My critique of Imperial Hubris

While I am more pacifistic in nature than ‘anonymous,’ I yet think he has some good ideas.

Part I – Policy
First, we either believe we’re in a war or not. We don’t fight it half-hearted or half-assed. We fight it where it should have been fought (Afghanistan – then real Middle Eastern problems not including Iraq), and we fight it without being restrained by allies.

Second, we stop playing Gulliver to Israel’s Lilliputian tie-down. Period.

I’m not saying we should abandon Israel to the Arab world, and Anonymous doesn’t get into policy prescription details.

But would could do like Bush Senior – freeze foreign aid to Israel. But let’s make the unfreezing contingent on a lot more movement than we did in the past.

Part II – errors
He’s got one minor one and one historically big one.

The historic one? He somehow claims Britain, not Turkey’s first secular leader, Atatürk, abolished the Caliphate in 1924. For someone claiming Middle Eastern CIA analyst expertise, that’s a credibility-damaging error in my book.

While as a skeptical progressive, one who rejects both liberal and conservative forms of American exceptionalism, I’m not sanguine about Muslim-world progress toward secular states or democracies, let alone a combination thereof, the fact that Turkey did it – and started the ball rolling itself – shows it can be done. Anonymous’ historical mistake, assuming he stakes some of his analysis beliefs on it, has consequences.

Second, he misspells Paul Bremer’s last name.

Part III – Critique Proper
In my opinion, to use a phrase, I’d call Anonymous an internationalist paleoconservative. Bush Senior with lots more conejos? Nixon if he’d been elected in 1960?

Support for this includes his contra-Kerry statement that, within the country's foreign-policy establishment, a sort of Euro-veto does exist.

He’s definitely religiously conservative, as he talks about “the Pillsbury Doughboy-version of Christianity now on offer from the Vatican and Canterbury.” He clearly intends the phrase to be pejorative, given that it is gratuitous.

At the same time, he skewers Zionism and American fundamentalists and allied evangelicals who support it, so he is probably from a more mainline denomination.

His American military references to Lee as well as Grant, and the valiant efforts by both Union and Confederate soldiers, without referring to the context of the Civil War, paints him as a Southerner.

A, B, and C together add up to someone who in his own way at least comes close to using Crusade-type definitions on how we should fight this war.

I have websites identifying him bookmarked at the office, but I’m deliberately writing this from home.

That said, his bottom line critique that bin Laden hates us not for who we are (secularism, short skirts for women, etc.) but what we do (imperialism, support for Israel, support for corrupt Middle Eastern states) has a lot of truth in it.

Does our war against bin Laden have to be as total as he claims? I’d like to try more guns, better used (another critique of his) andmore flowers at the same time, at least for now.

And, if we fight that ruthless of a war, can we win it without it, in fact, becoming apocalyptic? Unfortunately, Anonymous remains silent at this point.