3/8/2005
Fareed Zakaria
About a year ago I happened to catch Fareed Zakaria at Politics&Prose. I remember hearing people buzzing afterwards: "Oh, how smart, how well-spoken. Why don't we have more like him around?"
He is certainly very well spoken. Yet, he left me with the same sense that I often get from an egg roll: I'm not sure whether I've had an actual meal, or that my palette has just been tricked. In particular, I couldn't tell you whether that evening I'd heard a subtle denounciation of Bush's foreign policy, an equally subtle praise for Bush, or just gibberish.
I recalled that sensation reading Zakaria's recent Newsweek piece:
Bush never accepted the view that Islamic terrorism had its roots in religion or culture or the Arab-Israeli conflict. Instead he veered toward the analysis that the region was breeding terror because it had developed deep dysfunctions caused by decades of repression and an almost total lack of political, economic and social modernization. The Arab world, in this analysis, was almost unique in that over the past three decades it had become increasingly unfree, even as the rest of the world was opening up. His solution, therefore, was to push for reform in these lands. I'm always tickled to hear someone use the word "analysis" applied to Bush. You can almost picture him puffing on his pipe, the Jowett translation of Plato's Republic tucked under his arm. By George, W mutters to himself, I believe I've discovered the theoretical underpinnings of a most fantastic plan for world peace, prosperity, and global harmony.
Zakaria must be forgetting that the "Bush" foreign policy is just the Project for a New American Century with a paperbag bookcover. And that it's implementation has included torture, has provoked instability, and produced thousands of unnecessary deaths. If we ever regain credibility with the rest of the world, it could be a generation or more.
As Dr. King put it: "Hate begets hate; violence begets violence."
Update: I can't find a definitive reference for this quote (the hate and the violence clauses are reversed in some versions). Here's how WSU has it:
Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love.The part about toughness confused me at first. I don't believe he means "greater toughness" in the sense of our toughness can beat up your toughness. That's not really consistent with the next sentence. I think he's using greater in the sense Thoreau often did. To suggest a force of a higher order. A humane human is greater than a bully in the hierarchy of things.
Thoreau expands on this idea in Higher Laws. I can't help but see a good bit of Thoreau in MLK whever I read this passage:
"I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."File under: Iraq.
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