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COMMENTARY
January 25, 2003
On the eve
Next week will be downright exciting. Hans Blix reports to the United Nations Monday George Bush delivers his State of the Union speech Tuesday evening. The U.S. may or may not suddenly unload a lot of information upon the U.N. Something dramatic is likely for the U.S. President is going to war in Iraq and must take as much of the world with him as he can. At the least I know the Americans are sitting on copies of Saddam Hussein's actual orders to prepare nerve gas attacks against U.S. troops complete with atropine and chemical suit inventories -- only three weeks old. (The BBC now has these too.) They also have Saddam's instructions for attacking U.S. Navy ships in the Gulf. They have satellite photographs showing Iraqi ground movements at locations before and after U.N. inspections. They have logged information they gave to Mr. Blix's inspection teams and which they failed to act upon. They have intercepts of conversations between Kofi Annan and Tariq Aziz. And this is only what I know about I'm sure there is much much more. Meanwhile over the opposition of the U.S. Canada and Guatemala alone the U.N. just elected Libya to the chairmanship of its Human Rights Commission. (Most European delegates politely abstained.) It was like the last straw. Opinion polls show that the whole world including Americans would feel decidedly more comfortable about his going into Iraq if Mr. Bush had U.N. backing. To be charitable to world opinion I think this is because there is very little real appreciation of what goes on in there -- of the degree to which the U.N. is itself not an embodiment of noble ideals but more simply the corrupt and dissimulating reflection of its largely illegitimate and despotic membership. And next week is the crunch. I expect we will come to look back on this as we do now upon the League of Nations in its last moments -- the League's failure to act on Abyssinia and so forth in the gathering clouds of World War II. The U.N. has manoeuvred Mr. Bush into a position where he cannot advance towards Baghdad without pushing them over. It follows he will push them over -- and let the world know why. As I see it we have reached the end of the road either for Mr. Bush or for the United Nations. I expect Mr. Bush to prevail; but if he doesn't I'll tell you. I expect Mr. Bush to be blamed for the convulsion that then seizes the U.N. but in the longer run I think it will be seen that the U.N. killed itself. The North American media are if possible overplaying the soap operatic performances of Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder as they strew thumbtacks along the road to Baghdad. If you turn to the European media you see that the French and Germans themselves hardly take their leaders so seriously. They are used to this kind of cynical posturing and it doesn't make the front page. What scares them is rather the American earnestness the possibility that Mr. Bush means what he says. They expect politicians to lie to them -- it is part of the "social contract" as in Canada -- and when one of them starts putting his money where his mouth is they are naturally alarmed. Tuesday will also be the election in Israel. That has received much less attention than it deserves. It appears that Ariel Sharon will be re-elected as prime minister despite untried corruption charges against him (technicalities about kiting debts on election expenses) that were systematically leaked through Ha'aretz and the other "left" media in Israel in a last-ditch attempt to bring Mr. Sharon down. They have not helped the Labour party or its prime ministerial candidate Amram Mitzna who continue their free-fall in the polls. Instead most of those abandoning Mr. Sharon swing farther right. Party standings in the Knesset will reflect this. Mr. Sharon will shift from tacking right against a Labour coalition partner most likely to tacking left against religious parties. The most interesting electoral battle is in the background for seats and traction between two leading secular parties -- Natan Sharansky's Yisrael B' Aliya associated with Russian immigrants since its founding in 1996; and Tommy Lapid's Shinui. The latter has made a splash in this election offering a kind of dry-wharks version of the old Labour Party agenda. It campaigns for nothing positive only negatively against the haredi -- the ultra-orthodox Jews -- who have become a common object of scorn in post-modern secular Israeli society. All the problems of Israel are blamed on these people who are presented as leeches absorbing welfare benefits and getting in the way of every kind of modernizing innovation. In a brilliant essay in the Jerusalem Post Jonathan Rosenblum sketches out the real danger in Shinui's huge appeal to the young and the "cool" -- to people sick to death with their own Jewishness. They endanger the haredi for sure; but they endanger the secularism they pretend to defend even more. Israel has reached another defining moment in its young life. It is once again presented with an existential threat; in fact it is ringed with lethal weaponry in the hands of terror masters who report back respectively to Damascus Baghdad and Tehran. The upshot of the coming Iraqi campaign for Israel is unknowable but if it ends in the removal of one more of Israel's deadliest enemies -- Saddam -- then on balance good news. But Israel itself is suffering the psychic shredding that comes from the combination of constant external threat with liberal and secular internal response. Mr. Sharon makes an astute war leader against an external enemy but has little to offer in the internal struggle -- in what might be called "the battle for Israel's soul". >From this distance and because of the endless war we fail to see what Israel has in common with Europe Canada even much of the U.S. It is a society which has advanced technically and outwardly in wealth and efficiency but at the price of being poisoned -- in my view poisoned in the soul. It has fallen into a post-modern intensely secular droll and glib outlook on life; one that forgets its own heritage and puts a premium instead on tolerance and what "feels good"; which discounts indeed mocks all myth and tradition especially its own. It appears that Shinui has captured the shallowest end of this constituency. It thus now embodies an outlook which in the time of testing cannot give anyone a reason to live a reason to fight a reason for hope a reason to build. It represents something that began long ago as the politics of convenience and ends in crisis as the politics of despair. The message of the politician Natan Sharansky -- a graduate of solitary in Moscow's Lefortovo prison who spent a decade in the Soviet Gulag in Siberia thinking things through -- is the profound contrary. He argues that if we don't ourselves believe that our religious inheritance and our way of life are intrinsically superior to what threatens us we are in deep trouble indeed. He himself survived the Gulag kept his mind free within it and ultimately triumphed over it because he never forgot he was a Jew. A Jewish state that does not truly believe it has a claim to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is no match for a culture that does. For the moment Israel agrees that "the Arabs have as good a claim to it as we have" Zionism is dead and Israel has begun to die within has lost its reason to be. Moreover a country such as Israel aspires to be -- not only Jewish but Western democratic with a "liberal" (in the old sense) legal and constitutional order -- must also remember its civil heritage. As Sharansky has convinced President Bush there can be no final safety in building higher and thicker security walls. Israel has a direct interest in the spread of democratic and constitutional rule among its neighbours in building a truly free Palestine beside a free Israel. This is why the background rivalry between Mr. Sharansky and Mr. Lapid -- which the latter seems to be winning -- is so intensely interesting. Here in microcosm is the real battle the one reflected in macrocosm in the contest between Mr. Bush and the United Nations. It could be summed in one sentence: "Do we think that what we ARE is worth defending?" Chirac Schroeder and Lapid answer No. ... Bush Blair and Sharansky answer Yes. ... And next week everyone votes. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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