JERUSALEM, March 30 (UPI) -- Dear readers, I know you're out there because I can hear you rustling the paper or clicking the mouse. While we wait for Hamas to name a government and Iran to get a nuclear weapon, it's a good moment to pause and talk about what it means to analyze and understand Middle East politics.
The need for this kind of chat between us has been prompted both by a careful examination of readers' letters and a recent experience with a radio program interview. I explained that Hamas was a radical movement involved in terrorism and unlikely to moderate very soon. My Arab colleague was asked about these points and responded, "Professor Rubin can say whatever he wants." And then, of course, ignored all the examples I had just provided.
But that's just it! I thought. I cannot say whatever I want. What I say must correspond with the evidence, factual points like quotations from Hamas figures and documents as well as the group's behavior. The analysis must be based on that evidence and must make sense of it, not just derive from someone's political preference or some theory.
Categories like optimistic/pessimistic, liberal/conservative, pro-Israel/pro-Arab should not play any role with our analysis, except as impulses we should try to keep under maximum control while doing it. Foolish consistency is indeed, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, a hobgoblin of little minds. Where politics comes in is when politicians, policymakers, or anyone else decides what is to be done on the basis of an analysis.
Let me give an example, using Israeli politics for simplicity and brevity. The analytical proposition universally accepted and based on lots of evidence is that there is no partner for peace in the Palestinian camp today who is going to produce any results. The Labour party takes that and concludes it is a good idea to emphasize talks with Mahmud Abbas as the lesser of evils; Kadima chooses unilateral withdrawals to focus Israel's efforts on territory it wants and needs. Likud argues that this conclusion makes necessary control over all the territories captured in 1967. They draw different policy views from a relatively common interpretation of the facts.
The point is that analysis should not be determined by politics or ideology. The outcome of such an approach is very dangerous and often has proven so. What should we be saying: "Hi! I'm a liberal so naturally I believe that Hamas is moderate, Iran isn't seeking nuclear weapons, and that everything in the Middle East is America's fault?" Or: "Greetings! I am a conservative so I must claim that the Arabs will never make peace, Iran would immediately use nuclear weapons on Israel, and current U.S. policy is right about everything?" This is nonsense, though it is often what happens.
Yet the advantage of democracy over dictatorship is precisely supposed to be that people not only are allowed to think freely but use the advantages they enjoy to do so accurately. It is dictatorshops that suffer from their own restrictions when trying to figure out what is happening in the world, and they often pay very highly for those kinds of mistakes. In this context, here are two basic principles of the greatest importance:
--We should not know what we think until after we finish looking at the evidence
--We must always be ready to change our views if facts and events warrant it.
A propagandist is someone who bends the evidence to prove his case and who always says the same thing. How boring and useless.
One of the most pernicious ideas, powerful though unspoken, is what I call "Lying for peace," something all too common nowadays in Western media and academia. It goes something like this: Peace is good; tolerance of other peoples and religions is good, people having their aspirations satisfied is good, the oppressed improving their situation is good.
Now, if I were to say, for example, that Yaser Arafat is a terrorist who doesn't not want to resolve the conflict, Abu Mazen is a weak incompetent, the peace process is dead, and Hamas is going to remain an extremist terrorist group, won't that make it harder to achieve peace? Therefore, these realities should be prettified. For if peace seems more obtainable, so this thinking goes, it will be easier to achieve.
It should be unnecessary to say -- but alas it isn't -- that such nonsensical substitution of wishful thinking and ideology for being truthful is quite dangerous. We should have learned from the 1990s' experience with the peace process that "lying for peace" is going to end up producing more bloodshed and suffering.
As for optimism and pessimism, after making my analysis I am only pessimistic about two things:
-- That far too much, but by no means all, of Western intellectual life is dominated by blindness about the realities of the Middle East.
-- That during the next era the struggle for moderation and democracy in the Arab world and Iran faces an uphill battle against the forces of dictatorship and radical ideology.
My despair arises not because I fear Arab dictatorships or Islamist Iran, or Hamas, Hezbollah, or Osama bin Laden will win but the fact that I know they will lose and in doing so inflict so much suffering on their own people. At the same time, they are blocking solution to a wide variety of serious regional problems including terrorism, poverty, lack of freedom, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. When those in the West, through greed, stupidity or misguided intention, help prolong the era of suffering, it is inexcusable.
Otherwise, though, I believe in the common sense of the Western public; the basic values of the American system; the generally good policies (in substance if not always in words and gestures) of democratic states; the extremists' failure and ultimate defeat; the long-term spread of freedom, the survival and prospering of Israel.
There is much for us today in the wisdom of Charles Dickens describing his own era as simultaneously the best of times and the worst of times.
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(Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, Interdisciplinary Center University. His co-authored book, Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography, (Oxford University Press) is now available in paperback and in Hebrew. His latest book, The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East, was published by Wiley in September. Prof. Rubin's columns can now be read online at: http://gloria.idc.ac.il/columns/column.html.
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(United Press International's "Outside View" commentaries are written by outside contributors who specialize in a variety of important issues. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of United Press International. In the interests of creating an open forum, original submissions are invited.)
