08/03/12 – David Bromwich – The Scott Horton Show

Our next guest is David Bromwich.
He teaches literature at Yale.
He's written on politics and culture for The New Republic, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and other magazines.
He's the editor of Edmund Burke's selected writings on Empire, Liberty, and Reform, and co-editor of the Yale University Press edition of On Liberty.
He writes at TheHuffingtonPost.com/David dash Bromwich.
And the latest is Romney, Netanyahu, and George Washington's warning.
Welcome back to the show.
David, how are you doing?
It's good to be with you.
Well, it's good to have you here.
And this is, well, Romney, Netanyahu, and George Washington.
I can't figure out what they got to do with each other in a sentence.
What's that about?
Well, in one sentence, it is about George Washington's warning to Americans in his farewell address of 1796, his warning against excessive partiality toward one nation, toward a favorite nation, and the extreme hazards of becoming embroiled in another nation's contests and coming to identify with another nation's enmities and so on.
So he is urging Americans to keep their own national identity and interest as an integral thing and not get it confused with others.
And now, I guess at the time that this is going on, you had sort of a split between the Federalists and the Republicans about whether they liked England or France best.
And that was the context of his warning.
He was the first person having a history of being red hot for the French Revolution and so on.
I think that's among the things Washington had in mind, right?
But then, it sure does sound like he's talking about Israel right now, doesn't it?
It's just perfect.
You couldn't ask for a better George Washington quote about our current situation.
No.
Can I read it?
Please do.
People listening might not have read this great piece of cautionary advice any time recently.
So when I picked it up, I was astonished at what I found.
He says, and this is near the end of the speech but not the very end, that nothing is more essential than that permanent inveterate antipathies against particular nations and passionate attachments for others should be excluded.
That the consequence of indulging in such antipathies or passionate attachments will be, quote, frequent collisions, obstinate, envenomed, and bloody contests.
The nation prompted by ill will and resentment sometimes impels toward the government, contrary to the best calculations of policy.
And he says at the end of the quotation, which I will read too, against the insidious wiles of foreign influence, I conjure you to believe me, fellow citizens, the jealousy of a free people, and he means the watchfulness there, the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government, excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other.
So I completely agree with you.
It could not sound more like he had in mind what was going on in Jerusalem the other day.
Well, you know, I was reminded of, I guess it was Eric Margulies, and others have talked about this too, about how in the Arab world, America really had a great reputation, even though we were sort of English-like.
We had overthrown the English and defeated them and proved that it could be done and that kind of thing, and they really liked that.
And we actually, just kind of public opinion-wise, as much as such a thing was ever measured, had a pretty good reputation in the Middle East.
It's just been our support for Israel since the end of the Second World War, really, that's gotten us into all this trouble.
Yeah, the hopes that were associated with the United States after the Second World War were amazing and optimistic.
It was true in Southeast Asia too.
Ho Chi Minh really wanted to emulate the American founders and admired them more than the architects of the French Revolution, if you can call them architects.
But, you know, we allied ourselves first in a sort of background way with the French colonialist operation against the Vietnamese and then took it on ourselves.
And the disappointment and surprise there was enormous.
It's not just the Arab world, but right, that's an enormous part of our current history.
And then, well, for me, to just cut right to the chase, it's in Perfect Soldiers, Terry McDermott's biography of the core of the 9-11 hijacker group, the pilots, the Hamburg cell, the graduate school students who went to that mosque there and became friends, went to Afghanistan together and joined up the cause and whatever.
They would sit around in their apartment all day complaining about what was going on in Palestine and about how Americans ought to have to pay for what's going on in Palestine.
So the fact that, you know, people in Middle America don't think about these things very often and don't recognize how responsible their country is for what's going on far away over there and that we could have consequences like that, you know, when most of us are just sold the lie that history began on September 11th when they attacked us for no good reason at all, kind of, or no reason anyone ever heard of anyway, other than how evil they are.
Good reason or not, you know.
Well, I agree that is the work of education that still is ahead of us.
A decade after, more than a decade after the September 11th attacks, it's extraordinary.
But the awareness of these commitments of the United States and what they have done to world opinion toward us is almost as low as it ever was.
And, I mean, in my case, a book that changed my thinking or gave a new emphasis to my thinking about this was also written a little before September 11th, The Blowback by Thomas Johnson, which covers quite a lot of different U.S. entanglements in various regions.
