Hopefully this will be my only post today on Ahmadinejad's visit to the US. Hopefully.
Over at Campaign for America's Future, Rick Perlstein does a bit of then-and-now on the subject of visits to the US by "evil" people. An excerpt:
Let me put before you an illustrative example: one week in September of 1959, when, much like one week in September of 2007, American soil supported a visit by what many, if not most Americans agreed was the most evil and dangerous man on the planet.Nikita Khrushchev disembarked from his plane at Andrews Air Force Base to a 21-gun salute and a receiving line of 63 officials and bureaucrats, ending with President Eisenhower. He rode 13 miles with Ike in an open limousine to his guest quarters across from the White House. Then he met for two hours with Ike and his foreign policy team. Then came a white-tie state dinner. (The Soviets then put one on at the embassy for Ike.) He joshed with the CIA chief about pooling their intelligence data, since it probably all came from the same people--then was ushered upstairs to the East Wing for a leisurely gander at the Eisenhowers' family quarters. Visited the Agriculture Department's 12,000 acre research station ("If you didn't give a turkey a passport you couldn't tell the difference between a Communist and capitalist turkey"), spoke to the National Press Club, toured Manhattan, San Francisco (where he debated Walter Reuther on Stalin's crimes before a retinue of AFL-CIO leaders, or in K's words, "capitalist lackeys"), and Los Angeles (there he supped at the 20th Century Fox commissary, visited the set of the Frank Sinatra picture Can Can but to his great disappointment did not get to visit Disneyland), and sat down one more with the president, at Camp David. Mrs. K did the ladies-who-lunch circuit, with Pat Nixon as guide. Eleanor Roosevelt toured them through Hyde Park. It's not like it was all hearts and flowers. He bellowed that America, as Time magazine reported, "must close down its worldwide deterrent bases and disarm." Reporters asked him what he'd been doing during Stalin's blood purges, and the 1956 invasion of Hungary. A banquet of 27 industrialists tried to impress upon him the merits of capitalism. Nelson Rockefeller rapped with him about the Bible.
Had America suddenly succumbed to a fever of weak-kneed appeasement? Had the general running the country--the man who had faced down Hitler!--proven himself what the John Birch Society claimed he was: a conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy?
No. Nikita Khrushchev simply visited a nation that had character. That was mature, well-adjusted. A nation confident we were great. We had our neuroses, to be sure--plenty of them.
But look now what we have lost. Now when a bad guy crosses our threshhold, America becomes a pants-piddling mess.
As Perlstein points out, at this point Khrushchev hadn't just promised to "bury" us, he actually had the means to do it, too! Although the nuclear arms race was only just getting underway, the USSR already had the capability to permanently alter, and perhaps even destroy, our civilization. Khrushchev's rhetoric was backed up by a very real and very serious military capability. But despite the presence of what can only be described as a true existential threat, we acted reasonably and maturely. We didn't run around claiming that Satan had come to our shores. We talked to the man, making every effort possible to convince him that he was wrong and we were right. Were such attempts futile? Most likely. Did this stop us? Most certainly not. Why? Because we recognized that by talking to the man we were demonstrating our values, and that by doing our values rather than simply saying them, we were showing the world that we actually meant all of the things we said!
If there is one thing this entire episode has done for me, it is that it has crystalized just how different today's conservative movement is from the one of our not so distant past. Reagan may have at times gone a bit overboard with his "evil empire" rhetoric, but even he understood that we as a nation showed our strength by engaging in dialogue and open exchange with those we opposed. Reagan's "peace through strength" philosophy was often interpreted by his political opponents as nothing more than a military doctrine, but it really was much more. By combining economic, diplomatic, and military power, Reagan believed we could secure a peace that would lead inexorably to the triumph of our system over theirs. And guess what? It worked, quite possibly better than even he had imagined.
In 1987 Reagan called on Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. Even Reagan's Chief of Staff at the time, Howard Baker, thought his language was too extreme. But a little over two years later the Wall fell. A year after the Germany was reunified. And one year after that the Soviet Union collapsed.
That "new world order" the first Bush tried to build? That was about "peace through strength," too, a reinterpretation that hoped to redefine "strength" to include the entire free world. When Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded Kuwait, Bush led an effort that convinced the world to act. The United Nations and the Arab League joined forces to organize a response from a true coalition of nations, setting what many hoped would be a new standard in international affairs. Act aggressively towards your neighbors, and the entire world will respond. Whatever other flaws that war might have had - and believe me, there were many - unity of purpose and action were not among them.
But in just 15 years we have gone from that to this. Yes, yes, I know: 9/11 changed everything. But that statement is no longer enough. It has never been enough. No matter what some might think, it is not a magic wand that makes everything we do OK. We need to be smarter, better, and more mature about how we handle our affairs. We need to move past the bravado and swagger to begin addressing the very real problems we face. We need to stop conflating action with speech. Saying you are strong does not mean you are. Claiming you are tough does not demonstrate toughness. In most cases, it is the reverse. Once upon a time the conservative movement understood that. Once upon a time...
