I'm Glad We Got That Sorted Out (Whew!)

So, it turns out I'm not an anti-Semite after all.

What I am is what everyone else is: someone who brings to the table a set of default assumptions that are activated and modified as I learn more about whoever it is I'm relating to. The way we humans make sense of the world is by categorizing stuff and attaching labels to the categories. We certainly do that to people too.

If I find out that my interlocutor is male, 35 years old, Finnish, works in the IT industry, and plays role-playing games, I will make one set of assumptions, some of which will create positive expectations, while others will create negative ones, and many of which will certainly prove to be incorrect. For example, I would expect him to be intelligent, conscientious, relatively independent both of family and friends, socially somewhat awkward, physically in not great shape, and not have much dress sense.

(All of the "knowns" I listed apply to me, but many of the default assumptions don't -- I'm very much family-minded, socially not awkward at all, in excellent shape physically, and I dare anyone to challenge my dress sense, dammit.)

If I find that she is female, 55 years old, American, Jewish, and enjoys photography, my default assumptions would be something like that she's family-minded, community-minded, articulate, intelligent, works in a solid white-collar job, places a very high value on education and hard work, doesn't eat ham sandwiches, has a pretty high opinion of herself, and cheered on the Tsahal as it was pounding Lebanon just now.

The crux of the matter is this: the fact that some of my default assumptions about our hypothetical female 55-year-old American Jew carry more or less strong negative connotations for me does not make me an anti-Semite, no more than the fact that the more or less negative characteristics I assign by default to our 35-year-old Finn make me a Fennophobe. It's just that the war that's touched me has loaded those particular assumptions with far more emotional baggage than the assumptions I carry about the Finn, which does complicate things.

(Oh, and by the way -- if I see someone here in Helsinki wearing a dishdasha and sporting a full beard, with a muhajjabat pushing a pram walking three steps behind him, I will make another set of default assumptions about him, some of which will most certainly not be positive -- and which are just about as likely to turn out to be incorrect should I get to know him better.)

In order to have any meaning at all, any definition of anti-Semitism must include more qualifiers than that, for example a will to treat Jews differently from other people because they are Jews. If we extend the definition far enough to include me, that would make almost everybody anti-Semites -- I'm pretty sure you'll have to look hard to find even a Jew whose initial assumptions about Jews are exclusively positive. (And if you did find that individual, my default assumption is that he's a stark staring jingoist.)

Thanks for the discussion, everybody. I think I'll be putting on some Leonard Cohen when I get home tonight.

I Want My Leonard Cohen Back

Where were you, Leonard
What did you do
That summer the vultures tore at Beirut?

Speak to me, Leonard
Whose side were you on
When the vultures' black shit
Soiled the shores of Jbeil?

Tell me, Leonard
How did you feel
When the vultures tore up
Four million dreams?

I can't hear you, Leonard
Whose name did you call
Or were you not even born
When the vultures first nested
On the Western Wall?

Say something, Leonard
For I no longer see your New York.

Say something, Leonard.

~ * ~

During a recent pretty heated discussion about the Lebanon war, I got accused of being an anti-Semite. I said something like "no wonder chutzpah is Yiddish" after commenting on, if I recall correctly, the sequence of events where the IAF bombed out all roads from a village and announced it'll attack any traffic on them, then dropped leaflets demanding that everyone leave, then dropped bombs, and when civilians got killed said "well, you should've left." Or perhaps it was that one commentator on Jerusalem Post explaining that in no conditions can Israel vacate Sheba'a farms now, since it would go against the long-established United Nations principle that it is not permissible to acquire territory through violence.

It got me thinking. Could it be that I really am an anti-Semite?

Fortunately, Ha'aretz was kind enough to provide a handy self-test. I took it, and it turned out I wasn't an anti-Semite after all, if only barely. I think I scored about 210 on it, where 230 would've marked me down as a potential Auschwitz gas chamber operator.

But it really isn't as simple as that. Trouble is, there are several definitions of anti-Semitism, and by some of them I most certainly am an anti-Semite.

"Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism." You see this a lot in Israeli and pro-Israeli media, nowadays even leftie publications like Ha'aretz. I am vehemently, fundamentally, unshakeably anti-Zionist. I believe Zionism is the last bitter fruit from the twisted tree of European integral nationalism that gave us Mussolini and Hitler, Bismarck and Garibaldi. (And Mannerheim too, for that matter; his hands are just as bloody on the smaller scale on which he operated; he was in charge when White Terror snuffed out about twenty thousand Red lives, after the Finnish civil war.) I believe Zionism is a morally untenable, politically destructive ideology that must be opposed everywhere it turns up. Just like any comparable chauvinism... except that Zionism happens to happen in a regional context where it makes blood flow, which makes it particularly dangerous. So by that definition, I'm proud to be an anti-Semite.

The racial/genetic hoo-hah. That is, the idea that there's something in Jewish blood or genes that's somehow different (and worse) from anyone else's blood or genes. Utter rubbish; I want no truck with that. By this classical racist European definition of anti-Semitism, I'm in no sense an anti-Semite. Sorry. (On the other hand, I don't believe there's anything superior about Jewish genetics either. Sorry about that too.)

The religious variety. That is, the belief that the Jews murdered Jesus Christ and therefore deserve persecution. Martin Luther spewed a lot of venom on this topic. Again, utter rubbish. I'm somewhat familiar with what the Pharisees actually stood for, as well as thinkers like Rabbi Hillel, or Philo of Alexandria for that matter. On the other hand I'm not entirely certain about who the Christ actually was, nor how much of the account of the Crucifixion actually happened, and in any case if it did happen more or less as described it was the Romans that nailed him up, not the Jews: it'd make much more sense to be pissed off at the Italians for it. Hell, it was 2,000 years ago; how much sense would it make to carry a grudge that long anyway?

Finally, while I certainly can't deny my Lutheran roots (I had a religious grandmother who had some effect on my childhood ideas, even if my upbringing was staunchly secular), I'm philosophically an agnostic. That means that should someone ask me if I believe in God, my answer would be that I don't understand the question. So while I find much to admire in the teachings attributed to the Christ, he is not a symbol of my faith.

So, any way I think about it, I have no religious beef with Jews. Sorry, this one's a washout.

The cultural/national thing. Now, this one's tricky. Real tricky. My reflexive reaction would be to deny all cultural bias against Jews, but on deeper examination, I have to admit that that's not quite true.

Fact is, if I claimed that my anger towards Israel has in absolutely no way at all spilled over to my feelings towards that amorphous concept known as "the Jews," I would be lying.

I'm only human. My mind works the same as everyone else's. If I see a recurring pattern of some kind of behaviour, and it's recurringly associated with some kind of symbol, and the pattern is associated with strong emotions, I make a connection. When I hear that 95% of Israeli Jews supported the wholesale destruction of Lebanon, or I read Max Jakobson here in Finland make the same excuses for Israeli atrocities and affect the same fake sympathy towards Lebanese civilians as David Brooks in New York or some unnamed editorialist baying for more blood in Ha'aretz, yes, I do start making certain assumptions about Jews in general. Perhaps like that bit about chutzpah being Yiddish.

Worse, I feel that my enjoyment of, for example, Leonard Cohen's music and poetry (I have all of his records, and he's the only singer about whom I can say that) has become tainted by a bitter aftertaste. I wonder, what does he think? Does he, too, feel that a thousand dead Arabs are worth less than twenty-odd dead Jews? Is he, too, nodding to himself, full of the righteous anger raised by a "just war" or deploring a "premature ceasefire" or asking "why wasn't the war fought earlier" or saying that "the IDF should have struck harder" or that "if they put down their arms, there will be peace, but if we put down our arms, we will be annihilated?"

Why is it that his song about that day they wounded New York suddenly sounds just a tiny bit tinny?

A wall has gone up. Not like the Western Wall. Like the Separation Wall. I no longer relate to Jews just like would relate to the French or the Germans or the Koreans. I used to, not that long ago. But now there are... issues, that need to be dealt with, before that can happen. Assumptions. Prejudices.

I don't think they're insurmountable, though. Every once in a while I come across a piece by Gideon Levy or Aluf Benn or Amira Hass or Paul Rogat Loeb or someone at Rabbis for Human Rights and I feel an immense wave of relief and sympathy -- they haven't all gone insane after all.

But that separation wall is there, no doubt about it.

