The Palestinians: the more things change, the more they…..

The New Neo Posted on by

A reader recently alerted me to an astounding article by Martha Gellhorn which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in October of 1961, forty-four years ago.

Gellhorn was quite a story in herself. Beautiful, brilliant, brave, she was the third wife of Hemingway (a fact she wanted biographers to omit when writing about her) and a well-known journalist and author.

The article is entitled “The Arabs of Palestine,” and it was the result of a series of interviews Gellhorn had with residents of Palestinian refugee camps, and talks with Israeli Arabs, as well. The article is long, but well worth reading in its entirety, although it is available by paid subscription only. I will quote some excerpts, but I suggest you try to obtain it and read it to get its full flavor.

At the time of Gellhorn’s article, the various refugee camps she visited were under the jurisdiction of Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon. Keep in mind, also, that she was describing conditions that existed long before the 1967 war that resulted in Israel having jurisdiction over some of the areas Gellhorn visited. Therefore nothing Gellhorn writes about Palestinian attitudes towards Israel could possibly be the result of an “occupation” that hadn’t yet occurred.

Here are some of her opening salvos:

Although no one knows exactly how many refugees are scattered everywhere over the globe, it is estimated that since World War II, and only since then, at least thirty-nine million non-Arab men, women, and children have become homeless refugees, through no choice of their own….The world could be far more generous to these unwilling wanderers, but at least the world has never thought of exploiting them. They are recognized as people, not pawns. By their own efforts, and with help from those devoted to their service, all but some six million of the thirty-nine million have made a place for themselves, found work and another chance for the future. To be a refugee is not necessarily a life sentence.

The unique misfortune of the Palestinian refugees is that they are a weapon in what seems to be a permanent war. Alarming signs, from Egypt, warn us that the Palestinian refugees may develop into more than a justification for cold war against Israel…today, in the Middle East, you get a repeated sinking sensation about the Palestinian refugees: they are only a beginning, not an end. Their function is to hang around and be constantly useful as a goad.

They have certainly preserved that function, haven’t they? Over forty years after Gellhorn wrote these prescient words, the Palestinians are still hanging around as refugees, and still a goad.

The camps, then as now, were administered by UNRWA. Gellhorn visited eight, along with a Palestinian translator, and talked to many of the residents.

UNRWA is running a world, simply, a little welfare state. It makes villages, called camps, and keeps them clean and free of disease, feeds, educates, trains teachers and technicians and craftsmen, operates clinics and maternity centers, sends out visiting nurses, encourages small private enterprises with small loans, distributes clothing, soap, kerosene, blankets, provides hospitalization, footballs, youth clubs, mosques…

Gellhorn describes an UNRWA camp in Lebanon which was inhabited by Christian Arabs:

The camp consisted of little cement or frame houses rambling over the hillside, a village of poor people, disorderly and beflowered and cheerful. School was letting out for lunch; troops of children, dressed in the pinafore uniform that small boys and girls wear in Italian schools, meandered home, shouting bye-bye at friendly, giggling length. They are Roman Catholics here, but the young teachers are refugees, not priests. They have to teach the children about Palestine, since most of them have never seen the country and even the oldest cannot remember it. The children are taught hate, the Garden of Eden stolen from them by murderers; their duty is to live for Return and Revenge.

Gellhorn speaks to the camp leader there and has one of the first of what she calls “Mad Hatter conversations”:

It went like this:

“The Arab countries invaded Israel in 1948 to save the Palestine Arabs from being massacred by the Jews.”

“Were there massacres? Where?”

“Oh, yes, everywhere. Terrible, terrible.”

“Then you must have lost many relatives and friends.”

This, being a tiresome deduction from a previous statement, is brushed aside without comment.

“Israel overran the truce lines and stole our country. We left from fear. We have a right to our property, which brings in 47 million pounds a year in income. If we had our own money, we would need nothing from UNRWA. Our own money is much more. We do not have to be grateful for the little money spent on us. We should have our own.”

“Then, of course, you want to return to your property and to Israel?”

“Not to Israel. Never to Israel. To our own country, to our own part.”

“But didn’t the Jews accept Partition, while the Palestine Arabs and the Arab governments refused?”

“Yes, yes. And England protected the Jews. An Arab was arrested if he carried a pistol only to defend himself, but Jews could go through the streets in tanks and nothing happened to them. Also, England told the Arab states to attack Israel.”

The principal of the school then spoke up. “In our school, we teach the children from their first year about their country and how it was stolen from them. I tell my son of seven. You will see: one day a man of eighty and a child so high, all, all will go home with arms in their hands and take back their country by force.”

When Gellhorn and her guide leave the meeting, the guide astonishes her by showing surprising reasonableness–in private (he seems to have possibly been one of those mythical “moderate Palestinians” about which we’ve argued so much):

“It can all be solved with money,” he said. “Now the people have nothing in their mouths but words, so they talk. Money fills the mouth too. If every man got a thousand dollars for each member of his family, for compensation to have lost his country, and he could be a citizen in any Arab country he likes, he would not think of Palestine any more. Then he could start a new life and be rich and happy. And those who really do own something in Palestine must be paid for what they had there. But those are not many. Most had nothing, only work.”

Gellhorn describes Gaza almost forty-five years ago, when it was administered by Egypt:

The Egyptian government is the jailer. For reasons of its own, it does not allow the refugees to move from this narrow strip of land. The refugees might not want to leave at all, or they, might not want to leave for good; but anyone would become claustrophobic if penned, for thirteen years, inside 248 square kilometers. A trickle of refugees, who can prove they have jobs elsewhere, are granted exit visas. The only official number of the departed is less than three hundred, out of 255,000 registered refugees. It seems incredible. Rumor says that more refugees do manage to go away illegally, by unknown methods.

These locked-in people–far too many in far too little space–cannot find adequate work. Naturally, there is less chance of employment than in the other “host countries.” Meantime, they are exposed to the full and constant blast of Egyptian propaganda. No wonder that Gaza was the home base of the trained paramilitary bands called commandos by the Egyptians and Palestinians, and gangsters by the Israelis–the fedayin, whose job was to cross unnoticed into Israel and commit acts of patriotic sabotage and murder. And having been so devastatingly beaten by Israel again, in 1956, has not improved the trapped, bitter Gaza mentality; it only makes the orators more bloodthirsty.

