Seeing Only What You Want To See

From The Weekly Standard, via The Corner:

The December issue of the Atlantic Monthly features a "Hypothetical" essay entitled "If America Left Iraq: The case for cutting and running." The author is Nir Rosen, a freelance journalist who over the last year or so has published a series of long, meticulously reported examinations of the Iraqi insurgency in au courant journals like the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine. Rosen's journalism is noteworthy, the editors of the Atlantic inform us, because he "speaks Arabic" and "has spent 16 months in Iraq," mostly "among ordinary Iraqis." That, and he probably has more sources in the insurgency than any other American reporter.

And those sources, incredibly, have led him to the following insight: "If the occupation were to end," Rosen writes, "so, too, would the insurgency." Because, "after all," the "resistance movement" is "resisting" the "occupation." And if there were no "occupation" . . . well, "who would the insurgents fight"? Q.E.D.

Say what you will, this Zen-koan approach to geopolitics struck us as pretty original. Yet it turns out "If America Left Iraq" is merely a shorter, better-edited version of a September 21 "outside view" article Rosen penned for UPI entitled "The Small, Daily Abu Ghraibs." The opinions expressed in this article "are not," Rosen assures, "the ramblings of a leftwing polemicist." And he's right. They are something more sinister.

"I spent about a year and a half in Iraq," Rosen writes, and "it was obvious early on, and continues to be, that the main problem in Iraq, the main obstacle to progress, is the U.S. occupation." Cue ridiculous tautology: "When it ends, attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq will end as well."

What is more, Rosen continues, all of this is "true worldwide as well":

The American empire will cease to be a target when it ceases to directly or indirectly oppress weaker people. Terrorism--inasmuch as the word has any meaning, but that's another argument--is not a phenomenon or an entity. It is a tool of politics by other means, just like war. . . . In Iraq, America is attacked because it is a brutal occupier, humiliating Iraqis, destroying villages, arresting, beating, and killing countless innocent men, women and children. This is the main cause of the resistance. . . . If America was not occupying Iraq, there would be no resistance.

[In August], a few thousand Jewish fanatics who illegally settled on occupied land in Gaza and went on the occasional pogrom, attacking Palestinians whose land they had settled, were given more attention and sympathy by the American media in a week or two than it has given in five years to the Palestinians whose homes have been destroyed, who are not permitted to live as humans, and who inhabit a giant prison.

Bottom line: "An American withdrawal from Iraq and an Israeli withdrawal from all the occupied territories to the 1967 lines would do more to fight terrorism than any military action ever could." No wonder Rosen has such great access to the Baathists and jihadists who make up the Iraqi insurgency. He's on their side.

Here's the problem with this view: America was a terror target before the Iraq War, is now, and will be after we leave.

America is a target because America is America, and that annoys some people.

Back to "The Wahabist Challenge."