I suppose that does count as anti-Semitism. I don't like it at all. I really want to have my Leonard Cohen back. Any ideas on how to go about it?


~ * ~



Storm approaching Beirut. December, 2005.

Lebanon: So, What The Hell Happened?

One thing has been bothering me about the Lebanese war that appears to be just winding down: how is it possible that I'm smarter than the Israeli Defence Forces?

I've been saying all along (on-line and off) that Hezbollah cannot be destroyed by an air campaign, nor indeed by any military means at the IDF's disposition. Yet Israel attacked it, and stated at the beginning of the attack that its war aim was its destruction. In other words, they set themselves up for failure.

The Guardian writes that according to Sy Hearsh the whole shebang was planned between the Israelis and the Americans as a sort of general rehearsal for an attack on Iran's nuclear research centers.

Normally I tend to be sceptical of conspiracy theories, since accident, the seven deadly sins, and common stupidity are usually enough to account for most man-made horrors we come across. However, this one sort of make sense... if you make a couple of assumptions, that sort of make sense if you have a particular mind-set.

Suppose the Bush administration was determined to stop Iran from acquiring nukes, whatever the cost.

Suppose they had already decided that diplomacy was unlikely to do the job. (On that count, by the way, I agree with them. I believe Iran is determined to acquire nukes, and no amount of diplomatic sticks or carrots will dissuade them.)

That only leaves the famous "military option" -- an option that this particular administration has been more than eager to use before.

However, the disastrous failure of the Iraq campaign has severely reduced America's capacity to project military power. The USA is simply not capable of launching a frontal military assault on Iran. It just doesn't have the troops, equipment, nor (most importantly) the political capital.

What's left? An air campaign, of course. The USA is certainly capable of striking any nuclear facility in Iran... if it knows where it is, that is.

There's just one problem with this scenario: the fact that Iran would certainly retaliate against Israel (and America, where it can).

Iran has four ways of doing this: making trouble in Iraq, international terrorism, attacking Israel directly with long-range missiles, and... Hezbollah. So, in order to be able to attack Iran's nuclear capability, the USA must somehow deal with each of these three threats.

Let's leave Iraq out of the equation for now; it's fucked anyway, and the US army in Iraq mostly consists of underpaid Mexicans whose lives are clearly not worth much to the Bush administration. It's unlikely that the Iraqi Shi'a militias would be able to rack up dramatically more casualties than the US is currently suffering anyway, as long as the Yanks just hunker down and stay put in their bases (which they're mostly doing anyway).

International terrorism is obviously no worry to the Bush administration. On the contrary, an attack on American territory (or even better, a foiled attack on American territory) would make them jump with joy -- just look at how they pounced on the British liquid-explosive plot. So clearly the threat of Iranian terrorism on American territory won't deter them.

The old saying is that general are always fighting the last war. So at this point, let's look at precedents.

The first precedent is the 1991 Iraq war. At that time, Israel was also threatened by long-range missiles. They didn't do much damage. So, the fighting-the-last-war thinking goes, nothing much to worry about there -- Iranian missiles are unlikely to be much more dangerous than Iraqi Scuds. (Very likely true.)

So, that leaves us Hezbollah. And the second and third precedents. Namely, Belgrade and Baghdad.

The NATO air campaign against Serbia achieved its goals very cleanly (from the NATO point of view). While it was actually almost completely ineffective against the Serbian military, the strikes against civilian infrastructure caused the home front to crack, and resulted in a quick and comparatively cheap capitulation. Consequently, NATO generals -- especially American generals -- have been trying to go for a re-run of this war ever since.

The next place they tried it was Baghdad, during the beginning of the second Gulf War. It worked too, sort of: the US military got to Baghdad with very little trouble, yanked Saddam down from his pedestal, and waited for the locals to show up with the rose petals. (We know what happened next, but that's not important in this context.)

The (erroneous) lesson to be learned is something like this:

When fighting a war against any country whose capital starts with a B, you can win a war cleanly by frightening the populace through an aerial bombardment campaign, even if the bombs don't do much damage to the actual military capability of the enemy you're fighting. (Tehran starts with a T, though. I wonder if they thought of that?)