When one reads that passage, the previous speaker’s point becomes even more poignant: if the Palestinian “could be a citizen in any Arab country he likes, he would not think of Palestine any more.” Ah, but Palestinians can’t become such citizens–and there’s the rub.

Gellhorn has an interview with the Palestinian leader of a camp in Gaza:

First the camp leader told me how rich they had all been in Palestine and how miserable they were now and how much land they had all owned. I do not doubt for one minute how much land some of them owned, nor how rich some of them were, and I did not point out this subtle distinction: if everyone owned the land claimed, Palestine would be the size of Texas; if everyone had been so rich, it would have been largely populated by millionaires…

Then he spoke of Jaffa, his native town. The Jews surrounded the city, firing on all sides; they left one little way out, by the sea, so the Arabs would go away. Only the very old and the very poor stayed, and they were killed. Arab refugees tell many dissimilar versions of the Jaffa story, but the puzzler is: where are the relatives of those who must have perished in the fury of high explosive the infallible witnesses? No one says he was loaded on a truck (or a boat) at gun point; no one describes being forced from his home by armed Jews; no one recalls the extra menace of enemy attacks, while in flight. The sight of the dead, the horrors of escape are exact, detailed memories never forgotten by those who had them. Surely Arabs would not forget or suppress such memories, if they, too, had them.

As for those Arabs who remained behind, they are still in Jaffa–3000 of them–living in peace, prosperity, and discontent, with their heirs and descendants.

“The Jews are criminals,” the camp leader continued in a rising voice. “Murderers! They are the worst criminals in the whole world.”

Had he ever heard of Hitler?

He banged his table and said, “Hitler was far better than the Jews!”

“Far better murderer? He killed six million Jews as a start,” I observed.

“Oh, that is all exaggerated. He did not. Besides, the Jews bluffed Hitler. They arranged in secret that he should kill a few of them–old ones, weak ones–to make the others emigrate to Palestine.”

“Thirty-six thousand of them,” said the Secret Service man, proving the point, “came here, before the war, from Central Europe.”

“It’s amazing,” I said. “I have never before heard anywhere that the Jews arranged with Hitler for him to kill them.”

“It was a secret!” the camp leader shouted. “The documents have been found. Everyone knows. It was published. The Jews arranged it all with Hitler.”

Everywhere Gellhorn goes she has similar “Mad Hatter” conversations. At the time these talks must have seemed most odd indeed, but these are ideas with which we have now become all too familiar. The rot in the Palestinian world apparently set in long before the “occupation,” long before Arafat became its corrupt and corrupting leader.

I disagree with a few things Gellhorn says (in particular, she accepts in its totality the Palestinian version of Dir Yassin), but I think she gets the big picture right.

Back then, the outlook actually seemed marginally more hopeful–for one thing, the Palestinians had only been in this situation for thirteen years. It is far worse now that time has passed, and after Oslo allowed Arafat to drain the Palestinian coffers while preaching ever more hatred.

But any quibbles I have with the article are minor; Gellhorn’s piece could practically have been written today in terms of the conversations and the patterns of thought she describes.

Here is part of her summation of the situation as she saw it then:

I had appreciated and admired individual refugees but realized I had felt no blanket empathy for the Palestinian refugees, and finally I knew why…It is hard to sorrow for those who only sorrow over themselves. It is difficult to pity the pitiless. To wring the heart past all doubt, those who cry aloud for justice must be innocent. They cannot have wished for a victorious rewarding war, blame everyone else for their defeat, and remain guiltless….

Arabs gorge on hate, they roll in it, they breathe it. Jews top the hate list, but any foreigners are hateful enough. Arabs also hate each other, separately and, en masse. Their politicians change the direction of their hate as they would change their shirts. Their press is vulgarly base with hate-filled cartoons; their reporting describes whatever hate is now uppermost and convenient. Their radio is a long scream of hate, a call to hate. They teach their children hate in school. They must love the taste of hate; it is their daily bread. And what good has it done them?

There is no future in spending UN money to breed hate. There is no future in nagging or bullying Israel to commit suicide by the admission of a fatal locust swarm of enemies. There is no future in Nasser’s solution, the Holy War against Israel; and we had better make this very clear, very quickly.

Well, it’s way too late to make this very clear very quickly. Forty-four years have gone by. Nasser is long dead, and even Arafat; but the Holy War against Israel lives.

But it’s still not too late to make it very clear–if only the world agreed to do so.

So what’s in it for me?–making political hay out of disaster

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s a world of difference between skepticism and cynicism. Skeptics doubt and question in an attempt to get at the truth. Cynics doubt because they think that, by definition, every player has bad (or at least selfish) motives.

What happens when journalists are cynics rather than skeptics? One result is that every event and every action is rated and spun as though its sole purpose is either to enhance or detract from a political party or a politician. It is assumed that whatever stands politicians may take, they are always based only on self-interest rather than even a consideration of such old-fashioned and outdated virtues as principle.

A recent New Republic features an article by Ryan Lizza that is an example of this noxious genre. Lizza manages to deal with two of the most dreadful events of recent years–9/11 and Hurricane Katrina–and evaluates them only in terms of which political party is helped/hurt by each disaster, and how both parties are using them to “position” themselves into power.

I believe that Lizza may be one of the New Republic‘s political writers, and if so it would be natural for him to focus on the political aspects of the disaster, I suppose. But there still seems to me to be something unusually cynical in what he has written here–dealing with 9/11 and Katrina as though they were solely opportunities for politicians to score points.

Lizza writes that the Democrats can gain from the Katrina disaster by promoting themselves as people who handle humanitarian crises properly. He then compares that to the political advantage the Republicans received post-9/11 when they were perceived as the party that could best handle a security crisis.

I don’t recall any of the newspapers of my youth ever taking a Katrina-like tragedy or an attack and analyzing either of them in terms of how they affected the rise and fall of each party, and how each party was deciding to use the disaster/attack to its political advantage. It seems to be something that has cropped up in the last few decades only. When did we become so strategic in our thinking; when did journalists begin to resemble sports commentators, concentrating on ongoing play-by-play analyses of who is going to win the game?

It’s been particularly in evidence in the coverage of Katrina, as anyone who’s been paying even a particle of attention has no doubt noticed. And it’s not that I think politicians don’t use events to further their own careers. I just think that the MSM has gotten to the point where this is often the primary story, and everything else is secondary. I am not willing to ascribe to that level of cynicism, and I don’t think it does our society any good for the media to constantly take such an intensely cynical point of view.

