbell and Freeth’s legal battle against the Mugabe regime. They have decided to take the Southern African Development Community (SADC) charter — which states that citizens of the regional bloc’s constituent nations cannot be discriminated against on the basis of their skin color — at its word. While the racial disparities in Zimbabwe have long merited some form of land redistribution policy aimed at alleviating the economic status of the country’s black majority, this was not the sort of plan that Mugabe had in mind. Even if one could justify his violent, forced evictions of white farmers on such grounds, the vast majority of these properties were handed to political hacks, not the destitute. What makes Campbell’s legal case airtight is that he purchased his farm years after authoritarian, white-ruled Rhodesia became black-ruled Zimbabwe.

While the filmmakers chose two white men as their protagonists, Mugabe and the White African comes across strongest in its depiction of the ruinous effects that Mugabe’s agricultural policies and vicious racism have had upon his fellow black Zimbabweans. Campbell employed about 500 black workers on his farm; with their families, this meant that Campbell was responsible for the livelihood of several thousand black people. Hundreds of thousands of such black farm workers and their families’ lives were wrecked by Mugabe’s land seizure policies, putting the lie to the claim, balefully endorsed by most of his fellow African leaders, that he has been fighting for the interests of blacks all along. Throughout their struggle, Campbell and Freeth work with black comrades in resisting the depredations, both political and racial, of Mugabe-ism. “If we had more Mike Campbells in Zimbabwe, we’d have a better Zimbabwe,” his black, female lawyer says.

From the airy, languid courtroom of the SADC tribunal in Windhoek, Namibia, to the rolling valleys of Campbell’s Mt. Carmel farm, Mugabe and the White African offers a rare, firsthand glimpse into a country whose trauma has been difficult to capture on film due to the onerous burdens imposed on foreign media (the movie was filmed largely in secret). The most riveting scene involves a surprise visit to Campbell’s farm by the son of the government minister to whom Campbell’s land has been promised by the regime. “We don’t want you here anymore,” he spits, pacing back and forth, wild-eyed and with the demeanor of an untamed beast. In the face of such open hostility, the question posed at the outset of the film by Ben Freeth on the subject of the white man’s place in Africa clearly remains an open one. What’s inspiring about Mugabe and the White African is its conveyance of the fact that there are so many ordinary Africans, white and black, willing to resist the curse of racial prejudice.

A new poll finds that a majority of Arabs support Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon. This doesn’t jibe with “elite” Arab opinion — that of the sort found in the palaces of Arab capitals — which considers a nuclear-equipped, revolutionary Shiite regime a major destabilizing force. (That privately-held view was inadvertently divulged earlier this summer when the United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to the United States essentially came out in support of a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities.) Most interesting is that the percentage of Arabs in favor of a nuclear Iran has doubled in the past year, in defiance of the Obama administration’s campaign to rally the world in favor of tougher sanctions on the regime. These results can also be seen as a repudiation of Washington’s attempt to strong-arm Israel into making concessions, a diplomatic row explicitly orchestrated in service to a worldview — debunked by yours truly in the current issue of World Affairs — which holds that “solving” the Arab-Israeli crisis will somehow bring the Arab world around to our view of things on a whole matter of problems.

One doesn’t have to be a Revisionist Zionist to think that a nuclear Iran would be a very, very bad thing. Even those adamantly opposed to military strikes against the regime acknowledge that a nuclear Iran would not only threaten Israel, but first and foremost its own people. Equipped with such a weapon, the regime would be able to crack down further on the domestic opposition and engage in foreign adventurism with even more impunity than it already does.

So what does it say that most Arabs profess to be unbothered by the prospect of a nuclear Iran? For one, this must put them on the extreme fringe of world public opinion. Aside from Europe, where majorities across the continent view an Iranian nuclear program as a threat, I haven’t seen polling on this issue in other parts of the world. But I can’t help but assume most Latin Americans, Africans, and Asians oppose the theocratic, messianic regime in Tehran acquiring a nuclear bomb, even if they may be hesitant to embrace the measures required to stop such a scenario. “So what happens is when they’re angry with the U.S., as they are in 2010, you find them more supportive of America’s enemies,” Shibley Telhami, who conducted the poll, told the Washington Times. “In 2009, when they were less angry with the U.S. and more optimistic about the Obama administration and hopeful that something was going to happen in the next year, they didn’t want Iran to be a spoiler.” This widespread irrationality infects other realms of Arab thinking: an overlooked revelation from the poll is that only 3 percent of Arabs “empathize with the Jews who suffered under the Nazis.” Look on the bright side: at least they acknowledge the Holocaust happened!

