Because History Written By Brown People Who Aren’t Huge Fans of the US Doesn’t Count
A while back, I made a point of reading Commentary’s blog — Contentions — frequently and commenting/responding/criticizing their work. For a variety of reasons, from boredom to just blogging less, I don’t do this anymore. But this head-scratcher from Martin Kramer just begged for a response:
Some of the influences on Obama bubble to the surface. There is the Third Worldism: Muslims are victims of our colonialism (Obama has read Fanon) and the Cold War (has he been reading Khalidi again?) The primacy of the West is over: “Any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail.” There is the implicit comparison of the Palestinians to black Americans during segregation, a familiar trope (Carter and Condi went for it too). Israel comes across as an anomaly. There is no appreciation of Israel as a strategic asset – its ties to the United States are “cultural and historical,” and thus not entirely rational. (That validates Obama’s other former Chicago colleague, Mearsheimer.) All of this has the ring of conviction – and of a Third Worldist sensibility.
As far as I can tell, the only evidence Kramer needs to show that Obama’s claims that “muslims are victims of our colonialism..and the cold war” are wrong headed is that he can cite two left wing critics of colonial and imperial foreign policy who make these arguments. I guess in Commentary world, the mere fact that Rashid Khalidi or Frantz Fanon said something makes it necessarily not true.
But that’s not the only bizarre part of argument. There’s also the sheer amount of paranoia on display, Kramer just had to paint Obama in this absurd light as a adherent of Fanon and a “Third Worldist.” Now, why a Third Worlder would, say, expand our presence in Afghanistan or even want to become the commander-in-chief of the American military is beyond me, but whatever.
The more important thing is that what Obama said about the Muslim world’s interaction with the West and with the United States specifically is totally true, no matter if it happens to overlap with critical thinkers like Khalidi or Fanon. Would Kramer like to dispute that America played a major part in meddling with the affairs of Muslim and Middle Eastern nations before the Cold War? I mean, is there even an argument? And during the Cold War, would Richman deny that America sponsored all sorts of nasty leaders in Muslim countries, some of whom slaughtered their own people. Or that the U.S. gleefully played both sides in and helped prolong a near-decade long war that killed or maimed nearly one million Iranians and 375,000 Iraqis? Oh yeah, and there’s the entire over throwing Mossadegh and reinstating the dictatorial Shah thing.
Neoconservatives, at their most appealing and idealistic, actually said they regretted the oil and geopolitics fueled support for these awful regimes and saw it as one of the root causes of terrorism. But I guess when a Democrat acknowledges the US’s role in all this nasty stuff (not to mention calling on Israel to comply with international law and an agreement they signed), he’s a Fanon disciple Arab-lover who’s going to sell out the Jews. Interesting how that works.
