Hillary Clinton: One For Two In Gulf Jaunt

By education Ms Clinton is a lawyer.  By concatenation of political circumstances she is a diplomat.  Among the many features the two occupations share is a reliance upon words.  Words which are carefully considered, accurately employed, and possessed of certain denotative value and connotative freighting.  Thus it was both shocking and disheartening when Ms Clinton exhibited sloppy thinking, false analogy, and harmful shoddiness of expression in assorted Arab media following the Tucson shooting incident.

Specifically Ms Clinton debased the English language, fudged truth, created a very false analogy, and further obscured the nature of the threat presented to the US and other civilized states by violent political Islam when she equated the action of Jared Loughner and the motives of the 9/11 Himmelsfhartkommando.  She was blunt, averring that Mr Loughner, like Mohammad Atta and his Eighteen Companions, was an "extremist."

This sort of casual mislabeling is a sure sign of the dynamics at work not only inside the Beltway but throughout the American elites which have assured a persistent inability to name the enemy at our gates.  Mr Loughner is not an "extremist."  In all probability he is psychotic whether or not his defects of perception and reasoning qualify him as legally insane.  Mr Atta and his Eighteen Companions were not psychotic. They were not suffering under some defect of reasoning or emotional disturbance.  Neither were they mere "extremists."  The killers of 9/11 were--at least in their own minds and the minds of other adherents of violent political Islam--good Muslims.  They were Muslims who sincerely believed they were protecting and advancing the One True Faith by their actions and by their deaths.

By her words, Ms Clinton once again gave a free pass to those Muslims in and out of government who tacitly support or at least passively accept the presence of violent political Islam.  She encouraged the false perception that only psychotics can seek martyrdom, can wear suicide vests, plant roadside bombs, persecute and kill Christians.  By her stating that a moral equivalence existed between the Loughner shooting and the acts of war on 9/11 Ms Clinton did a vast disservice to the cause of the US and its associates in the struggle against violent political Islam.  Simultaneously she removed a burden from Muslims, specifically the moral obligation to openly, publicly, and repeatedly seek the exclusion of adherents of violent political Islam from the Muslim community generally.

Ms Clinton's (in highest probability) politically motivated depreciation of the 9/11 attackers and their ilk, her marginalization of these men by linking them to the evidently disturbed Tucson shooter, her sweeping aside of the role of religion in the events of 9/11, all harm our interests both short and long-term.  Her ill-chosen and factually insupportable characterization of the martyrdom seekers as well as the psycho shooter as "extremists" underscores the unwillingness or inability of the Obama administration to accurately describe both our enemy and what is at stake in the contest.

Had Ms Clinton's trip ended on this pathetic note, she would have merited the much prized Bugs Bunny What A Maroon! Award.  Fortunately for her reputation and, far more important, the interests of the United States, Ms Clinton had another bite at the rhetorical apple.  A bigger bite before a very important audience.

At a major meeting of the region's elites in Doha, Qatar, Ms Clinton had some very well chosen, quite accurate words for the assembled officials and business leaders.  In a fine example of Hillary at her hectoring best, she gave a trenchant cowboy-mend-your-ways series of admonishments regarding endemic corruption, pervasive maldistribution of wealth, political inequality, absence of transparency, and a form of democracy illustrated more by its lacking than its abundance.

Her message was blunt and tough.  Unless the states of the Gulf, and, by implication, elsewhere in the Mideast changed their basic social, political, and economic structures; allowed more freedom in both politics and the economy; halted the corruption; ended the hyper-privilege of the narrow elites; fostered economic growth; then all would "sink in the sand."  Her performance was "tough-love" diplomacy at its best, being a fine combination of exceptional truth telling and accurate assessment.

The salience of Ms Clinton's lecture has been underscored with bloody drama by recent events in Tunisia.  The riots have been the result not only of economic doldrums, which have had a major impact on the young, but of a thorough revulsion with the corrupt, authoritarian, and nepotism riddled regime of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.  The seventy-four year old president has been running things for more than a quarter century with results which have been very, very good for himself, his wife, the families of himself and his wife as well as assorted favored cronies but not particularly good for everyone else.

Tunisia, which has long been regarded with more hope than realism as a modern, dynamic, and tolerant society, polity, and economy has been exposed in recent months as a wallow of all the political, social, and economic sins which beset the Arab Muslim countries generally.  Ms Clinton has called it as it is and not as the local elites would like it to be seen.

Her warning that without major changes the disaffiliated youth of the region would respond with increasing fervor to the appeals of those who peddle violent political Islam is bang on and long overdue.  It is this sort of realism and not the fantasies of the Obama Cairo Address which the region, the world, and the interests of the US and other civilized states need desperately.

Ms Clinton is to be congratulated for her Doha remarks.  She should be encouraged to keep hitting the same notes in the future.  The baseless praise so beloved by Mr Obama for all things Islam does no service for the people of the countries dominated by narrow authoritarian albeit Muslim elites.  Nor does the Obama stance benefit the interests of the US.  The stance taken by Ms Clinton (with or without presidential approval) is the only one which has any potential of useful outcome either in the region or for the US.

To say that Ms Clinton has a mixed record as America's top diplomat is to belabor the obvious.  In Doha she swung her personal diplomatic pendulum far into the positive range.  One can only hope that she will do more of the same in the future and refrain from making disastrous analogies about "extremism" either of the Muslim or the made-in-the-USA sort.