This support for a nuclear Iran on the “Arab Street” seems to be of a piece with a broader hang-up of chest-thumping anti-Americanism; asked to choose a favorite leader outside their own country, the most popular recipient of Arab affections was Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, followed by Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, (oddly) French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and Osama bin Laden. With the exception of Sarkozy, there’s not a democrat among the bunch. And with the exception of Erdogan and (again) Sarkozy, not an elected one either.

Last year, I wrote an essay for Commentary called “What Price Popularity,” which argued that the United States has and always will be reviled by many people around the world (particularly  Muslims), that the reasons for this resentment are often quite complex and beyond our control, and that, rather than fret and complain about this phenomenon, policymakers would do well to pursue what they believe to be in the nation’s interest, regardless of what foreigners think. This latest poll simply underscores the irrationality, paranoia, and ignorance underlying Arab public opinion — and why we should stop obsessing over it, if not ignore it entirely.

In December 2001, the Independent’s Robert Fisk earned international infamy when he filed a dispatch from Afghanistan about a group of young Afghan men and boys who nearly beat him to death. “In fact, if I were the Afghan refugees of Kila Abdullah, close to the Afghan-Pakistan border, I would have done just the same to Robert Fisk,” he wrote. “Or any other Westerner I could find.” A more fitting example of the Western foreign correspondent “gone native” — recognizable by ample amounts of self-loathing and patronization toward dark-skinned people — could not be found. The article, “My Beating by Refugees is a Symbol of the Hatred and Fury of this Filthy War,” inspired the Internet phenomenon of “Fisking,” the painstaking deconstruction of a news article or column, sentence by sentence, with biting and caustic commentary.

I’ve largely ignored Robert Fisk since then, so predictable and overwrought is his work. Last month, however, a fellow journalist who covers Afghanistan and Pakistan placed into my hands a copy of a speech he had delivered just days earlier to the fifth Al Jazeera Annual Forum. Titled “Journalism and ‘the words of power,’” it’s a typically rambling, occasionally conspiratorial discourse on the venality and corruption of the Western news media — in other words, a hallmark of the Fisk oeuvre, with some sprinkles of Foucault thrown in for good measure (the Independent reprinted the speech, in modified form, here).

The gist of Fisk’s speech is that journalists, in collusion with Western governments, use language in a corrupt and dishonest way to further the interests of imperialism. “More and more today, we journalists have become prisoners of the language of power,” he told his audience. Yet Fisk is no less a victim of the supposed ills he diagnoses. He deems the appointment of Tony Blair as the Quartet Middle East peace envoy to be “an obscenity of history,” right up there, one assumes, with Halabja and all the other massacres Fisk has witnessed in his decades-long career. There is the requisite attack on “Israeli colonization of Arab land” (can one imagine Robert Fisk or anyone of his ilk ever referring to “Jewish land” or “Christian land”?). He compares the blockade of Gaza to the Soviet army’s blockade of Berlin.

The speech is a cavalcade of hyperbole. He considers the shorthand, diplo-military term “AfPak” “as racist as it is politically dishonest.” He’s angered by use of the term “foreign fighters” to describe Arab Islamists fighting coalition forces in Afghanistan. After all, are not those men and women “in American or other NATO uniforms” also foreign fighters?. Technically they may be, but they are in Afghanistan at the behest of the internationally recognized Afghan government, and they serve there on a United Nations mandate. Only a man as dishonest and possessive of the corrupt politics of Robert Fisk would not be able to tell the difference between the two.

