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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
May 25, 2003
Bedwetting
It was probably a good week notwithstanding an inordinate number of terror bombings. The United Nations began re-assembling itself Thursday around the fact of the U.S.-British occupation of Iraq. The French Germans and Russians allowed themselves to be led back into the diplomatic sheepfold. There were at least rhetorical signs of a new spirit of co-operation from various Arab countries in response to the blasts in Riyadh and Casablanca. Some remarkable articles began appearing in official and semi-official Arab media acknowledging at least some of the facts of life. An extraordinary apparently spontaneous public demonstration was mounted in the town of Beit Hanoun in Gaza after five days of Israeli military occupation during which according to the Associated Press the IDF flattened more than a dozen houses uprooted several orchards drove through innumerable gardens and garden walls damaged sewer water and electrical infrastructure and tore up the streets; in addition to killing four gunmen three stone-throwing teenagers a miscellaneous bystander injuring another 65 and leaving by municipal estimate at least 400 people homeless. Beit Hanoun has been an Hamas stronghold and a constant source of Qassam rockets aimed at nearby Israeli villages. It was the seventh time since the beginning of the Al Aqsa Intifada that the Israelis had had enough. When the Israeli tanks and bulldozers and trucks withdrew hundreds of residents came out of their homes to protest burning tires and trash and blocking the streets with rubble. We've seen that sort of thing before. But now the twist: the residents were directing their fury not against Israel but instead against Hamas and against the Palestinian Authority which protects the "militants". The AP's brave correspondent Ibrahim Barzak found a local farmer willing to be quoted by name. He was Mohammad Zaaneen age 30 and he seemed to be speaking for the town. The militants he said claim they are heroes. ... They brought us only destruction and made us homeless. They used our farms, our houses and our children ... to hide. Now I have heard that demonstrations like this have occurred before but heard this only from Israeli sources. This one to my knowledge was at least the first to be reported internationally which means in turn reported back throughout the West Bank and Gaza. It thus became a talking point among a people who often feel powerlessly trapped between the rock of the Intifada and the hard place of Israel. If the recent elevation of Abu Mazen to the premiership of the Palestinian proto-state has had one positive effect it is that the people of Beit Hanoun felt empowered to speak up. For Abu Mazen has himself publicly argued that anti-Israeli terror is one of the great Palestinian dumb ideas. The ultimate intentions of the new prime minister are hard to fathom and his past is not such as to encourage unqualified rejoicing. He is no Anwar Sadat -- the sort of statesman for which the Arab world now has a crying need. But Abu Mazen comes much closer than any previous Palestinian leader (Arafat; the Mufti of Jerusalem) to being a conventional politician in the sense we might understand one and that's a good thing. No such politician is complete in himself his constituency will tend to define him. And if the Palestinian constituency is harbouring the kind of sentiments that were released after the Israeli raid on Beit Hanoun there may soon be Palestinian statehood. Ditto for the prospects of democracy in Iraq: I don't know what they are and nobody knows yet. I try to be both an optimist and a pessimist simultaneously rather than just one or the other for this is helpful in keeping an open mind. Looking over the Iraqi situation from this distance there is much reason to despair and much reason to hope. Much has been written pointlessly about mistakes made by the American occupation forces -- including about things that weren't even mistakes -- without conceding that among people who aren't gods mistakes are inevitable. Better to ask are their intentions right and do they learn from their errors? It is the American way to stress optimism and to be extremely empirical. They learn by doing and did not have much experience governing demolished Arab countries. They make ghastly mistakes and as often as not turn around and fix them. They have if I may make one of those generalizations about national character that aren't all the rage a national disinclination to panic. The media are delegated to do the panicking on their behalf the American people are fairly hard to scare. The American government and people anyway don't own Iraq any more than the Israelis own proto-Palestine. In each case they merely take control of something that is trying to harm them. Short of simply annihilating the enemy -- which is on balance contrary to Judaeo-Christian traditions -- they aspire to put things right. The old-fashioned kind of imperialism is gone has been proved a bad investment and no country in its right mind aspires to govern another indefinitely. So the issue isn't finally the Americans at all or the Israelis in the case of Palestine. It is rather what the people of these countries want and are capable of doing. If for instance the great majority among Iraq's majority Shia were determined to create an Islamist theocratic state then they would extend their national tragedy into new dimensions. If alternatively they want representative government and the secular rule of law -- which I'm persuaded the great majority would favour -- and if they have the will and industry to take charge of their own fate -- which I'm persuaded Iraqis are now showing in every walk of life -- they will become a free and prosperous people. The enemy next after the truly evil forces of terrorism and political fanaticism is the bedwetting impulse. Pessimism is defensible but not despair. The better sort of pessimism provides the equipment to look at the problems in their breadth at which point optimism dictates which problem to fix first. This is not a left/right thing incidentally. So many counsels of despair especially about the ground situation in Iraq have come recently from seemingly good solid rightwing pro-war hacks who ought to know better; and conversely the tone of "okay let's make the best of this" from what was the other side. Opinions count for nothing compared with character. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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