It happens at times that a writer would show no
respect for his audience, thus shells out tons of nonsense to make points that
sound innocuous on the surface but in reality, serve a nefarious cause he
believes will escape the detection of the audience.
The writer may get away with it, as some do at
times. Still, however, in so doing, the writer risks being exposed as a fraud,
and risks blowing the cause he is trying to serve. This, in fact, is what
happened to Robert Kagan who wrote an article under the title: “The myth of the
modernizing dictator,” published on October 21, 2018 in the Washington Post.
On the surface, Kagan seems to be discussing the
Saudi/Khashoggi affair. His apparent point being that the new ruler of Saudi
Arabia behaves more like a dictator than a reformer, Kagan legitimately went
into history and dug up the cases he used to support his argument. Cherry
picking being the prerogative of the writer, Kagan exercised that prerogative
by omitting from a long list of names, Menachem Begin, the right-wing,
ex-terrorist who became Prime Minister of Israel. The list contained Benito
Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Ferdinand Marcos, Mohammad Reza
Pahlavi, Chung-hee and Augusto Pinochet.
What Kagan said about these people is that they
were fundamentally bad dudes but looked good to many Americans, and were
forgiven for one reason or another. Some were forgiven, said Kagan, because
they looked like they were what their countries needed at the time. Others
looked good, he went on to say, because they appeared to be modernizing
dictators. Still others looked good, said Kagan, because they handled their
country's economy in a smooth and effective manner.
Having something at the back of his mind, Kagan
needed to accomplish a tour de force to bring it to the fore. He did so by
mentioning two American favorites, Samuel Huntington and Jeanne Kirkpatrick. It
is that Huntington once argued that “order” was the tool needed to modernize
backward societies. Later, Kirkpatrick used that argument to support foreign
right-wing dictators who were America's “bastards”.
And so, Kagan said that Kirkpatrick, who believed
that these dudes will eventually democratize, “had it exactly backward.” He
pointed out that it was the former communist countries of the Second World
(Eastern Europe) that democratized, not the right-wing dictatorships of the
Third World. So, here is how Kagan pulled his tour de force: “Meanwhile,
authoritarianism persisted in the Middle East and elsewhere, except where the
US withdrew support, as in the Philippines, South Korea and Chile; only at that
point did they become democracies”.
Note that Kagan did not claim there was a cause
and effect relation between the US withdrawing support, and those three
countries democratizing. They seem to have evolved naturally to the political
state that suited them. In fact, it happened in the Philippines after the
Americans were told to vacate the naval base they had in the country. It
happened in South Korea despite the fact that 30,000 American troops remain
there to this day.
As well, Robert Kagan did not explain why the
countries of the Middle East that did not enjoy America's largess failed to
democratize as per his theory. And neither did he explain why China, Cuba and
Vietnam –– three Communist countries, among others –– never democratized, along
with those of Eastern Europe.
Kagan went on to blather a few more rants in an
attempt to tie the loose ends of a theory that was beginning to fray at its
core. Eventually, he got to the point where he could turn what he had in the
back of his head into the punchline that was the reason for writing his article
in the first place. Here is how he did that:
“We wanted allies against the Soviet Union; now,
we want allies against Iran. We discovered during the Cold War that the
supposed allies were not the bulwarks we had hoped. In Egypt and Saudi Arabia,
we may ultimately find that supporting dictators in those countries produces
the outcome we had hoped to avoid. Who are the fools here? We are the ones
living in a self-serving fantasy of our own devising”.
So, that was the purpose for writing his article
in the first place. It was to add his voice to the ongoing Jewish push to have
America cut ties with the Arab World, and turn itself into a monopoly in Jewish
hands.
This explains why Kagan failed to add the name of
Manachem Begin to his list of bad dudes. Had he done so, the people going over
his punchline would have read it as follows:
“We wanted Israel as an ally against the Soviet
Union; now we want Israel as an ally against Iran. We discovered during the
Cold War that this supposed ally was nothing but a bloodsucker that sucked us
dry and gave us nothing in return but knife stabs in the back. By contrast, we
may find in Egypt and Saudi Arabia that engaging the Arabs in an ongoing
dialogue is what defines friendship at its best”.