At any rate, Lizza’s arguments in the New Republic article are also marred by some rather large flaws. If the Republicans are perceived as being better able to handle a security crisis, it is because they actually were engaged in handling a major security crisis post-9/11. It is logical to assume that the perception of Republicans as tough on national security was predicated at least in some part on their actual performance in a shaky situation that represented a demanding challenge– one that many people give them credit for handling at least somewhat well–rather than on mere rhetoric and promises.

But if Democrats were to get credit for handling a humanitarian crisis better than Republicans based on Katrina, wouldn’t the Democrats have had to have actually performed better than Republicans during Katrina? Can a perception of better performance simply come from criticizing the performance of others? Somehow I don’t think so; I don’t think most people are that naive. Merely to say “I could do it better, trust me!” isn’t usually enough.

It’s easier to get people’s attention and trust by actually doing something effectively as opposed to criticizing someone else for not doing it. If there are Democrats who fail to realize this, perhaps it relates to differences (discussed in some previous threads here) between conservatives and liberals as to their relative focus on objects (the real) vs. abstractions (the theoretical). Democrats and liberals, because they often emphasize words over acts and the abstract over the concrete, may tend to think that one thing is just as good as the other–that saying it is just as good as doing it.

But, ordinarily, it is not. It would be much better if Democrats could point to some sort of huge humanitarian crisis that they actually handled well recently.

Oh, you say that there actually was a humanitarian crisis recently in which Democrats were involved? Which one was it?

Well, as it turns out, it was Katrina itself. Both Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin were (drum roll here) Democrats!!!

That Lizza fails to take note of this little fact in his article declaring how Democrats can position themselves, post-Katrina, as the party to turn to in a humanitarian crisis is just–well, it’s just strange. He seems to believe that rhetoric can trump reality. I hope he’s not correct–because, if he is, we’re in even greater trouble than I think.

Thoughts on Palestinian “wilding”

The New Neo Posted on by

The Israeli withdrawal from Gaza (which I supported, by the way, as the best alternative among all the lousy “choices among crazinesses” available to the Israelis at the time) has had some disheartening results.

First we had the inevitable but sorrowful spectacle of Israeli soldiers forcing weeping Israeli settlers from their homes. And now we have another inevitable spectacle, this one of destructive fury: a Palestinian wilding that is annihalating what’s left of the settlements, including the synagogues and the greenhouses.

The article from the Scotsman that I linked describes the festivities. It’s an example of what I called the Martin Higby phenomenon (see here for an explanation) run amok. Imagine a society that nurtures rage in its children, feeding it and watering it like a precious crop. This is the harvest: a society in which those who would be moderates, those who would just like to get on with the sober and hopeful business of building a just and decent society, are overwhelmed by the explosion of carefully fostered rage.

It’s not surprising, of course, that people are helping themselves to what’s there, a sort of recycling. What should be surprising, however, is that they are even destroying their own potential livelihood, the flourishing greenhouses the Israelis had built, and which the Palestinians themselves had hoped to make the basis of their post-withdrawal economy.

But somehow it’s not surprising. Why? In certain situations, rageful crowds can be as hard to contain as the force of a ferocious hurricane spilling water over and through inadequate levees. Not only has Palestinian culture long been in the business of whipping up destructive rage for its own propaganda purposes (not to mention keeping its citizens in weakened economic conditions the better to further those very same purposes), but it’s a society in which the restraints on violence are not at all strong. Among the Palestinians, their sheepdog protectors–both of the herding and the guard variety–are extremely weak or even non-existent. In many cases the sheepdogs are probably even wolves in sheep’s clothing. Without police as effective brakes on the impulse to destroy, and without the will to apply these brakes, that impulse can expand unchecked and, in the end, feed on the society itself.

I have no doubt that moderates–or at least would-be moderates–exist among Palestinians. How many there are I cannot tell. Are they rare? Or are they numerous but silenced into invisibility by the fact that speaking out would get them killed in short order? I do not know. But I don’t think that they have a chance right now.

Part of the terrible calculus of the Israeli withdrawal was a hope that the world might finally see the Israelis as doing the right thing this time, and see that the resultant Palestinian response would either be to finally make a decent society for themselves or to show themselves to be hopelessly at war with each other. The latter–a vicious civil war–is the one I’d bet on at the moment, I’m afraid.

As for how the world sees the Israelis, articles such as this one from Reuters are not exactly what you’d call sympathetic to them. Reuters continues to subtly–and sometimes not so subtly–present what amounts to the Palestinian point of view.

The Reuters article, as well on another from the London Times discussed here by Wretchard of Belmont Club, uncritically present the Palestinian accusation that the Israelis left the synagogues intact as a way to make the Palestinians look bad when they destroyed them.

Well, of course–the Israelis are the evil puppeteers, as usual. The Palestinians have been raised on the idea that they themselves are responsible for nothing and that their endless victimhood entitles them to endless revenge, and much of the world has reinforced them in that perception. So this blaming of the Israelis for the acts of Palestinian crowds in destroying the synagogues comes as no surprise, either, although it bodes ill not only for the Israelis, but for the Palestinians, too–and for the world.

And speaking of those Iraqi Jews…

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a movie dealing with the subject of the departure of the Jews from Arab and Moslem lands in which they had lived for centuries–and, in some cases, millennia.

If you scroll down, you will read an interesting piece by Magdi Allam (Allam, as best I can tell from perusing several articles automatically translated from the Italian–which means that reading them is somewhat like reading tea leaves–is a Coptic Christian Egyptian journalist who writes in Italy and Italian). Allam’s thesis is that Arab communities lost a good deal of their own previous identity when their Jewish populations fled:

Seeing Pierre Rehov’s documentary film ‘The Silent Exodus’ about the expulsion and flight of a million Sephardi Jews helped me gain a better understanding of the tragedy of a community that was integral and fundamental to Arab society. Above all it has revealed to me the very essence of the catastrophe that befell it, a catastrophe which the mythical Arab nation has never once called into question. In a flash of insight I could see that the tragedy of the Jews and the catastrophe of the Arabs are two facets of the same coin. By expelling the Jews who were settled on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean centuries before they were arabised and islamised, the Arabs have in fact begun the lethal process of mutilating their own identity and despoiling their own history. By losing their Jews the Arabs have lost their roots and have ended up by losing themselves.