But, you know, there are people, I think it's still a common view, and it's encouraged by our leaders, as well as political opportunists who aren't in office.
It's the common view that terrorists are religious fanatics and that they are just crazy people and, like crazed animals, the only way to approach the problem is to kill them one by one.
And, unfortunately, Obama, with his drone warfare, has seemed to give credence to this simple-minded approach to it.
But if you read a book like Robert Pape's book, I think it's called Dying to Win, which did a close statistical analysis of the first generation, if you want to call it that, of serious terrorists and suicide bombers in the 90s and early 2000s.
He found that a great many of them were not religious fanatics.
Many of them, in fact, were unbelievers or highly secular.
Some of them were communists.
But what unified them more than any single other factor was that the countries they identified with, or their own countries, were occupied by foreign powers.
And they would commit suicide acts against the occupation.
And when the United States was the occupying power, as in Iraq, or was closely allied to the occupying power, as in Palestine, the United States suffers the blowback.
So that's the thing about it.
It's not just that, well, gee, it's unfair what's happening to the Palestinians.
It's that as little as Americans care about what happens to the Palestinians, that little ends up amounting to blowback of very serious consequences for us, which, of course, then just became, in the case of September 11th, the excuse for that much more intervention in that part of the world and a policy that became that much worse, really, on the fate of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip under the Israeli occupation.
We'll talk more about that with David Bromwich from HuffingtonPost.com right after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
ScottHorton.org is the website.
Check out Tom Wood's Liberty Classroom link right there at the top of the page at ScottHorton.org.
Talking with David Bromwich, he teaches literature at Yale University, and he writes at the Huffington Post.
This one is called Romney, Netanyahu, and George Washington's Warning.
And I guess we need to get to the current events here, David, which is that Mitt Romney, running for president, if I understand the story right, he brought a bunch of Americans with him to Israel in order to hold a fundraiser of a bunch of Americans in Israel.
And he got himself in quite a bit of trouble with broad sections of political opinion over that.
But you say that doesn't matter because he did serve two particular groups that needed serving.
Well, you know, libertarians, anti-war people, supporters of Obama can all see the fault in what Romney did and how lacking in information and even common sense some of his remarks were.
But the main purpose of that extraordinary demonstration he mounted with his handlers in Israel, where he brought these billionaire high-rolling bank rollers with him to declare his, while not quite unconditional, but extraordinary allegiance to Israel at this time when Israel is threatening a preventive attack on Iran and when there is enormous tension among all these three countries.
To have a political rally in a foreign country at a time like that, where you concern yourself overtly with the interest of the other country and not your own, and to bring along enormously wealthy backers from your country, that's a do.
Political rallies in foreign countries during a campaign have happened, but nothing like this.
So, yeah, Sheldon Adelson, if that's how you pronounce his name, is the most famous of these very large-scale patrons of the Romney campaign.
He has vowed to contribute $100 million to it, but there were others too, including the heir of the Johnson & Johnson fortune and a man named Paul Singer, who is an adept of buying up third-world debt and trying to sell it back at a higher price to the third-world countries that need their independence and so on.
Some of these people make money in extremely unsavory ways.
But regardless of that, their appearance together in a foreign country in the middle of a campaign to pledge allegiance in effect to Israel and its efforts against Iran, that's what's unusual.
Well, and I guess I haven't really been around that long in the scheme of things.
Can you help me out?
Has there ever been anything like this in American politics, where the presidents were so badly racing to suck up to Israel at the expense of their own country like this?
I don't think so.
I don't think we've had.
But we haven't had a moment where an adventurer, or I should say a politician with adventurous ideas like Benjamin Netanyahu has pushed himself right into the middle of a campaign and been playing one side against the other, though everyone knows his sympathies are with Romney.
He has in effect extorted more and more out of the Obama administration in order to allow them to say they're doing a pretty good job, so that the Israelis don't actually commit themselves to say Obama has not helped us.
He's done so much for them in the way of donations, equipment, pledges of support in case Israel attacks Iran and so on, that they can hardly claim that.
And there's been a sort of act of good cop, bad cop towards the Obama administration with Netanyahu as the bad, and Barack, the defense minister, as the good cop.
And this has even come out in statements by the president, where he said, I think even Benjamin Netanyahu would acknowledge, but if not he, certainly the defense minister would acknowledge that we've been a staunch friend of Israel.
Well, Obama cemented that friendship to the last degree when he said over the last few months that the United States' relationship with Israel was sacrosanct.
