Of Parrots and Hamas

- QUOTATION OF THE DAY -

"I've asked why nobody saw it coming. It does say something about us not having a good enough pulse."
- CONDOLEEZZA RICE, on Hamas's victory in Palestinian elections.

Can you believe this? I mean, where do I start? Nobody saw it coming? Nobody? Baby, that’s not even a weak pulse, that’s absolutely no pulse at all. That parrot is dead. Finished. Deceased. The only reason anyone could be fooled into thinking that American foreign intelligence is still alive would be because you’ve nailed its f*cking feet to the perch!

For those of you not paying attention, this is big stuff. Around the world Hamas is generally considered to be a terrorist organization sworn to Israel's destruction. As the NY Times put it “…an election victory by the militant group Hamas … has reduced to tatters crucial assumptions underlying American policies and hopes in the Middle East.”

There were all sorts of interesting sub-plots leading up to this election, including the US Administration backing of the Fatah Party, including American led “assistance” to the Palestinians totaling over a billion dollars per year. Recently, Israel called for the US to boycott the elections if Hamas was allowed to run as an “armed” party. The US decided to back the elections anyway, placing their faith in the credo that democracy always leads to a just end.

Unfortunately for the US, it turns out that happiness isn’t the only thing money can’t buy. It seems that it can’t buy an election in the Middle East, either. But the million dollar question still remains: With all of their foreign intelligence and military expertise, why didn’t anybody in the US administration see this coming?

To provide some insight, perhaps it would be useful to look back into the not too distant past, to a time when American foreign policy also had US troops occupying a hostile nation? There have been plenty of comparisons made between the Iraq and Vietnam “wars” in current media. Perhaps there were some “lessons learned” back then that could help with the world the US faces today?

Now admittedly, I don’t actually remember the Vietnam War. My closest memory is of my parents not letting me out of the car on one of our family holidays to the Canadian west coast because there were “draft dodging hippies” on the beach. Hence, I’m not a very reliable historical resource. But thanks to a recent documentary film, the information is out there for all to see, if we care to take the time to watch.

I’m referring to the film “The Fog of War - Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara”. It’s a remarkable film in that the narration is provided by McNamara himself. Who better to tell it like it was? He uses the events that occurred while he was Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to outline eleven rules that he feels are essential to preventing similar events from ever occurring again.

It’s not very far into the movie that he reveals the crucial point:
Movie lesson number 1 - Empathize with your enemy. He’s not saying sympathize, as in feel sorry for, but empathize, meaning to understand. It’s not a difficult concept. Know your enemy. We’ve all heard it before. However, it is apparently a very difficult concept to apply. He feels that a lack of understanding of the Vietnamese people led to very inappropriate decisions by him and his administrations. The results were, as we all know, horrific.

Years later history repeats itself. America wonders why the people of Iraq aren’t more appreciative of US efforts to bring freedom and democracy to their Middle Eastern nation. And now, the Palestinians unexpectedly elect a militant group that stands to destroy everything that America has been working to accomplish in the Middle East. The Bush administration is left to scratch their collective heads.

Condoleezza Rice suggests it came as a surprise because they did not understand the hostilities the Palestinian people had towards their previous leaders. I suspect they didn’t bother to try and understand the Palestinians, preferring to place confidence in the rather naïve ideology that “democracy wins over evil every time”.

In “The Fog of War”, McNamara is unwilling to outright apologize for the events that took place in Vietnam and Japan, yet he is obviously haunted by the role he played in their unfolding. I’m not sure if it has occurred to those in the Bush administration just what sort of legacy they are in the process of leaving behind. The more they choose to ignore the lessons learned in the past, the easier it must be for them to forge on, blindly following their own ideals.