As has often happened in history, the Jews were the first victims of hatred and intolerance. All the “others” had their turn soon enough, specifically the Christians and other religious minorities, heretical and secular Muslims and finally, those Muslims who do not fit exactly into the ideological framework of the extreme nationalists and Islamists. There has not been a single instance in this murky period of our history when the Arab states have been ready to condemn the steady exodus of Christians, ethnic-religious minorities, enlightened and ordinary Muslims, while Muslims plain and simple have become the primary victims of Islamic terror.

The birthmark: an identity is a difficult thing to change

The New Neo Posted on by

Just recently I received an e-mail from a thoughtful reader who asked:

For most of my friends, being progressive is part of their identity. Changing their minds requires reevaluating who they are…Why do you think identity is so tied up with political beliefs?

In the post entitled “Beginnings” (part of my “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series), I tried to describe the process of formation of a political identity. A great influence is the political affiliation of a person’s family. Although some people certainly break away and forge a different political identity than that of parents and relatives, there is definitely a tendency to stick with whatever is the ideology in which we are raised.

Here is a picture of the identity-forming process as a whole:

Memberships in organizations or collectives that serve as reference groups are typically emphasized as integral to the process of identity formation. These socially based identities provide potential sources of identity for the individual… Most findings suggest that identity is seldom restricted to one group…individuals may have a variety of identities or subidentities, each supported by group memberships.

So, the groups to which we belong–social, ethnic, religious, racial, class, professional, recreational, familial, political–all are pieces in the puzzle that creates our sense of identity. The majority of people are probably most comfortable when they perceive the elements within them as cohesive, and are uncomfortable when they see them as clashing with each other. But all sides–Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, “progressives” and anarchists and libertarians–take on an affiliation which becomes a basic part of personal identity and is consequently often very difficult to give up.

An excellent illustration of this phenomenon is Democrat Zell Miller, who gave a speech nominating G.W. Bush at last year’s Republican convention. This earned him the enmity of most of his fellow Democrats, who considered him a traitor to the party.

Many people wondered aloud why Zell Miller had not switched parties in light of his strong alignment with the Republicans and his staunch opposition to the Democrats. A “conservative Democrat” seemed to be a sort of oxymoron.

Miller’s answer? That he was born into the Democratic Party and considers his party label to be “like a birthmark”–innate, and difficult to eradicate.

Miller’s not the only one who feels that way in his neck of the woods:

“We’re a little bit different than the Washington Democrats,” said state Rep. Charles F. Jenkins (D-Blairsville), who represents Miller’s home county of Towns as well as Rabun, Union and White counties.

Jenkins said he understands why Miller refuses to join the Republican Party.

“You’ve got people up here who just will not switch from the Democratic Party because they’ve been Democrats since they were born,” Jenkins said. “They’re hard-headed mountain people. And hard-headed mountain people don’t switch for anybody.”

Well, most people are pretty hard-headed in that respect. But it’s my impression that liberals may even be more hard-headed than most about changing their political identities.

That’s because a liberal political identity tends to be so much more than a political identity–it’s also a moral and personal identity. Liberals tend to equate their own position with such abstract (and non-political) qualities as goodness, kindness, lack of bigotry, intelligence–oh, a host of wonderful virtues. Any identity that is so identified is going to be particularly difficult to shed. Do some conservatives feel this way about their identity? Of course. But my impression is that it is a feeling even more basic to the political identities of liberals–at least the ones I know, and I know quite a few.

My sense is that this is one of the main reasons that my attempts to talk to my friends have so often been met with rage: to many of them, my espousing of any conservative causes means 1) I must be a bad (i.e.: selfish, racist, classist) person; and 2) if I ever were to convince them of the rightness of my arguments, they would be faced with leaving the fold, also, and becoming a bad person, too. Much better to let the whole edifice remain in place than to remove one little brick and risk the whole thing toppling down.

Japan votes for a reformer

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not particularly conversant with Japanese politics, but this seems like an important story. Japanese voters answered the call of Prime Minister Koizumi with a strong vote to return him to power on a platform of reforming and streamlining the Japanese government to deal with the next few decades of change there.

By returning Koizumi to power (which looks on the surface like “no change”), the Japanese people are voting for enormous change, at least potentially. Koizumi has plans to scale down government by privatizing the post office and insurance industry, as well as changing the pension system.

Looks like the Japanese are encountering something similar to what Europe is facing as the population ages over the next few decades. Many Europeans seem to be more or less in denial, not wanting to abandon their free lunches, but Japan seems to be trying to tackle the problem head on.

It’s also a vote for a Bush supporter in foreign policy:

The win would keep a staunch ally of President Bush in power. Koizumi is expected to stand by his dispatch of troops to support the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq over opposition objections, and he strongly supports the continued presence of 50,000 U.S. military personnel in Japan. Tokyo also is a U.S. negotiating partner in efforts to disarm North Korea of its nuclear weapons.

Koizumi has his work cut out for him, especially in the economic sphere. I wish him the best of luck; he’ll need it.

A mind is a difficult thing to change: Part 6A (9/11: the watershed)

The New Neo Posted on by

[On this fourth anniversary of 9/11, I am offering the following post. It represents part A of a projected two-part segment about 9/11. Parts A and B together will be the sixth entry in my ongoing series about intrapersonal political change. For links to earlier posts in this series, please see the right sidebar under the heading, “A mind is a difficult thing to change.”]

INTRODUCTION

Although I’ve written in my “About Me” section that I was “mugged by reality on 9/11,” that’s really just a convenient and probably misleading shorthand description of a much more complex reaction, one that began that instant but emerged only slowly, over a period of several years. It’s probably still in the process of evolving and changing.

But the beginning wasn’t slow. Not at all.

It began in an instant, the instant I heard about the 9/11 attacks. Like most of you, I remember exactly where I was at the time and how I learned the news. My story isn’t a particularly dramatic one. I don’t tell it for that reason. I tell it to learn more about the process by which a mind is changed–sometimes, as in this case, through a sudden and dramatic event that sparks intense feelings and begins a cognitive process by which a person tries to make some sort of sense of that overwhelming event and those chaotic feelings.

9/11

I was having trouble sleeping that night. I don’t know why–I wasn’t in pain, I didn’t have a stomach ache, nor was I anxious about anything in particular. But I lay awake in bed for hours in a sort of unfocused but nevertheless unpleasant and restless agitation, until I finally fell into a fitful sleep from about 5 AM to 8 AM, and then woke up again.

