[Dean's World] Dave Price: The Macguffin of the Middle East

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Posted by Dave Price:
The Macguffin of the Middle East
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1182362388.shtml


   Daniel Finkelstein [1]explains the ongoing psychodrama of the Mideast.

     No Hitchcock film could get going without a MacGuffin. The master
     explained it thus: âIt is the mechanical element that usually crops
     up in any story. In crook stories it is most always the necklace
     and in spy stories it is most always the papers.â What the
     MacGuffin was didnât really matter. The characters cared about it
     deeply, the narrator not at all. It kicks things off, thatâs all,
     provides an excuse for the rest of the action.
     The neocon case is this â Israel is a MacGuffin.
     Have you ever wondered why everyone goes on and on about Israel? It
     is a tiny, tiny country, not much bigger than the Canary Islands.
     From the West Bank to the sea, the width of Israel is nine miles.
     You could fit the entire country into the state of Florida seven
     times. In his magnificent work The Case for Democracy the former
     Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky provides the neocon explanation of
     why a local dispute involving a nation the size of a pocket
     handkerchief is regarded as one of the most important conflicts in
     the world.

   It seems odd, does it not, that while Germany and Japan have gone
   pacifist, the Berlin Wall has fallen, The Soviet Union dissolved,
   Eastern Europe become liberal democracies who have joined the West,
   Europe adopted a common currency (and fitfully tried to establish a
   constitution), and China become a liberalized capitalist economy, the
   Israeli situation remains essentially unchanged after five decades?

     Itâs all about the preservation of fear societies. Sharansky
     describes a fear society as one in which you canât participate
     freely and without fear in the public debate. Having elections is
     one part of being a free society, but the civil institutions that
     protect free and fair discourse are even more important. And the
     Middle East is dominated by fear societies â back to back,
     cheek-by-jowl dictatorships.

   Critics of the neocon agenda have noted, correctly, that liberal
   institutions like freedom of speech are more important than elections.
   But this amounts to a catch-22: like Saddam Hussein, the illiberal
   autocrats of the Middle East are neither fools nor altruists; rather,
   they are pragmatic thugs who know free speech will destroy their hold
   on power more surely than free elections would, by exposing the ruling
   class' xenophobia for the self-serving facade that it is. The
   critically important liberal institutions cannot evolve without
   elections to remove those preventing liberal reforms -- and as we saw
   in Palestine, even if elections are held there's no guarantee those
   elected will be any better. Thus the near-total lack of progress in
   developing such institutions -- with two major exceptions.
   The sad fact is, even with the violence and chaos, what we are seeing
   in Iraq and Afghanistan is probably the best we can hope for,
   accompanied as the serious problems in those countries are by the
   gradual emergence of independent media and organized protests which
   over time, with Western support, may evolve into the liberal
   institutions underpinning liberal democracy as we experience it in the
   West. The violence is not so much the result of the interventions
   themselves (far more were dying, on average, in both countries before
   we intervened) as it is resistance to the establishment of liberal
   institutions by those who stand to lose power to them.
   Eleutheria in any form is generally the bete noire of the illiberal
   autocrat and the violent power-seeking terrorist alike, and they will
   hunt it mercilessly until either their own people rise up and demand
   their rights as human beings or an external force removes them.

References

   1. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/daniel_finkelstein/article1957659.ece