Just an amazing word to use.
And said that we were going lockstep with Israel in all of our management of the crisis with Iran.
And then his UN speech on September 21, where he virtually gave up the effort to broker the negotiation for a state of Palestine.
The thing he had staked his Middle East foreign policy on, he gave up in front of Netanyahu.
And Netanyahu says in a comment to the paper right afterwards, the president should wear this as a badge of honor.
It's a badge of honor that he's been loyal to us and not to his own policy.
So, I mean, no, I'm...
Well, I guess Obama probably regrets ever saying a word about the settlements now.
I don't know.
As I see him, his procedure in almost every political engagement is to say first what he would like to do.
He does say that first.
And then, in almost every case, back off.
And very often back off humiliatingly.
But he sometimes, somehow, he sees the value of his words are so unique that it's worth it.
I've never seen anything like that in politics either.
But I'm not sure he regrets it because he's done it with everything.
He's done it with bank regulation.
He's done it with environmental protection and so on.
But, I mean, not to talk about Obama, the Romney commitment to Israel is much more extravagant than Obama's.
Because Obama has been, in effect, saying, you know, go slowly, be cautious.
And his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Martin Dempsey, said in January or February that an Israeli attack on Iran would be a bad idea.
Which, apparently, from Pentagon estimates of what the damage to the U.S. interest in the area would be is a great understatement.
But Romney has gone to the brink of saying it would be a good idea.
And that, you know, he's rooting for Israel no matter what.
Well, and now, to be specific here, I mean, you say in your piece now that when he said that no matter what, I don't know the exact words, perhaps you have them, about his Romney's loyalty to Israel.
It was directly and specifically in the context of if Israel wants to go ahead and launch a war with Iran.
It wasn't just in general.
Yeah, he used sort of terms of art there.
He said Israel has a right to defend itself.
But it's understood, it's embedded in everything else he said on the subject, that Israel has judged that it must attack Iran long before Iran is really working on a bomb.
When they judged that the refinement of low-enriched uranium has gone above 5% or even above zero.
Well, sure, there's another piece in the Los Angeles Times about it today saying everybody knows they're not making nukes.
Everybody knows.
It's an open secret.
But Romney, in effect, saying what Israel wants is what Israel should do.
And the United States would back anything Israel did if I were president.
All right.
Now, we don't have too much time.
But I think this, even though it's sort of an aside in your piece, I think that's a very important notion of what you say about Mitt Romney's anti-Semitism.
Oh, I'm using anti-Semitism there.
People will have to read the column to pick it out.
But, I mean, the Semitic peoples are the peoples of that part of the Middle East.
And the Jews were always considered part of that racial grouping at a time when people were very conscious of race at the end of the 19th century.
So Jews and Arabs look alike.
They sound alike.
The languages actually sound alike if you don't know them.
And the cliches that were used, the stereotypes that were used to put down Jews in the early 20th century, especially in Europe more than in America, because the American idea of Jews is fast thinking, money making, you know, they're on the go, they're climbers, etc.
That's the American anti-Semitism.
But the European kind tended to categorize them as shifty, sly, maybe sort of violent underneath, plotting against you, their women have strange, sexy eyes, that kind of thing.
And that very much fits the current stereotype against Arabs.
And so I point out that when Romney is talking about the Palestinians as poor and lacking in culture, he means lacking in Western culture.
And, you know, somehow born for the ghettos that they live in.
It's disturbingly close to the stereotypes used against Jews a few generations previous.
And I think this should be a bit shocking to Jews also more than it is.
Well, I think it's meaningful to what you say about how and now Jews are honorary Christians, meaning people.
You know, it's now now you have to respect them as people.
Whereas before, I guess that wasn't the rules.
And the evangelical, the Christian Zionists in the United States sort of put the seal on that pact.
I mean, they are the largest reliable constituency for tourism in Israel.
And they are a large part of the Republican base that causes a man like Romney to make these extravagant statements in favor of Israel.
And yet what Palestinian lobby is there to argue the other side of this case?
Very little and not even not even a large scale Arab lobby, which could include, you know, American Iranians and Iraqis and others to make a statement for the Palestinian cause in any way.
All right.
That's David Bromwich.
He teaches literature at Yale and he writes at The Huffington Post.
HuffingtonPost.com/David dash Bromwich.
Thanks very much for your time, Dave.
Appreciate it.
Good talking to you.