To account for the West’s moral failing, Fisk delivers the following non sequitur: “Maybe one problem is that we no longer think for ourselves because we no longer read books. The Arabs read books — I’m not talking here about Arab illiteracy rates — but I’m not sure that we in the West still read books.” Well, if he’s not talking about literacy rates, what the hell is he talking about? The United Nations Arab Human Development Report, surveying 22 countries, presents stunning and incontrovertible evidence of the failures of Arab regimes to educate their people. Last year’s report found the adult literacy rate in these nations to average out at 70.3 percent over the period from 1995 to 2005. Of the first such report in 2002,  which produced similarly dreary findings, a Jordanian journalist wrote that it “hangs out the Arabs’ dirty washing before the world and offers a wealth of information that mars the image of the Arabs in the world, but unfortunately the information is correct.” That same report contained the infamous statistic that tiny and bankrupt Greece translates five times as many books into English as do all the Arab states combined. And what books “the Arabs” are reading seem to be dog-eared copies of Gamal Abdel Nasser speeches and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

But somehow, according to this vaunted interpreter of world events, it is Westerners who don’t understand. This is certainly the view of “the Arab street,” of whose dim prejudices Fisk is not so much a reporter but a fierce advocate. This penchant for attributing the region’s problems on outside forces, a habit bred by anti-Semitism and a conspiracist worldview, is recognized by a courageous and honest band of Arab intellectuals, like the Jordanian writer I quoted above. But it is of little interest to Robert Fisk, who, by indulging the worst instincts of the people he covers, isolates the region’s liberals and sides with its reactionaries by ritually blaming the problems confronted by Muslims on everyone but themselves.

Last Sunday marked World Refugee Day, which annually highlights the plight of the over 30 million people forced to flee their homes due to war, famine, or ethnic strife. This year, the event could not have occurred at a more fitting time. Over the past two weeks, an estimated 400,000 citizens of Kyrgyzstan have fled their homes in the wake of riots between ethnic Uzbeks and Kyrgyz in the country’s south. According to many Uzbeks, Kyrgyz troops burned their passports, effectively preventing them from taking part in a constitutional referendum scheduled for this Sunday. The violence, which has left some 2,000 people dead, is  some of the worst to have hit the former Soviet Union since its breakup two decades ago. Indeed, the very fate of Kyrgyzstan’s tenuous provisional government — which assumed nominal control of the country following the violent ouster of President Kurmanbeck Bakiyev in April, the aftermath of which I covered — hangs in the balance.

But you wouldn’t learn much about the dire situation in Kyrgyzstan by reading the international media, or by perusing the statements of foreign ministries, the agendas of international aid organizations, or the resolutions of the United Nations. Were you to rely on these sources for information, you would think that the greatest calamity to befall the world in recent months was last month’s raid by Israeli commandos of a Gaza-bound vessel in which nine Turkish Islamists were killed.

The details of the incident are disputed by both sides, but it’s clear by now that the “Freedom Flotilla” was not a caravan of peace-loving humanitarians. The Turkish organization that sponsored it is alleged to have ties to al-Qaeda, and passengers on the convoy’s largest boat, the MV Mavi Marmara, came equipped with knives, metal bars, and other physical instruments not usually befitting aid workers. Far from a mission intending to bring food and supplies to the residents of Gaza (each of whom, by the way, receive about a ton of food per year from Israel), the flotilla was a stunt, a staged spectacle intended to provoke the Israeli government into taking defensive action, which it inevitably did.

As always when it comes to Israel, the world was primed to attack. The UN Security Council convened an emergency session in which it “condemned” Israel’s behavior, after which it called for an international investigation of the very behavior it had already judged with the strongest word in its rhetorical arsenal (never does the UN “condemn” the concentration camp that is North Korea, Iran's brutal crackdowns on democracy activists, or China’s gulag system known as the laogai). Turkey’s foreign minister told reporters in Washington that the event was “Turkey’s 9/11.” The incident made front pages around the world for weeks on end, with the headline of Britain’s Daily Mirror leading the pack in sensationalism and distortion: “MASSACRE IN THE MED.”

