Pearson digs in

Hopefully Troppodillians will forgive me for tackling another Pearson piece only two weeks after my last effort. I’ll try not to make a habit of it, I promise.

With your indulgence, then, let’s proceed.

First, a few questions. Is it relativism to hold our liberal democratic traditions to a higher standard than those of Islamic extremists? Do our actions over the years in the Middle East really have little to do with the growing enmity many of its inhabitants feel for us? Is it either useful or accurate to constantly label the narrative of grievance shared by a significant part of the Muslim world (and, it should be noted, many others) as irrational?

Noel Pearson seems to think so.

In a lengthy opinion piece (November 10, 2007), he ventures more deeply into the territory he introduced two weeks ago in United, We’ll Fight Terrorism. Pearson’s views can be summed up as follows:

1. Despite many errors in its prosecution of the war on terror, some of them grievous, the liberal democratic West is in one camp, “within the pale” in Pearson’s terms, while the Islamic extremists are in another. To obscure this distinction is not only wrong, but dangerous.
2. Those who oppose, in principle, the current policies for dealing with the Islamic threat hail from the Left and are generally “immature and highly confused”.
3. Even a radical change in Western policy would do little to reduce Islamic extremism because it “feeds off an irrational attribution of real and imagined grievances to Western and Zionist conspiracy”.
4. “Deterring people from taking the step from the middle group [those who have some sympathy with the extremists] to the violent extremists, and controlling those who do take the step, must then be a very high priority for Western policy”.

We can, I think, let the last one stand without much further comment. It is, after all, little more than a commonsense wish, carrying a slight implicit policy prescription only in his use of the word “deterring”, rather than, say, “encouraging”. This, oddly enough, is as close as Pearson gets to an actual policy suggestion in the entire article.

The other threads of his argument deserve a much less forgiving scrutiny.

At first glance, it's hard to disagree with his initial point. Indeed, stated in such a simple form, it’s a truism. Pearson goes out of his way to acknowledge the many policy errors made in recent years and to restate the vital importance of argument and dissent within the West. First, though, he says, we must understand that we are we and they are not.

Fair enough, in many ways. Still, the effect of this line of argument, as employed by Pearson, is to discourage vigorous debate about the fundamentals of Western policy. Not the details, note, but the fundamentals. In fact, his whole piece (and most of the one two weeks ago) seems devoted to confining such debate within boundaries he considers acceptable. The same is generally true of the writings of Hitchens and the signatories to the Euston Manifesto whom Pearson so extols.

There are those within the West sufficiently disillusioned or embittered to blur, or even entirely deny, the distinctions between their own tradition and that of Islamic extremists. They are, however, few in number and weak in voice. Certainly they bear no comparison to all those who have a great love of their country and its traditions but are convinced these are being dangerously undermined, or even betrayed, by current policies.

Most of these do indeed come from the left, but roughly similar views on foreign policy and civil liberties are held by some conservatives, by liberals of a more classical persuasion (such as myself) and by many libertarians. It is these groups (many of whom are far more immersed in the traditions of liberal democracy than their critics), together with their principled concerns, that Pearson seems to be trying to exclude from the debate.

Let’s consider two examples of his technique.

In the first, he extols Major Mori’s efforts on behalf of David Hicks as well as those of his colleague, Charles Swift, in bringing the case of bin Laden’s bodyguard, Hamdan, to the US Supreme Court. He then goes on to conclude:

Those who hold up Mori as a hero can’t ignore that Mori’s commander-in-chief at the end of the day, is his country’s president, the reviled George W. Bush.

I was astounded at the chutzpah of this statement. Or is it possible, unlikely though it seems, that Pearson isn't aware of the full background? In any case, we should indeed praise Mori and Swift, and to some degree the system that allowed them, whatever its reservations, to proceed so vigorously. We can also praise the Supreme Court for hearing Hamdan’s case, although our enthusiasm ought to be tempered by the knowledge that the Court has so far been somewhat ambivalent in its willingness to deal with these fundamental issues. To claim any credit in these matters for President Bush, however, is to be absurd.