So, since Beirut also starts with a B, it's only logical to fight the Serbian war all over again. Carpet-bomb the enemy military whenever you can find it, carpet-bomb the areas of its support base on the pretext that the enemy you're fighting operates from there (Shi'ite lives are cheap, these days), do some mostly psychological bombing of the enemy capital, and the populace, terrified, will turn against its leaders and do your dirty work for you. Hezbollah problem solved, Iran's ability to retaliate against Israel neutralized. The democratically-elected, anti-Syrian, progressive Lebanese government strengthened, the Lebanese people eternally grateful for the kind Israelis having solved their Hezzie problem for them. Everybody goes home happy. Right?

Only this isn't what happened. Beirut starts with a B, but the Lebanese didn't turn against the Hezbollah, the Hezbollah didn't get demoralized, and after a full month of pounding, Hezbollah probably fired more rockets into Israel than got destroyed by the IAF. What went wrong?

Obviously the Americans and the Israelis made a miscalculation somewhere. Perhaps the first letter of the capital isn't the determining factor after all. Because, seriously, other than that (and the fact that both former Yugoslavia and Lebanon are multiethnic countries with mountains) they don't have much in common.

For starters, the Lebanese are all war veterans. They've gone through fifteen grueling years of bloody civil war. When they get bombed, they get more angry than scared (and they get plenty scared, like anyone does who gets bombed, so you can only imagine how angry they'll get). They know what to do, how to handle it. They never expected the country to be "normal" anyway.

What's more, the Hezbollah doesn't give a hoot about what Beirut thinks. It doesn't obey the Lebanese government, except when it suits them. They're the strongest military force in Lebanon by far. The idea of the Lebanese army (or any army, for that matter) disarming them by force is ridiculous. In other words, terrorizing the Lebanese civilian population can only have one consequence -- since it can't do a thing about Hezbollah anyway, the only logical reaction is to rally around it.

What still beats me, though, is how come the Israelis thought that Lebanon is like Serbia just because Beirut and Belgrade sound sort of similar. Perhaps stupidity is contagious, and they caught it from America. Or perhaps it's just Olmert's lack of military experience, rivaling that of George Junior's.

I would never, ever have imagined that I'd be saying this, but... I kinda miss Sharon. Whatever else he was, he was not a complete moron about military matters. I have a feeling that he would've given George Junior something to think about, when presented with this damn-fool scheme.

I wonder what this bodes for Iran, though? Any guesses, anyone?

The Rise of the Shi'ites

"Then there's the story of the mystery uprising in Basra, confirmed by the Tehran-based Committee for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (or whatever, the Iraqi Hezbollah in a nutshell), of all people... only they say it's not against Saddam, but against the water and power shortage. Iran must really be rubbing its hands in glee: without lifting a finger, its second-worst enemy is taking out its worst enemy, and letting the fruits of their effort fall right into their lap. Do you think the Shi'ites of Southern Iraq (over half the population of the country) will sit quietly if an occupation regime is imposed on them? Think again. Set up free elections in Iraq, and they will vote the Hezbollah into power. Which, in my opinion, would be a good thing: the Hezbollah vision is one of the more enlightened ones currently touted in the Middle East; beats the Arab nationalists, the Ba'athists, the Al Qaeda crazies, and the Marxists anyway. If I had to choose among these which regime I'd have to live under, I'd pick the Hezbollah every time, even if it meant dusting out my baptism and declaring myself a Christian. The Hezbollah has nothing against Christians, as long as they accept their "protected" status -- and I'd much rather be protected by the Hezbollah than subject to any of those other regimes."

(Petteri on March 25, 2003, in a personal diary.)

Things in the Middle East are moving. The elections in Iraq were the start. Next, the murder of one of the few true statesmen in the Middle East precipitated events that have the Syrians meekly backing out of Lebanon. Democracy on the march? Perhaps. But more importantly, it's Shi'ite power on the march -- the hitherto invisible underclass of the Arab world taking center stage.

And now, a similar social, political, and religious movement from the Sunni side has announced it will take the same road: Hamas will be participating in the elections for the Palestinian legislative next summer.

This could very well be the beginning of a new era in the Middle East: democracy, Arab style. Of course, the Bushies and the Blairies are patting themselves on the back about it, and the limp-wristed milquetoast whiny liberals are falling all over each other to beat themselves up about how wrong they were to oppose the Iraq invasion.