I was visiting with friends, so I wasn’t in my regular bed. I didn’t have to get up early, so I tried to relax and sleep a bit more. But the strange wakefulness continued, and at about 10:15 I finally gave up and went downstairs.

My friend was at her job, but her husband John worked at home in a basement office. Since he was nowhere to be seen, I figured he was down there at his computer. I grabbed a yogurt for breakfast, and was engaged in eating it a few minutes later when John appeared in the kitchen.

John is one of the calmest people I know, almost preternaturally so. I’ve never heard him raise his voice, and never even seen him look agitated, despite the vagaries of raising two teenagers and assorted pets. Nor did he appear particularly distressed that day. He seemed to be looking through some piles on the countertops for something–a pen? some notepaper?–when I caught his attention and started to ask some casual question.

John stopped shuffling through the stacks, and gave me a look I can only characterize as quizzical. He seemed to be studying me. And what he said next are words that are burned into my brain, a phrase I never want to hear again, not ever: “You don’t know what happened, do you?”

I write it as a question, but it didn’t really have a rising inflection at the end. It was more of a statement, an expression of intense wonderment that anyone could be so ignorant of something so obvious. It was as though he’d said “You don’t know the sky is blue, do you?”

No, I guess I didn’t know what had happened, I said, and waited for him to tell me.

What did I suppose it might be? I had already sensed, somehow, that it was nothing good. But in the split second of innocence I had left to think about it, I might have thought John was about to say that there had been an auto accident, a bus collision, or a fire, an upsetting but ordinary and generic tragedy of some sort or another.

But instead, John’s calm words came out in one long run-on sentence, although their content was anything but calm, or calming.

“Two planes just crashed into the World Trade Center, and the towers have fallen, and then another plane crashed into the Pentagon, and a fourth one is missing, and a few others are missing, too” (the final destination of Flight 93 was unknown as yet, and a mistaken report had been issued that there were further planes still unaccounted for).

If John had told me that Martians had landed in Central Park, or that an asteroid was on a doomsday course towards earth and we had only a few hours to live, I could not have been more surprised. My body reacted instantly, before my mind did–my legs felt shaky, my mouth went dry, and something inside my gut was shaking, also.

I knew immediately and intuitively that a watershed event had occurred. I didn’t know the exact parameters of it, nor any details of the direction in which we were headed, but I knew that this moment felt like a break with everything that had gone before. Assumptions I hadn’t even known I’d held were dead in a single instant, as though their life supports had been cut. I didn’t know what would replace them.

What were the main assumptions that had died in that instant for me? They had to do with a sense of basic long-term safety. Some utterly fearful thing that had seemed contained before, although vaguely threatening, had now burst from its constraints. It was like being plunged into something dark and ancient that had also suddenly been grafted onto modern technology and jet planes–Huns or Mongols or Genghis Khan or Vlad the Impaler or Hector being dragged behind Achilles’ chariot–a thousand swirling vague but horrific impressions from an ancient history I’d never paid all that much attention to before.

I remembered having read articles within the last couple of years that had told of terrorist plans and threats, but managing to successfully surpress my rising fear and reassuring myself that no, it wouldn’t actually happen; it was just talk and boasting bravado. The nuclear nightmares of my youth now came to mind: the fallout shelters, the bomb drills, the suspicion that I wouldn’t live to grow up. I had suppressed those, too, especially in recent years when the fall of the Soviet Union had removed what had once been the likeliest source of the conflagration. It now felt like one of those horror movies where the heroine is chased by someone out to do her harm and then she gets home, feels safe, closes the door and breathes a sigh of relief–and then the murderer leaps out of the closet, where he’d been hiding all the time.

But all these thoughts and images weren’t fully formed, they were a jumbled set of apprehensions that hit me almost simultaneously with John’s news. In the next instant, I had a sudden vision of the two WTC towers toppling over and falling into the other buildings in downtown New York, crushing them as in some ghastly game of giant dominos. So the first question I asked John when I could get my suddenly dry mouth to function was, “How did the towers fall? Did they fall over and smash other buildings?

John didn’t know the answer. The reason he didn’t know was that the family television set had recently been unplugged and stored away, deemed too distracting for the kids, who’d been having some trouble in school lately. This meant that John had no visuals, and so he couldn’t answer my question.

And then John left to get his daughter, and I was left alone with my thoughts.

I had always been glad I’d been born after World War II because I had a sense that the stress of those horrific war years would have taken a terrible toll on me. I had often wondered whether I could have handled such a lengthy time of deep uncertainty about whether the forces of good or evil (not that I really thought in those terms ordinarily, but WWII did seem to present a stark choice of that type) would triumph. I wondered about the sense of impending doom and personal danger that a worldwide war with so many casualties would have entailed, especially in those early years when it wasn’t going very well for the Allies.

I’d known war, of course–most particularly, Vietnam. But as much as that war had affected me personally by affecting those I loved, and as much as I’d been upset by all the killing and struggle, the actual fighting had been far away “over there,” and in a relatively small area of the globe.

From the very first moment that John had told me the news of 9/11, there had been no real doubt in my mind that the attacks had been the work of terrorists. There had also been no doubt that this was something very different from what had gone before.

But why was that difference so clear? After all, there had been terrorist attacks before that had killed hundreds of people at a time. There had even been a previous attack on the World Trade Center, and I had known that the intent of the terrorists back then had been to bring the building down. So, why this feeling of something utterly new?

Each prior terrorist attack had contained elements that had allowed me to soothe and distance myself from it, and to minimize the terrorists’ intent. Most of the attacks had been overseas, or on military personnel, or both. Or, if the attack had been in this country and on civilians (both were certainly true of the previous WTC bombing), the terrorists had seemed almost comically inept and bumbling. Each attack had been horrible, but the presence of one or more of these elements had kept knowledge of what was really going on at bay.