Had Bush and his administration had their way, what few avenues of effective appeal still survive would have been long gone. They have been resolutely obstructionist, have gamed and abused the court systems within the US and have sought, wherever possible, to arrogate power to themselves at the cost of the other two branches of government. Pearson is either being terribly disingenuous or needs to do some serious study. The move towards an imperial presidency has been underway for many decades but the Bush administration, far more than any other, has accelerated the pace and shown a brutal disregard for both convention and the checks and balances that have so far guarded America.

Pearson (does he sense the slippery slope at the edge of his argument?) insists that he “wants to make it crystal clear” that he is “not seeking to defend the policy and strategic decisions of Bush and John Howard and their respective governments” and that those “who oppose their policies [may] be enemies in many senses of the word, but they are not enemies in the same sense as violent extremists”. That he felt this latter point needed to be made says a good deal about the swamp into which he’s been led by his line of argument.

As for the second example, consider this statement:

I believe that in the struggle against terror - and in many other contexts - we can and should divide the world according to a dichotomous rule: on the one hand the community of states characterised by liberal democracy and the rule of law, on the other, those who would prosecute their ideological, political and religious agendas outside the parameters of democracy and law.

Again, on the face of it, all well and good, if a little pompous. There’s only one problem. If we are “the community of states characterised by … the rule of law”, how is it then that we invaded Iraq, entirely unprovoked and against the wishes of many, if not most, of the world’s liberal democratic nations, and that the US is now considering bombing Iran, to take but two examples? Is this not acting more like the “other” he so derides? I fear our use of phrases such as liberal democracy, rule of law and freedom has, at times, post 9-11, veered perilously close to becoming Orwellian. They can all too easily become mere banners to march under, fig leaves with which to cover our nakedness.

What is most vital is surely to guard our own traditions from inner corruption, not to conjure up ghostly fears about fifth columns. Here too, Pearson tries to walk both sides of the track by dissociating himself from the specific policy disasters that have characterised the last five years, and by emphasising that internal criticism is vital. Only, though, once his dichotomous winnowing process is complete. It’s hard not to wonder what purpose is served by Pearson’s continual emphasis on the need to distinguish between us and them when the population of those in the West who don’t entirely accept this distinction (if only viscerally) is trivial.

Finally, a brief look at the third thread of his argument. Pearson claims, again and again, that there’s little point in considering serious changes in policy towards the Muslim world because it won’t make much difference anyway, because the more extreme Muslim beliefs in regard to the West are irrational and rooted in perceptions of “Western and Zionist conspiracy”.

Those who read his piece searching for evidence to back up this remarkable claim will do so in vain. There is some truth to it, of course, as indeed there is to most of Pearson’s arguments. What he fails to consider, unfortunately, is the process by which Muslim views become extreme in the first place. That Muslim perceptions of the West (and of the US in particular) have steadily and profoundly worsened in the wake of the Iraq invasion, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, America’s support for the extensive Israeli bombing of Lebanon last year, the growing belligerence directed at Iran and so on ad nauseam, is of no account, it seems.

All these clear indications that actions have consequences are ignored. So too is the much longer history of Western interference in the Middle East over the last century, its continual support for authoritarian regimes, little if any of it bringing any good.

How then can anyone of imagination wonder that Muslim (and other) opinion about our bona fides has soured? With such a history, of course many who once were entirely unpolitical will wake to powerful new passions and others will be drawn towards radical action out of some combination of anger, or despair, or ideology. Can this really be so difficult for Pearson to grasp?

Only he can know why he has chosen to move in such a fashion into this new field of proselytising, but I do wonder if the cause may not be rooted in a deep frustration with the “left” gradually acquired over many admirable years of trying to better conditions for his own people. Perhaps he has experienced them as naïve, ill informed, unrealistic, counterproductive, superior in manner, and that sense of the left has been carried over to whatever other policies they tend to support. Like civil liberties and a more humble foreign policy, for example.

Perhaps he has found it impossible to separate the actual issues from his perception of their most active sponsors.