Mutinyblogging Pours the First Drink

"You know, they shouldn't have set their phasers to miss" - Mike Nelson

With the new job and some other side projects, I put my Space Mutiny Project on hold for a bit. As I did last year with the Arch Hall Jr. classic Eegah, I'd been planning to write some posts in tribute to the 1988 cinematic masterpiece and eventual MST3K experiment Space Mutiny. It's the story of an uprising on a spaceship (which looked eerily similar to a warehouse on the inside) led by an evil guy named Kalgan (like the soap). The protagonist of the movie, David Ryder, was quickly pulled out of a futuristic Gold's Gym and put in charge of defeating the insurgency. The rest of the movie is barely watchable, unless you've got the godfathers of snark at the helm. The scene above was one in a long line of gun battles where the bad guys had unexplainably bad marksmanship. It's the mindset of C-list Hollywood, sometimes having everyone else miss is the only way to win.

The story I have to tell begins in 1996, as I was headed to a Finnish lake on a bus filled with foreign students who'd come to Helsinki for the summer on internships. I'd been there a few weeks and the local university hosting me had set up the event. Midsummer weekend, when the days are at their longest, is a holiday in Finland when people head up to the lakes to take saunas and get eaten alive by mosquitos. I'd already been through some of the customary culture shock, including a naked sauna with some co-workers at a company event (male-only unfortunately), and the teenage cashier at Hessburger laughing at my attempt to pronounce the Finnish word for chicken sandwich and then speaking to me in almost perfect English.

The first night of the weekend, I did what I did for much of that summer. I drank like a Finn. After pouring beer on myself while checking my watch, I decided to head outside for some air. It was almost 1 AM and the sun was just below the horizon, the sky still a light purple. A few minutes later, someone headed down the path from the party - someone I hadn't met before. He'd just gotten there from the Ukraine a week before. We wound up talking for a while, and after he found out I was an American, he told me something I'll never forget. He said that when he was in elementary school, the Soviet school officials used to show him videotapes of Ku Klux Klan rallies as a way to demonstrate how hateful and evil the Americans were.

Ten years later, I found myself once again drinking, this time at a recent Seattle Drinking Liberally event. I met Stephen, the Seattle Jew, and a conversation broke out. In the years since my time abroad, my view of the Israeli-Palestinian problem has shifted greatly from the standard pro-Israeli mindset I grew up with in a Jewish family. Over the years, I've taken the time to learn the history to better understand the Israeli missteps, outright mistakes, and heavy-handed military tactics that grew alongside Palestinian terrorism to make this problem essentially unsolveable without a powerful third party to act as an arbiter. I soon found out that Stephen didn't quite agree with that, and we had a pretty intense debate that you'd expect between a Joe Lieberman Democrat and a sane human being.

It's fair to say I surprised him when I said that I don't think religion is the root cause of the conflicts between Israel, the U.S. and the Muslim world. It's easy to look at the religious storylines and conclude that we're in a struggle based on their unwillingness to accept Jesus Christ as their savior and our irreverence towards Muhammad, but that's avoiding the deeper issues: culture and autonomy. For centuries, Muslim cities like Baghdad had large Jewish and Christian populations that peacefully co-existed with the Muslim majority. In the 1970s, 40,000 Jews lived in Tehran. Yet also throughout history, cultural shifts and political upheavals have also led to situations where the religious minority communities were not welcome and eventually left. But these shifts were based on culture and the constant reality of invading armies and warring tribes - when people were convinced that their autonomy, and therefore their liberty, were under attack. Religion just became the flag that was waved to accentuate the differences for fighting the demon du jour. The Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq have only minor differences in their religions, yet they're fighting each other in Iraq now as if they were as different as agnostics and evangelical Christians.

A few months ago, I posted an excerpt from a book by Israeli journalist Abraham Rabinovich on the Yom Kippur war in 1973 that described the mood in the Palestinian territories as the Israelis fought the Egyptians and the Syrians.

Another concern was that the Palestinians of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip might rise up. Small forces, particularly border police, were assigned to deal with such an eventuality, but there were no incidents. Israel's own Arabs demonstrated remarkable loyalty to the state, given their natural sympathy for their fellow Arabs across the border. A reporter driving past the Arab city of Nazareth found Arab women at the main road intersection handing out soft drinks and cakes to soldiers on their way to the Golan front just like Jewish women were doing on roadsides around the country. Scores of Arab men volunteered for farm work at kibbutzim where the adult males were almost all on battlefronts, and Arabs donated blood for the war wounded. The mayors of Arab Nazareth and neighboring Jewish Upper Nazareth maintained daily telephone contact to deal with emergencies arising from the war situation. Such cooperation would succumb in a few years to rising tensions stemming from the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation.