Those planes that had crashed into the towers and toppled them on 9/11 also had smashed the nearly impenetrable wall of my previous denial. These attacks had been audacious. I could not ignore the fact that the intent of the terrorists was to be as lethal and malicious as humanly possible. The change in the scope and scale of the project made it seem as though they did indeed want to kill us all, indiscriminately, and it gave their motives even less grounding in any sort of rational thought that I could fathom, or any real strategic end. The creativity of the attacks (and I do not use that word admiringly, but the attacks were indeed an instance of thinking outside the box) made it seem that anything was possible, and that the form of future attacks could not be anticipated or even guessed at. The attacks had imitated an action/adventure movie far too well, the type of thing that had always seemed way too improbable to be true. But now it had actually happened, and the terrorists seemed to have become almost slickly competent in the split-second timing and execution of the attacks.

After John had left the house, I did a few practical things. I called my family in New York, who were all safe, though very shaken (my sister-in-law had witnessed the second crash from her balcony, and their small yard was covered with ash and papers). I managed to get to a television set and watch the videotapes, and it was then that I learned that the towers had fallen neatly, collapsing onto themselves like a planned demolition.

And then I did something impractical. I went to the ocean and sat on the rocks. It was the loveliest day imaginable. I had been alive for over fifty years at the time, and I cannot recall weather and a sky quite like that before. It added to the utter unreality of the day and my feelings. The sky was so blue as to be almost piercing, with a clarity and sharpness that seemed other-worldly. It made it feel as though the heavens themselves were speaking to us; but what were they saying?

All this clarity and purity was enhanced by the fact that there wasn’t an airplane in the sky. There were boats of all types on the bluest of oceans, the sun beamed down and made the waves sparkle, and it all seemed to have a preciousness and a beauty that came with something that might soon be irretrievably lost.

I thought there might be more attacks, bigger attacks, and soon. So I might as well enjoy the sky. I wondered whether I should go ahead with a house purchase I was about to make. I wondered whether it mattered. But most of all, I wondered why the attacks had happened.

I’d studied human behavior for a good many years, but I can honestly say there was a tremendous and unfathomable mystery here. I had always been a curious person, but the amount of time and effort I had spent studying world history or political movements had been relatively minor. I’d been more interested in literature and art, psychology and science.

Now, and quite suddenly, I wanted to learn what had happened, why, and what we might need to do about it. In fact, I felt driven to study these things, in the way that a person suddenly faced with the diagnosis of a terminal illness might want to learn everything possible about that disease, even if they’d had no interest whatsoever in it before. Samuel Johnson has written that the prospect of being hanged focuses the mind wonderfully. A terrorist attack on this scale had focused the mind wonderfully, too. That was, perhaps, its only benefit.

Even on that very first day, as I sat on the rocks overlooking the beautiful ocean that I loved so much, I thought we had entered a new era, one which would probably go on for most of my lifetime however much longer I might live. The fight would be long and hard, and there would be many many deaths before it was over. Perhaps it would result in the end of civilization as we knew it–yes, my thoughts went that far on that day. This war would encompass most of the globe. I had no idea how it would work out, but I knew that we were in for the fight of our lives.

The legal actions of the past–the puny trial after the first World Trade Center attack, for example–no longer seemed like an effective response. It seemed, in retrospect, to have been almost laughably naive. The situation didn’t even seem amenable to a conventional war. Something new would have to be invented, and fast. And it would have to be global. It would have to have great depth and breadth, and it would probably last for decades or even longer.

So for me the day began with an emotional intensity–a stunning shock that very quickly was matched by a cognitive intensity as well. It now seemed to be no less than a matter of life and death to learn, as best I could, what was going on. I knew it wasn’t up to me to solve this; I had no power and no influence in the world. But still something drove me, with a force that was almost relentless, to pursue knowledge and understanding about this event. The pursuit of this knowledge no longer seemed discretionary or abstract, it seemed both necessary and deeply, newly personal.

[Trackback to this Mudville Gazette post featuring photos of the World Trade Center on 9/11.]

[ADDENDUM: for Part VIB, go here.]

The doctor is in, indeed

The New Neo Posted on by

There are so many excellent blogs and bloggers that I can’t even begin to keep up with all the ones I want to read, and still continue to do any writing myself. But every now and then I find a new blog (new to me, anyway) and see something there so resonant and stirring that I can honestly say that I feel a thrill of excitement at the discovery.

That’s what happened to me when, through some circuitous route or other, I encountered Dr. Bob and his essay entitled “The Call”, which appears at his blog The Doctor is In. It is a remarkable piece of writing; please do yourself a favor and read it.

But writing is only the half of it. Dr. Bob can surely write, but he can also think and feel, and he can write eloquently about what he thinks and feels. He can also act, in his capacity as a doctor. My guess is, from the evidence of his essay, that he is every bit as good a doctor as he is a writer and thinker and feeler, and that’s saying a great deal.

For those of you who are not Christians, don’t let Dr. Bob’s Christian perspective throw you off, because he writes for everyone, and he writes of universal matters.

I plan to do more reading at the Doctor Is In. But even if Dr. Bob had never written another word besides “The Call,” it would have been enough.

Statistical surprise?

The New Neo Posted on by

A while back, in the course of doing some research on World War II and the Holocaust, I came across a statistic that absolutely stunned me: the percentage of Jews in the population of Germany immediately prior to World War II.

Since then, every so often I will ask people if they can guess what it might have been, and no one’s ever gotten it right, or even come close.

So, what percentage of the population of pre-WWII Germany do you suppose was Jewish? Take a moment and think about it. Then guess.

Here’s another one that no one ever seems to get right: the percentage of Jews in the population of Baghdad around the time of World War I. Take a moment and think about it. Then take a guess.

Now look here for the answer to the first question (hint: it’s in the first sentence of the third paragraph).

Now look here for the answer to the second question (hint: it’s in the second sentence of the second paragraph).

Okay, let’s review. Answer to the first question: just prior to World War II, Jews constituted about 0.75% of the population of Germany. In case you’re bad with figures or think that was a typo, I’ll say it in words: less than one percent of the population of Germany was Jewish around the time Hitler rose to power.

Answer to the second question: around WWI, Jews constituted about one-third of the population of the city of Baghdad.

Most people will guess between 5 and 20 percent for the first question, and a couple of percentage points or even less for the second. You get closer to the truth if you reverse Germany and Baghdad.

What does it all mean? I’m not sure, except that it’s another case of facts sometimes being quite different than what we suppose them to be.

The few vs. the many: the Martin Higby Phenomenon

The New Neo Posted on by

When I was in grade school, our entire class of thirty-odd marched more or less in lockstep from grades one through six. The community in which I was raised wasn’t very transient; people stayed put, and so we got to know those same kids awfully well by the time we went to junior high and dispersed somewhat into the larger crowd.