I have a feeling that many of the people militating for democracy in the Middle East won't feel entirely comfortable with it now that they're seeing what it's going to be like. Sheikh Nasrallah of the Hezbollah studied in the same schools as Ayatollah Sistani. His movement is organized the same way. It has the same branches: religious, social, political, and military. It preaches the same political screed -- not an Islamic state à la Iran, but bringing Islam into society through democratic means. And Hamas, while Sunni, operates along the same principles.

We have seen the face of democracy in the Middle East, and it wears a beard and turban, holds a Kalashnikov in one hand, and the Qur'an in the other. And we had better learn to like it.

That's the scary bit.

The less scary bit is that it is entirely possible to learn to like it. Sheikh Nasrallah, Ayatollah Sistani, and the late Sheikh Ahmed Yassin are all entirely reasonable people. They're realistic, their goals are limited, and they're perfectly willing to accomodate to functioning in a society that includes other groups than their own, if we only give them half a chance. Labeling them terrorists and firing missiles at their wheelchairs doesn't leave them too many options.

So, basically, the Bushies and the Blairites are now faced with a strange quandary: the same Shi'ites in Iraq are harbingers of democracy... but in Lebanon they're unreconstructed terrorists. You can't have it both ways. If you're up for real democracy in the Middle East, this is what you're going to get. No more pliant dictators that can be bought off with dollars and arms shipments, and trusted to keep the integrists in check. Instead, you get people who hold their heads up high, believe in their cause, think on the scale of decades and centuries, and will not be bullied. And, of course, many of them believe that adulterers should be stoned, women should be veiled, and atheists should be executed. (Come to think of it, that doesn't sound too different from the Religious Right in the US.)

So, what's Bush's role in this?

Yep, the Iraq invasion did allow the Shi'ites of Iraq to rise. The January elections (which, I'll have to remind you, the Americans did not want -- they would never have happened without Sistani's quiet insistence and the immense restraint and discipline of the Iraqi Shi'ites) set the stage for things to come. However, crediting Bush for Lebanon is stretching it.

We've been watching re-runs of the same play many, many times over since about 1989. A monolithic, seemingly invincible authoritarian state gets hit by a sudden, sharp event, and promptly collapses in a cloud of dust. Sometimes people get caught in the collapsing rubble, as in Yugoslavia. Sometimes there's shards of glass mixed with the dust, as in Romania. Other times, it's all singing and holding hands, as in the Baltic states and Czechoslovakia. Yet other times, only the doors and windows are smashed and much of the structure is left standing, slowly to crumble over the coming years, as in Ukraine and Belarus.

The same dynamics are at work in the Middle East. That is why I was dead-set against the Iraq invasion, and still think it was a horrible crime: Saddam's regime was rotten to the core. It would have collapsed of its own accord sooner or later, probably sooner. The difference is that the collapse would have come about internally: by an act of will of the Iraqi people. It would have been an empowering event, not one where a poor, weak, suffering victim is rescued by a knight in shining armor (with a bunch of children crushed under the hoofs). It would very likely have demanded far less blood, and carried a far smaller risk of complete collapse -- and if collapse, ruin, and civil war had resulted, at least it would have been the Iraqis' own tragedy, not one imposed on them by outsiders.

The Syrian regime is a zombie. Ever since Hafez al-Assad died, it has been muddling on by inertia. More importantly, it fractured: like the hydra of Greek myth, once the head was chopped off, seven new ones sprouted. Nobody's really running the show. The various independent mukhabarats are doing their own thing. I think it's highly likely that the Hariri murder was done by one of the mukhabarats on their own account, with no order or authorization from Damascus -- Syria's meek reaction to the subsequent demonstrations would support this hypothesis. For now, it looks like that act of violence was enough to smash the edifice of Syrian power in Lebanon at least: whether or not it's enough to smash it in Syria as well only time will tell.

Dictatorships are inherently unstable. They're inefficient, and especially vulnerable at times of succession. However, they can be very effective in wartime, as people rally to the flag and centralized control makes it possible to mobilize resources quickly and totally. Therefore, it's almost always a bad idea to attack a dictatorship. Better to contain it and let it rot of its own accord, and be ready to support the new and hopefully better order when it does collapse.

