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Purges For The Democratic People’s Disarmament

When the war in Iraq started, I wrote some over the top satirical emails to my friends declaring the glories of “the People’s Disarmament” after the inimitable Ari Fleischer intoned: “The opening stages of the disarmament of the Iraqi regime have begun.”  I would always write these emails as if they were propaganda letters from one […]

When the war in Iraq started, I wrote some over the top satirical emails to my friends declaring the glories of “the People’s Disarmament” after the inimitable Ari Fleischer intoned: “The opening stages of the disarmament of the Iraqi regime have begun.”  I would always write these emails as if they were propaganda letters from one of the higher-ups in the Party and, knowing the current WSJ editor-in-chief’s excessive biases in favour of the invasion, always signed it, “Comrade Gigot.”  Well, it turns out that Comrade Gigot was even more of a Politburo type than I thought. 

He apparently ran off Mark Helprin–one of the last remaining glimmers of intelligent thought at that place–because Helprin, familiar with the region and its history, thought the idea of democratising the Near East was preposterous and also undesirable.  This reconfirms my sense of how rapidly the WSJ op-ed pages degenerated in just a few years to a level of party-line conformity that was absolute and somewhat stunning in its inflexibility.  Of course the WSJ had long had interventionist attitudes and took many appalling positions during the 1990s on all sorts of foreign policy questions, but the extent of the uniformity was never quite so total until Gigot took control.  I speak as a recovering Wall Street Journal reader, and one who was rather stupidly bewildered by the entire process of purging dissidents prior to the war, as if it were really that surprising.  But at the time it didn’t make sense to me, and what I couldn’t yet wrap my brain around was the obvious truth that these people were not only not conservatives but were the embodied essence of anti-conservatism.  More than that, what I couldn’t yet grasp was that there didn’t need to be good reasons for doing this–it had been decided on, so, like the administration’s own approach, reasons were shaped to fit the decision.  So it was quite natural, when the time came, to chuck out anyone exhibiting the slightest hint of real conservative instincts on Iraq.  I don’t know why I thought there was any reason to expect better of the Journal–or indeed why I thought any semi-official party organ would do anything other than spew propaganda–but it was still something of a surprise that a paper I had grown up reading could take a position so abominable and mad.  But enough about me.  Here’s the relevant section from the interview with Helprin. 

Kelly Jane Torrance spoke with Helprin for AFF’s Doublethink, and here’s what happened (via Tory Anarchist):

DT: What I’m thinking of specifically is thinking that we can change an entire civilization.

MH: I’m really on record about that one. Henry Hyde invited me to speak, and I went up to Washington to one of the House office buildings and there was a lunch. And I got up in front of the lunch, and it was covered on C-SPAN, and this was before we actually debated Iraq, and I gave a speech that lasted 45 minutes or an hour, followed by a long question period. And one of the questions was about the democracy initiative, about changing Iraq into a democracy, and I am on record as saying—I don’t quite remember exactly, but I said more or less—I think it’s insane. I emphasize it like that, because among other things, if you count intensive language courses I took there in the summer as preparation, I spent almost three years in graduate school at Harvard in Middle Eastern Studies learning about Middle Eastern history, Arabic. And it was very clear to me, from the very beginning, that it’s impossible. If you know anything about Islamic civilization, or about the contemporary Middle East, about the sociology and the anthropology of the people who live there, and their recent history, and their religion, and their motivation and everything, then you realize that it’s not going to happen. It’s just not going to happen. And even if it were going to happen, it certainly wouldn’t happen with 125,000 soldiers who are also at the same time fighting an insurgency and trying to bring electricity to the capital, and make water projects, rebuild schools, and protect themselves, and cook and clean, and run the convoys, and all that kind of stuff. It’s the same ratio of police to population as the city of New York. Imagine if the police in New York City were at the end of an 8,000-mile supply chain and didn’t have Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonalds. They had to bring in all their food and cook it, and had to protect themselves in a camp, didn’t speak the language, weren’t familiar with the culture of the city, and didn’t even know the geography of the city, and were facing a population that is armed to the teeth, with machine guns, artillery shells, mines, rocket-propelled grenades, and other such things. And who hated them viciously, I don’t think they would get very far. It was just a crazy enterprise and the only reason that it happened is the people who embarked upon it knew absolutely nothing about the reality of the region which they were entering.

Even if it could be done, I don’t think it’s a desirable goal. Particularly as a Jew, I don’t like missionary work. I’ve had it focused on me, and I don’t like it. Let people be what they want to be. Now that doesn’t mean that we can’t explain what our point of view is. I would never back down from the American ideals, and we should make them known, whatever way we can, but the idea of actually embarking upon—and a crusade is a perfect word for it—a crusade to transform a culture, another culture . . . well, has it ever ended up in anything other than war? When we did it with Japan and Germany, it was after the war. They made on war on us, we hit them, and then we said, Okay, this is what we’re going to do. But the object of the war was not to—even though the propaganda may have said so—was not to change Japan and Germany into democracies. They both were democracies, to a large extent, already, but the object was to check them. My positions on this are complicated, but simple—and they’re all available.

DT: Have you found that your colleagues at places like the Wall Street Journal are unhappy with your criticism?

MH: Yes, I no longer am with the Journal.

DT: Is it because of this? Your thoughts on these issues?

MH: Pretty much, yes. And change of management, I guess. Bob Bartley died, and it was just like what happened to me at the New Yorker in 1992: You don’t fit. It changed. Either I didn’t and it did or I did and it didn’t, or we both did, or whatever, but it happened.

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