“Of Mice and Men”

You've seen the story about Farfur? He was Hamas' version of Mickey Mouse who taught Palestinian children to hate Jews and to look forward to Islamic world rule. Following an international storm of protest, al-Aqsa TV finally canceled the obnoxious rodent—by having him beaten to death, on television, by an actor portraying an Israeli because while the Jew wanted his land, the mouse gallantly refused to hand it over. The world forced the withdrawal of a particularly noxious pediatric poison, but at what price? In place of a malicious mouse, the civilized world gave Hamas the opportunity to create yet another martyr to its cause.

It may be time to acknowledge that those who doubt the capacity of humans to progress beyond their immediate self-interest are right. Palestinian Arabs of the Hamas stripe are reluctant to emerge from the clawing spider's-web of the past, preferring instead to fight to the death all those with whom they differ whether they be Jews or other Arabs. Given a chance to make a model state in Gaza, Hamas chose instead to pelt Israel with rockets and to launch a bloody self-defeating civil war against its nominal ally Fatah. Nor is Hamas and its ancillary mobsters alone among the Arab population. Tom Friedman of the New York Times, who initially supported the Iraq war, now concludes that America must pull out by a date certain. He cites Basra as evidence that gradual withdrawal is not viable. “The British forces there have slowly receded into a single base at Basra airport. And what has happened? The void has been filled by a vicious contest for power among Shiite warlords, gangs and clans and British troops are still being killed whenever they venture out.” I might mention that in and around Baghdad the same scenario is being played out with the added ingredient of Sunni terrorists murdering Shiite civilians and vice versa with mosques being bombed and politicians assassinated.

A recent New Yorker article reminds that one of the principal architects of this disaster, Paul Wolfowitz, thought that Iraqis would joyfully greet our liberating forces. He was right. But what he didn't realize, until it was too late, was why. With Saddam's heavy hand gone, pent up hatreds could explode, vengeance against enemies could be accomplished; heretical and infidel blood could flow again on the streets of Iraq. Who now considers that the people of Iraq are better off in the post-Saddam world or that the area is more stable now that Bush's America has tried and failed to impose its will on the region in an aborted effort to bring democracy? Everybody would have been better off had we simply hunted down bin Laden in Afghanistan and then come home to lick our wounds.

Our misadventure in Iraq was doomed from before we started. If Arabs had wanted democracy, they would have had it. If America were a democracy, Al Gore would have been president. The hypocrisy of a nation with the Electoral College trying to bring democracy to a people that doesn't want it is staggering.

In an earlier era, in a less self-aggrandizing spirit, Northern liberals attempted to bring integration and equality to a Southern white culture we were told was so racist it could not be changed. After a while we thought we'd won. And then the backlash began. It always does. The South first took over the Republican party and then swung the entire country to the right. Richard Nixon used a Southern strategy in 1968 to win the White House, and Ronald Reagan announced his 1980 candidacy for president in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a town best known for the murder of three civil rights workers, including two Jews, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. The South, Hydra-like had risen again. Last month the Bushs' Supremes virtually abrogated Brown v. Topeka's guarantee of equal educational opportunities. Believers in Natural and Constitutional law had lost again

Humanity, our hope for creating a better world, is a mere chimera while people put more blind faith in obscurantists than in advocates of human potential, in superstition rather than in science, in religion rather than in reason. But they always will. Our salvation is with us, the living, with us the forward thinking, not with antiquated bigotries that lead to Farfur, and Philadelphia, Mississippi and George W. Bush. We are lost if we forget that. We thought the times had a'changed. We were wrong.