Invading Iraq was wrong in 2003, and it is still wrong. If the Bushies insist on taking the credit for every positive development in the Middle East, they must also accept responsibility for the crimes and tragedies. This, too, they can't have both ways.

It'll be an interesting trip to Lebanon in two weeks.

My Very Own Opponent!

I was tickled pink to notice that someone's been so tweaked by my little blog to start a whole new one just to counter it. Please go check out Flyover 101. Nothing particularly original there yet, but the author writes surprisingly fluently for a Bushie, so there might be something there in the future.

Wowee. Somebody actually reads me!

The Autocratic Instinct

Started out as a response to Luke Kaven's message on DPReview.

History, and understanding the contemporary world through it, is a game of pattern recognition. It's a very dangerous game, because history never repeats itself exactly. It's often impossible to know for sure what the really relevant bits of the pattern are, and whether the match between two patterns is valid or an illusion. By leaving out some thing from one pattern or the other, it's very easy to be misled.

The central innovation of democratic systems is universality -- the principle and aspiration that the rules are the same for everybody. This is very eloquently expressed in the US constitution and Bill of Rights: the "self-evident" rights that derive from a higher power than mere human government, and that therefore the government has no right to abrogate.

Despite the failings of any really existing system of justice and government, an important Rubicon has been crossed when the solutions move from the universal to the specific, such as when the right to due process is stripped from some individuals based on an administrative decision.

Democratic systems live on a sort of feedback loop between the institutions and the people who create them. If the institutions work, people start to trust them more. If the people feel that they're empowered to alter the institutions to work better, they trust the methods in changing them more. On the other hand, if the institutions don't work, and the system appears inflexible and out of control, the trust in the democratic process starts to erode.

There's a pretty clear difference in the "political instincts" of people who live in healthy, well-functioning democracies and people who live in authoritarian, totalitarian, or recently democratized systems.

People with "democratic instincts" tend to discuss policies, laws, and parties (abortion, social security, minority rights, immigration, taxes, Labor, Conservatives, Liberals, Democrats, Republicans), tend to see political leaders as pretty human-scale figures, and tend to judge them based on how consistently they adhere to their stated values, and how well the policies they advocate match with your preferences. There is also a broad consensus about the rules of the game: a democracy without a loyal opposition ("loyal" because it does not intend to overthrow the system, "opposition" because its function is to keep the governing party from going out of control) cannot function. "We need better laws" or "we need a better government" are democratic demands.

On the other hand, people with authoritarian instincts put their trust in individual leaders and symbols. They tend to elevate them to superhuman status, tend to equate disagreement with disloyalty, and see political opponents as traitors. This is very dangerous. They trust the leader to make the decisions and, as an individual, make sure that the underlings do not abuse their power. The authoritarian instinct is "We need a better/stronger leader/tsar/Führer." Just find some street polls made in Russia over the past ten years, and you'll see what I mean. There are precious few genuine democrats there -- and, during Yeltsin, many calling for a better, stronger leader, and now, many rallying to Vladimir Putin, as he quietly dismantles the rudimentary checks and balances that meant to foster a democratic Russia.

How does this apply to my favorite topic, America? Obviously, America is much more democratic than it is authoritarian. Leaders come and go. However, there is a strong authoritarian streak to the American psyche as well -- individual presidents tend to become symbols, either of all that is good or all that is nasty. Think of Reagan, for example: for many on the right, he's the president that made America great again and defeated the existential enemy of Communism, while for many on the left he's the devil incarnate.

It worries me that the authoritarian streak is getting stronger. The people as let the government get away with the selective application of the Geneva conventions (in spirit very close to the Bill of Rights!), erosion of fundamental rights (the right to habeas corpus, the right to freedom from governmental snooping), the pitifully inadequate response to the clearly documented systematic application of torture, and so on. Small baby steps, things that "I don't need to worry about, since I have nothing to hide," but that go against the fundamental principles of a free country: the universality of laws and trust in institutions rather than individuals.

If the American public ceases to trust in the universality of laws and rights, how long can a democratic society survive?

Losers and Viktors

How is it that an America that manages to do everything right in the former Warsaw pact countries can manage to do everything so wrong in the Middle East?