There was Glenna (all names have been changed to protect both the innocent and the guilty), everybody’s favorite nice girl, a motherly and protective soul who was the only one who was nice to Jerry, a nervous pacer and pretty much of a nervous wreck. There was Melinda, gossiper and partygiver; Brian, the ruthless achiever whom it seemed even then would have climbed over his own mother to succeed; Elizabeth, wild child who later ended up a heroin addict.

And then there was Martin Higby. Today I suppose his diagnosis would be ADHD, but then he was just labeled “bad.” He couldn’t sit still; he was loud, angry, disruptive, and aggressive .

The things that scared the rest of us didn’t intimidate Martin in the least. He didn’t much care if he spent his life in the assistant principal’s office or in detention—or even in jail, as some darkly predicted. I seem to remember a bit of corporal punishment, too—in those days not illegal—and one memorably nasty teacher who made him stand for an hour or so in a large metal garbage can, because he was “dirt.”

Whatever was tried, it didn’t work. Martin continued to disrupt things. It was bad enough when the teacher was in the classroom, but it got really bad on the occasions when she (and it was always a “she”) had to leave the room for a few minutes, which happened every now and then.

With stern warnings, and leaving the reliable Glenna in charge, the teacher would let us know that our behavior was being monitored even though she would be out of the room. She’d be able to hear us, and the neighboring classes would be able to hear us. If she got a report that we’d caused too much of a ruckus and been too loud, we’d all be punished by getting a detention.

That was music to the ears of Martin. The chance to get everyone else in trouble, as opposed to just himself, was an opportunity not to be missed. So he set out to do just that. Our ever-escalating efforts to stop him only added to the confusion and the noise level. I still remember my feelings of impotent rage at Martin (and the teacher) as I sat at my desk after school in detention with the entire class—my restless hands folded neatly, as required, watching the beautiful day go on outside the large school windows while we sat cooped up inside for an extra hour.

I thought that the teacher showed little knowledge of the nature of people like Martin, who for whatever reason wanted to ruin things for others. But lately I’ve been thinking that maybe it was a valuable lesson after all.

In fact, even though it’s a pseudonym, I’d like to nominate Martin for notoriety by coining the phrase “the Martin Higby phenomenon.” That stands for the idea that it doesn’t take many people to wreck things (or come very close to wrecking things) for everyone else—just a few will do. That’s what the police (and teachers) are for, of course—to try to keep those few in check. But in any situation in which the authorities are weak or absent (when the teacher leaves the room, metaphorically speaking) the Martin Higbys of the world see their chance, and they pounce. Whether it be looting after a natural disaster like Katrina, or the so-called “insurgents” in Iraq, the nature of the Martin Higbys of the world is to love a vacuum.

A police state, of course, is not a desirable response, although in some ways it “works” (Soviet Russia had a lot less crime than post-Soviet Russia, for example). The aim is to balance control with freedom, a tricky undertaking. It’s the one we’re trying to get at in areas as simple as theater fire regulations. It’s what’s at stake in arguments over the Patriot Act.

It also relates to my previous post on sheep becoming sheepdogs. I’ve begun to wonder what would have happened in that long-ago classroom if more of us had figured out a way to become sheepdogs rather than sheep. What could we have done, short of violence to Martin? What would have happened had we gotten together, for example—some of the strongest among us—and held him down and put a gag on him?

Well, in that setting, we probably would have gotten a lot more punishment than just a detention. But there must have been some sort of group sheepdog action possible. Back in the 1950s I don’t think we children were even capable of conceiving of the idea, much less carrying it out successfully.

In the end, though, countering the Martin Higby phenomenon requires an interaction of public and private responsibility, both group and individual. With the growth of the technology of destruction, and the possible availability of nuclear weaponry to ever smaller fringe groups, it has become vital to counteract the tyranny of the few.

More about those sheepdogs: what do they think of the sheep?

The New Neo Posted on by

In my recent “sheep to sheepdog” post, the following question was posed here in the comments section:

Richard, I hope NNC really thinks about your question: what do the sheepdogs think about the sheep? Because they prolly have some superior / contempt feelings. Sometimes quite a bit like the wolves, actually, though the wolves are more open and honest. (And many sheepdogs are NOT contemptuous at all, more supportive).

If you’ve read my post (or Bill Whittle’s essay to which it refers), you’ll know that “sheep,” “sheepdogs,” and “wolves” were meant to be metaphorical. The word “sheep” refers to those regular folk who don’t have much capacity or aptitude for violence, and the word “sheepdogs” refers to those people who have a capacity for violence but choose to use it to protect “sheep” against the “wolves,” those who prey on the otherwise innocent and defenseless. “Sheepdogs,” then, are typically members of the military or the police, for example.

I don’t really know the answer to the question “what do the sheepdogs think of the sheep?”, but I can certainly speculate. My guess is that the attitude of such “sheepdogs” to “sheep” is a combination of responsibility, love, and a frustration which sometimes borders on anger–depending on the particular sheep and the particular sheepdog in question.

Strangely enough, I happen to know a bit about sheepdogs. Actual sheepdogs. Not from personal experience, but from some research I once had to do for an editing project. And although I think the Whittle-Grossman metaphor of sheep/sheepdog/wolf is an excellent way to express some thoughts about the distinctions between these three types of people, it turns out that “sheepdog” is really too general a term to apply. Whittle and Grossman aren’t really talking about sheepdogs as we commonly think of them; they are talking about guard dogs for sheep.

This may all seem quite irrelevant, but please bear with me. There are actually two types of sheepdogs: herding dogs and livestock guard dogs. The former are the ones we think of when we ordinarily speak of sheepdogs–the Border Collies and the Corgis and Old English Sheepdogs and the like. They don’t actually fight off predators, they guide the sheep to where the owner wants the sheep to go. The livestock guard dogs are something else entirely. They are mostly larger dogs such as the Great Pyrenees and Komondor, for example, and they are the ones that will protect the flock against predators.

The interesting thing is that these two groups of dogs are raised very differently from each other, and they exhibit different attitudes towards the sheep they guide or guard. Here is an excellent article that explains the difference, which is that herding dogs make use of prey behaviors towards the sheep, whereas guard dogs make use of protective behaviors towards the sheep and prey behaviors towards animals that threaten the herd.