According to Michael Weiss of the British press watchdog Just Journalism, the British media devotes more attention to Israel than any other foreign country in the world. “The British media’s fixation on Israel trumps all other foreign policy considerations, even Afghanistan, where British soldiers are still fighting and dying,” he says. “A particularly noticeable example was Sri Lanka’s crushing of Tamil separatists at the exact same time Israel launched Operation Cast Lead in response to Hamas rocket fire,” says media expert Tom Gross. “Tens of thousands of Tamil civilians died — 1,000 in a single bombing of a hospital complex alone — compared to perhaps 300 Palestinian civilians. Yet there was virtually no coverage of the Sri Lanka situation.”

Contrast the international outrage over Israel’s entirely legal enforcement of its blockade on the Hamas-ruled territory of Gaza with the massive crisis now facing Kyrgyzstan. Sure, Western governments, led by the United States, have offered a few million dollars in aid. But there have been no emergency Security Council sessions to address the carnage. There have been no attacks on the Kyrgyz government in the international media comparing its alleged, wanton killing of Uzbeks and the burning of their identity documents to the Nazi Holocaust. Nor is much being done to address Kyrgyzstan’s massive refugee problem, at least not on the scale that the international community has devoted to the Palestinian cause. Indeed, the Palestinians are the only people in the world who enjoy the patronage of their own United Nations outfit, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. For over five decades, UNRWA has spent untold billions keeping Palestinians in squalid refugee camps as a means of avoiding their resettlement in neighboring Arab countries.

Why does Israel attract so much attention while Kyrgyzstan is ignored? Kyrgyzstan is, for lack of a better word, hard. Most of the journalists, humanitarians, and foreign ministry officials who perpetually stew over Israel would not be able to locate it (or any of the former Soviet republics of Central Asia) on a map, never mind offer a rudimentary analysis of the country’s problems. Indeed, the entire region is opaque to Western observers, what with its obscure Turkic languages, Eastern traditions, and inhospitable living standards. The endemic corruption and clan-based political system of Kyrgyzstan makes the possibility of there being some form of representative, liberal government — which has never had a better shot than in these past few months — seem hopeless. But the difficulty of alleviating the situation in a place like Kyrgyzstan is all the more reason for people who claim to care about human rights to tackle it.

Moreover, the very things that make Kyrgyzstan difficult for Westerners to understand also apply to the Arab-Israeli conflict. There, colonial powers drew arbitrary borders that created more problems than they solved. There, the people speak different languages. And there, the decades-long dispute between Arabs and Jews over a sliver of land is a complex, wrenching problem that generations of the world’s best diplomats have thus far been unable to solve. Yet most observers in the West have created an easy narrative framing the problem as one between a colonialist, settler state battling a displaced, victimized, helpless people.

Those who focus disproportionately on Israel claim that the attention is justified because the persistence of the Arab-Israeli conflict enrages the Muslim world, thus endangering our relationship with Islamic countries. This has always been a dubious claim. (If Muslims cared so much about the plight of the Palestinians, would they not do more to alleviate their situation? The way Palestinian refugees have been, and continue to be, treated in Arab countries like Jordan, Kuwait, and Lebanon puts the lie to this claim.) But even if we take this charge at face value, there’s no reason to believe that Kyrgyzstan isn’t of any less strategic importance to the West. For one, it hosts the Transit Center at Manas, the main refueling and cargo station for NATO troops and supplies entering and exiting the Afghanistan theater. In addition, Kyrgyzstan is a major route for two deadly things: Islamist fighters and opium. If the rest of the country begins to resemble the lawless south, trafficking in both of these will increase.

But for those who readily attack Israel, the far greater human impact of what’s happening in Kyrgyzstan (or Sudan, or North Korea, or half a dozen other global hot spots) doesn’t matter. They have their own reasons for piling on the Jewish state, whether it’s extreme leftistm, a hatred of capitalism, or plain old anti-Semitism. For Europeans in particular, demonizing Israel and sanctifying the Arabs helps to absolve them of their collective guilt about the Holocaust. That the world obsesses over Israel while ignoring far greater humanitarian crises is a perennial complaint. But it’s one worth registering as Kyrgyzstan teeters on the brink of collapse, and the world barely notices.