UPDATE: Ezra:
And it's worth saying that the Soviet Union really was murderously evil. It didn't merely deny the existence of massacres, but did its level best to perpetrate a couple. It didn't merely say threatening things about America, but actually possessed the weaponry to destroy us thousands of times over. And we may have been scared. But we didn't run, and we didn't back down from the challenge.
This is a vastly important and largely forgotten point. Under the reign of Joseph Stalin, millions - and maybe even tens of millions - of citizens of the Soviet Union died as a direct result of state action. There is a reason they were called the "evil empire." History had demonstrated that they were, in fact, evil. But that visit by Khrushchev? It came less than a decade after the end of Stalin's reign. And despite that we acted like adults.
More from Ezra:
I don't know how to prove this, but my sense is that the dawning realization that we're globally unpopular is having profound effects on the American psyche. There's a lot of talk about how we don't care about what other countries think, but like the kid repeating mantras of self-esteem in the corner of the playground, saying it doesn't make it true. If we felt more secure that the rest of the world had some faith in our intentions, would Ahmadinejad be anything but an annoyance? Is the reason we fear to negotiate with Iran because we believe that, when it comes down to it and we ask for an end to their nuclear program, they'll refuse, and the world will agree with them and not us? Is America growing afraid of rejection?
I actually tried to write about this a few days back, but I couldn't get past the "I don't know how to prove this" point and gave up. But I think Ezra is on to something very real here. We bluster because right now it is all we have. Most of what Ahmadinejad says is nonsense, but every once in awhile he makes some important points. This week's interview with CBS' Scott Pelly is a case in point:
AHMADEINEJAD: What religion, please tell me, tells you as a follower of that religion to occupy another country and kill its people? Please tell me. Does Christianity tell its followers to do that? Judaism, for that matter? Islam, for that matter? What prophet tells you to send 160,000 troops to another country, kill men, women, and children? You just can't wear your religion on your sleeve or just go to church. You should be truthfully religious. Religion tells us all that you should respect the property, the life of different people. Respect human rights. Love your fellow man. And once you hear that a person has been killed, you should be saddened. You shouldn't sit in a room, a dark room, and hatch plots. And because of your plots, many thousands of people are killed. Having said that, we respect the American people. And because of our respect for the American people, we respectfully talk with President Bush. We have a respectful tone. But having said that, I don't think that that is a good definition of religion. Religion is love for your fellow man, brotherhood, telling the truth.
The truth is that most Americans know that here at least he is actually speaking the truth. It doesn't matter what his motivations are; the words he speaks here necessarily ring true. We are being lectured about human rights and religion by a man we have labeled "evil," and he is making valid points. We have no idea what to do with this because we have no experience with this. We are the ones who give the lectures! We are not the ones who get lectured to! How can "evil" tell us about religion? How can it tell us about human rights? How dare it speak the truth to us!
That, it appears, is more than we can bare. Rather than accept what we have done, admit to our mistakes, and then, you know, actually change, we cover our ears and do our best to drown him out. It's actually worse than Ezra's "kid in the corner of the playground" phenomenon. We are not in the corner at all. We are the bully, the biggest kid in the class, standing at the center of the playground screaming "nah nah nah nah nah nah nah! I'm not listening to you!" at the top of his lungs. That is who we have become.
It is not that we are afraid of rejection; we are afraid of the truth. We want to believe that we are always and forever a force for good in the world, but keeping faith in that belief is becoming more and more difficult every day. We want to believe that we hold the moral high ground, that our actions these past few years have been good, and right, and salutary, but we know that they have not. We want to believe, but we cannot. Because we know the truth. A majority of the nation already knows the war was a mistake; they've been telling pollsters that now for month, if not years. America knows. It just doesn't yet know what to do with that knowledge.
One way or another, we are going to have to sort this out. The nation's psyche has been scarred, first by 9/11 and now by this. In just 6 short years we have gone from "we are all Americans" to lectures from Iran about human rights. Falling from such great heights hurts. Many Americans, I think, are just starting to understand and process this. The shock has worn off, and now the pain is kicking in. Now it is the morning after, and we're looking back and last night in horror and shame. We may have meant well, but it all went disastrously awry, and now we'll need to learn to live with our mistake.
But this too shall pass. In the end, I have no doubt that we shall find a way to overcome. We will because we have to. There simply is no other choice.
UPDATE II: One last thing.... McClatchy has a great piece today on the hypocrisy of Bush's speech yesterday before the UN. For those who missed it, it was an endless appeal to the people of the world to respect human rights. The content, of course, was wonderful. The problem was that it did not in any way match the reality of the actions of this administration.
Which, when you think about it, brings us full circle to Khrushchev. Once upon a time, leaders of the USSR did precisely the same thing. Soviet leaders loved to preach about human rights. Their sermons were filled with lies, of course, but that didn't stop them. And today it's not stopping Bush.
I guess it's not just their secret prisons we've borrowed, huh?
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