So this is the key to what’s going on with herding dogs–they see the sheep as prey and begin to stalk them, but stop short of killing them:

[B]asic canine predatory behaviors [consist of] seven steps: orient, eye, stalk, chase, grab-bite, kill-bite, dissect…Orientation on the prey animal starts the sequence. The dog focuses on the prey with an intent stare honed to perfection in the Border Collie, then stalks the prey with a slinking motion to get into position for the chase or pounce…Herding dogs orient, focus, stalk, and chase livestock, but with few exceptions, the behavior chain is broken before the grab-bite.

In similar fashion, hunting dogs go part of the way in this behavior sequence and then stop. With hunting dogs, we are aware that they consider their quarry prey; with herding sheepdogs, that attitude is more veiled. But it is still present; it’s an interrupted predator behavior.

Livestock guard dogs do not exhibit any of these behaviors–towards the sheep, that is. They direct them only towards animals that threaten the herd. How is this done? The trick to raising a guard dog is to convince him that he is a sheep (or rather, perhaps, that sheep are dogs). This is done by raising the guard dog from early puppyhood to live with sheep, until he is completely bonded with them and considers them part of a pack of which he is the alpha dog:

Flock guardians exhibit none of these behaviors towards sheep because farmers place their puppies with the sheep before stalk and chase behavior are triggered, so the dog becomes accustomed to the sheep and never learns that they might be fun to chase and even kill.

And, from another article on the subject:

…[the guard dog has a] unique ability to bond to the livestock, accepting the flock as its “pack.” Because of this bond, the guard dog spends the day moving with the sheep as they graze, ever vigilant for hungry predators. At night the guard dog is found with the flock in the “bed” ground ”“ usually a small, protected natural pasture central to the area the flock will graze for the next 7 to 10 days…
It is important to realize that “posturing” ”“ confrontation and warning off the intruder ”“ rather than outright attack is an important part of a flockguardian’s behavior. The ultimate goal is to protect the flock, not necessarily kill predators.

How does this all relate to people? Perhaps not at all. Perhaps it’s just a metaphor that I’m trying to extend way too far.

But perhaps not. Perhaps somewhere in all of this lies an answer to the question that sparked this post. And that answer would be: it depends. It depends on whether the sheepdog is a true guard dog–that is, how much love the protector has towards the people he/she protects, and how closely bonded to them he/she is.

If dogs can bond so closely with sheep, a very different species, it stands to reason that most people who are protectors are very bonded with their human protectees–their “sheep,” as it were. And this can carry them through a lot of the inevitable frustration that comes with the task of protecting those who might not be all that cooperative or appreciative, or who even might be getting in the way of the protectors and making their task more difficult.

That would be true of protectors who are the guard dog type. But are some protectors more like the herding dogs, in which there is still some predator instinct towards the sheep, and the bonding with them is less? Do these “herder” types turn out to be those members of the police and military who would be more inclined to crack under the strain of serving, to commit abuses of power, or to become bitter at those who don’t appreciate them?

I don’t know. As I’ve said, perhaps I’ve already stretched the metaphor to the breaking point. But I suspect that it is love and bonding that drives the true protector, and that the true “sheepdog” actually operates more like the livestock guarding dog than the herding dog.

I welcome any comments, especially from sheepdogs themselves.

Winning hearts and minds in Sadr City

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t know which is more amazing: the fact that this is happening, or the fact that the article about it appeared in the LA Times.

I noticed the story via this link from Big Pharaoh, my favorite Egyptian blogger (he’s also the only one I know, but I’m sure he’d be my favorite even if I knew of more).

So, things are going very well lately in Sadr City, that poor section of Baghdad that was thought to house an incorrigibly anti-American population, unreachable and potentially violent. Although the LA Times and Yahoo News have seen fit to spotlight the story, it certainly hasn’t gotten the wide coverage one would expect from such an astounding turnaround. After all, just remember how much we heard about Sadr City when things were going badly there.

So, I’ll do my small bit to publicize the good news. Here are some excerpts:

Crammed into armored Humvees heaving with weapons, Lt. Col. S. Jamie Gayton and his soldiers were greeted by a surprising sight as they rolled into one of Baghdad’s poorest neighborhoods.

Men stood and waved. Women smiled. Children flashed thumbs-up signs as the convoy rumbled across the potholed streets of Sadr City…

We’re making a huge impact,” Gayton said as his men pulled up to a sewer station newly repaired with U.S. funds. “It has been incredibly safe, incredibly quiet and incredibly secure.”

Sadr City has become one of the rare success stories of the U.S. reconstruction effort, say local residents, Iraqi and U.S. officials. Although vast swaths remain blighted, the neighborhood of 2 million mostly impoverished Shiites is one of the calmest in Baghdad. One U.S. soldier has been killed and one car bomb detonated in the last year, the military says.

The improvements are the result of an intense effort in the wake of the street battles last August with fighters loyal to anti-American cleric Muqtada Sadr. Within a month, U.S. officials decided to make Sadr City a showcase for rebuilding, and increased spending to $805 million in a neighborhood long neglected under
Saddam Hussein..

The author, T. Christian Miller, than goes into the obligatory disclaimer about all the other projects around Iraq that haven’t gone as well. But even he cannot restrain his excitement at the remarkable success of this one, when he returns to re-interview people who were complaining a short year ago, and finds them quite pleased with how things have been going lately:

At the newly repaired sewer station, a local family guarding it greeted Gayton like an old friend; he had visited several times before.

Haita Zamel showed Gayton how the local sewer authority was fixing a problem that had developed in one pump. She proudly showed off the small home that had been built on the site to replace a dilapidated trailer where her family of six once lived. She even asked Gayton for computer software to teach English to her children.

“When you tell me something, I know you’ll do it,” she said, clutching tightly at the white scarf covering her head. “To the last day of our life, we are with you. Us and all of our neighbors.”

But I think this is my very favorite part:

Kadhem said that for the first time, he could imagine a future for his children better than his own.

“Things are different. Before, we felt afraid. Now, there is freedom and we feel there will be a solution and it will be better,” he said. “At this stage, we have to endure.

“The change from a dictatorship to a democracy is not easy.”

Kadhem, resident of Sadr City, seems to be exhibiting far more patience and understanding–and just plain common sense–about the transition and reconstruction process than a great many people in the US and Europe are showing.

It makes a neocon proud.