I spent a year in Ukraine in 1999-2000. It was a highly instructive, although awfully depressing year. The country was a mess: mafiosi picking over the corpse of the Soviet Union, a cultured, educated people in a state of shell shock trying to get the potatoes to last over the winter, and everyone who had the possibility trying to figure out ways of escaping to the West. "How to marry a foreigner" was the title of a book that was selling like hot cakes among young Ukrainians. I haven't been back since, but I have been following the news, and it's been pretty depressing reading.

Until now, that is.

I can't help being a little bit cynical about the politicians involved in the Orange Revolution. In order to become a player for a top political spot in a country like Ukraine, you have to be connected. Viktor Yushchenko's gang may well be cleaner than Kuchma's and Viktor Yanukovych's gang, but pure-hearted lily-white Jeffersonians they're not. Yulia Tymoshenko, "Ms. Revolution," used to be a quite a respectable oligarch herself, and I'm quite sure Yushchenko didn't make his money purely through hard work and straight dealing either.

All that doesn't change the fact that he is genuinely popular, and compared to the clique currently in power he is if not lily-white, at least a lightish shade of beige. Of course, we don't know how the drama will play itself out -- Ukraine could even split, or worse -- but there is a real hope of a new direction for a country and a people who really deserve some good news for a change.

And the administration of George W. Bush deserves a fair slice of the credit.

When it comes to Ukraine, America has done just about everything right. It has recognized an incipiently revolutionary situation. It has identified the best candidates for genuinely reformist, democratic forces in the country. It has offered them advice, logistical support, and enough money to make a difference but not so much that it would corrupt them. It has supported them publically without resorting to grandstanding or unnecessarily antagonizing their opponents, both domestic and international. It has played its cards carefully: minimum cost, minimum risk, maximum benefit.

At least so far, it has been unprecedentedly successful: the Orange Revolution has gotten the Ukrainians to seize their destiny into their own hands, more so even than the half-accidental way the country split off from the Soviet Union back in 1991. It has even taken that consummate chess-player of international politics, Vladimir Putin, by surprise -- and caused him to stumble quite uncharacteristically, doing Russia's standing a lot of damage in the process. Given the Bush administration's foreign policy record, his complacency may be understandable.

This, friends, is a demonstration of how to foster democracy. It involves recognizing the limits of what is possible, working quietly and patiently out of the limelight, nurturing, advising, and supporting rather than hectoring, dictating, and imposing. And, of course, it only works when the conditions are right -- that's why we aren't seeing an Orange Revolution in Belarus... not yet, anyway.

How is it, then, that where America has succeeded so consistently in Eastern Europe (with the notable exception of Yugoslavia), it consistently and spectacularly fails in the Middle East? Why hasn't America followed a similar policy of engagement in the Middle East? The only reason American support is a kiss of death to any movement in the Middle East is that the Middle Easterners hate America's guts -- and no amount of finger-pointing will change the fact that this is the Americans' fault, not the Middle Easterners'. With another kind of foreign policy, we could've had an Orange Revolution in Teheran years ago -- and that could really have started the "domino effect" of democracy the neo-cons said would happen by invading Iraq!

I don't know, of course, but I can speculate.

I have a feeling that the reason is a mix of unfamiliarity and something like racism -- not the "biological" kind (I don't think anyone in the Bush administration genuinely thinks that Arabs are racially inferior to anyone else) but a "cultural" kind. A neo-version of the White Man's Burden, where inferior races have been replaced by inferior cultures.

While there are lots of people of Ukrainian origin in America, many in very prominent positions, there are a lot fewer Arabs. Moreover, many members of the Bush clique are very close to right-wing Likudniks -- and you don't have to do much Middle East watching before becoming very familiar with the Orientalist clichés still alive and well in those circles. You know, "Arabs only understand force," "culture of death," "the inherent barbarity in Arab culture" and so on.

So I don't think it's too much of a stretch to speculate that the Bush administration viscerally sees the Arabs as a people easy to shock and awe into submission, then educate in the ways of Liberty and Democracy (and perhaps even convert a few of the heathens into God's true religion). Imagine their surprise when the colonials are fighting back!

And, of course, the killing a few tens of thousands of brown peasants in a desert somewhere is a lot less messy than killing the same number of Europeans, even if they're Eastern Europeans.