Fascinating

Marty Peretz seems equally enamoured of two articles that flatly contradict one another.  Naturally, he has nothing to say about the merits of either argument, except to say that the dispute is “fascinating.”  This has the sound of the cheerful co-ed in a philosophy class who opines, “I think that everyone can have his or her own opinion and everyone is, like, totally right.”  Earlier, Peretz thought Lewis was absolutely right and obviously so:

This is the history of Western responses even to terrorism, especially to terrorism. We know the consequences.

According to Peretz, Lewis had penned a “cool analysis” and Lewis had forgotten more than his critics will ever know.  Well, his critics seem to include Efraim Karsh, who may not know as much as Lewis forgets, but he seems to know all of the things that Lewis has already forgotten. 

I suppose it is fascinating how Bernard Lewis can be shown in devastating fashion to be completely wrong about the modern history of the region about which he claims expertise.  Despite this, he will still be taken seriously by historically ignorant conservatives (and Marty Peretz) in this country as someone with almost oracular authority on things related to Near East policy.  Bernard Lewis takes a Munich-centric view that American problems in the Near and Middle East are the result of weakness, conciliatory gestures and appeasement (not like those tough Soviets), while Efraim Karsh (writing in the Sun, no less) completely repudiates virtually everything Lewis said, but still manages to make the conflict with jihadis into an unavoidable, epic struggle that apparently had nothing to do with U.S. policies.  Pick your interventionist poison.

Other takes on the Lewis piece are here and here.