No way to run the world: Obama, J Street, lies

In his book on politics in the Arab world, “Cruelty and Silence,” the Iraqi intellectual Kanan Makiya made a telling point about the opposition to the first Gulf war of 1991, when a U.S.-led coalition ejected Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime from Kuwait.

“A principled opposition to the Gulf war does not require,” Makiya wrote, “(a) denying that the Iraqi regime gassed its own citizens; (b) inventing dates to prove that the United States not only started the fighting on the ground (which it did) but that it sent Iraq into Kuwait (which it didn’t); or (c) generally imputing a reasonableness to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait which it never possessed.”

Sadly, it is an ingrained feature of Middle Eastern politics that myths, distortions, errors, and downright lies disfigure our attempts to hold a rational, fact-based exchange. We expect dictators—Saddam then, Bashar al-Assad now—to trade in dishonesty, and we recognize, too, that there is not much we can do about that, other than contradicting them at every turn. But we like to think we hold our own elected leaders, and more generally, political bodies and institutions working in the democratic world, to higher standards. 

It’s not just that we expect rectitude and transparency. We also believe that politicians understand that it’s in their interest not to lie, for the sake of their own credibility. Our acceptance of the moral norms of a democratic society and our desire for self-preservation is, you might say, what keeps us honest.

This week, however, I’ve seen two examples of behavior suggesting that we in the West are not above trafficking in the kinds of lies that have made the Middle East such a wretched location for nearly a century.

Let me begin with the first example: no less than President Obama, who told the Vox magazine that our fear of Islamist terrorism (even at this point, I’m paraphrasing, since Obama refuses to use the word “Islamist”) is stoked by an irresponsible media. “What’s the famous saying about local newscasts, right? If it bleeds, it leads, right?” Obama joked, clearly warming to his theme.