President Bush’s attempt to apply Hollywood’s Western genre of Good vs. Bad Guys to make sense of the complex and atavistic political animosities of the Levant area and its peripheries was a costly misjudgment, as was his decision to recruit as his adviser on the Middle East an aging raconteur of oriental fantasies, Bernard Lewis. In Lewis’ Book of One Thousand and One Nights – in the first night the United States “liberates” Iraq and discovers weapons of mass destruction – the tale of making the Middle East “safe for democracy” would figure prominently. But the vision promoted by Lewis and other neoconservative fanatics was that of a Democratic Empire, a creature that could have been conceived only through an unnatural union between President Woodrow Wilson and Queen Victoria.

Bush would have been better off killing two birds with one stone – watching a great film at the same time as he learned something about the Middle East – by watching Lawrence of Arabia. Perhaps he might have realized how difficult it would be to impose an imperial order in the Middle East – the feuding Hashemites and Saudis, the never-ending killings between Jews and Arabs in the Holy Land, establishing order in divided Iraq – even without adding the Wilsonian soundtrack of democracy and free elections. Why would you want, anyway, to dispense freedom to the same people over which you seek to impose an armed hegemony directly (Iraq), indirectly (Lebanon), or through proxies (Palestine)? Why provide the stick (power through elections) to the same players who want to stick it to The Man (who happens to be you)? ~Leon Hadar, Antiwar.com

Mr. Hadar’s analysis is very good, as usual, and his assessment of Bernard Lewis reminds us yet again why we should not take Lewis’ agitation over the significance of August 22 seriously.  Since it is already nearly midday on the 22nd in the Near East as I write this, we are halfway through Doomsday and (so far) there is a considerable lack of doom.