Looking at the situation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip today, it's hard to recognize how much has changed in the past 30 years and still conclude that the Palestinian animosity towards the Israelis is simply from a religion they've had for centuries. Of course, by 1973, there were already many Palestinians who didn't like the Jews (the PLO had existed for a decade and was made up of numerous people who felt liberation meant the removal of the Jews). They saw the Jews in the same way that wingnuttia sees the Mexicans, as an invading force coming in to carve off part of the land for themselves. But unlike the Mexicans, the Jews actually were coming to start a new nation, and unlike America, there was not a Palestinian nation with well-defined roots. A long and complicated battle for autonomy had begun.

Beyond autonomy, culture also played a role. Jews coming to the region had been coming from more secular areas in European cultures. They still lived through a lot of persecution though, and had a strong sense of the importance of religious freedom. They also had what our silly Seattle school board calls "Future Time Orientation," where a culture believes it is building towards a better future rather than trying to find meaning from the past. And as a result, the Jews bargained for a state while many Arabs relived centuries of religious conflict in their minds. Communal practicality took a back seat and the Palestinians Arabs were left without a state.

But something happened as Israel built a nation and fought for its survival. It began to have a history of its own, and as the years and the conflicts passed, more and more Israelis began to adapt to the culture of the Middle East, defining progress with an eye towards the past. The major turning points in this shift were the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War, two wars where Arab leaders staked their leadership on how they'd march their armies to Jerusalem, but which ended with decisive Israeli victories and a new sense of Israeli power. It highlighted another difference between the Israelis and their Arab neighbors. Arab leaders used the military as a political tool and made it the source of their political power, while in Israel, the army and the defense of the nation had been above politics. However, during the Yom Kippur War, that started to change too (also from Rabinovich's book):

Exacerbating the professional differences and the conflicts stemming from [Ariel] Sharon's assertive personality was the bizarre intrusion of party politics. In the three months since leaving the army, Sharon had embarked on a full-blown career in politics and was managing the Likud's election campaign. From the battlefield, he did not hesitate to telephone Likud leader Menahem Begin to express his frustrations over the way the war was being run and to ask for his intervention. He periodically called the defense minister himself, blatantly bypassing the chain of command.

There was suspicion among his fellow generals that, apart from professional considerations and natural pugnaciousness, Sharon was motivated by a desire for personal glory that would help him in his political career after the war, in particular that would come from being the general who led the attack across the canal. The suspicion was deepened by the fact that Sharon warmly welcomed reporters who visited his division headquarters. Sharon supporters pointed out that he did not solicit these visits and that reporters sought him out because he was optimistic, friendly, colorful, and accessible. (Adan's command post was generally in the dunes.) Even the bandage around Sharon's forehead came to be seen as a contrived image enhancer. When Sharon was reported to have tossed oranges from his APC to troops as they waited to cross the canal, an officer who had served with him in the early days of the commandos smiled at what he saw as the populist gesture of a newborn politician. "It's not like him," the officer said. "He used to act like a general even when he was a major."

Sharon's evangelism of Likud politics and his war heroics eventually paid off. A nation wary of Arab aggression began to mistrust its own Arab population despite the fact that only a few years before they stayed neutral in a war between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Two myths were instrumental in pulling this off; that it's their religion that makes them predisposed to hate Jews - thereby making them all terrorism suspects - and that they were not capable of autonomy - making it dangerous to live next to them without also governing them. They were seen as unruly children who needed to be shown who's the boss, and when that grew into a foreign policy, the Israelis no longer had a future time orientation. Their phasers were set to miss.

In 'From Beirut to Jerusalem', Tom Friedman describes the effect of this movement and the dilemma that Ariel Sharon faced a decade later as the leader of the PLO, Yassir Arafat, hid out in Beirut while his support grew in the Palestinian territories:

In very simple terms, then, the "Palestinian Problem" for Begin and Sharon, and a good many other Israelis, was not one of two equally legitimate national communities - Jews and Palestinians - seeking a national home in Palestine. The Palestinian Problem was the problem of marauding Arab bands killing Jews, engaging in terrorism, and refusing to accept the Jewish people's God-given right to the land of Israel from the Mediterranean to the Jordan. The Arab organization that was most responsible for killing Israelis and spuriously claiming Jewish land as their own was this thing called the PLO. Therefore, the PLO was the Palestine Problem; if they could get rid of the PLO, thought Sharon and Begin, they would get rid of the Palestine Problem. Because with the PLO out of the way, they figured, the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza would stop demanding independence and accept some form of limited autonomy according to the Camp David accords. Israel would then be in a position to dominate all of Palestine, without having to share any land or real power with the "Arabs" living there, the same way the Maronites hoped to dominate all of Lebanon without having to share any real power with the Muslims.

And the myths that developed at that time to enable this foolish plan were now coming out of the mouth of a self-described liberal as I sipped a microbrew. Stephen insisted that religion - their religion - was the cause of this mess. Judaism is a tolerant faith, guided by the golden rule, "Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you." I asked him if building the wall in the Palestinian terrorities was a good representation of that faith. "That's a good question," he said. And it's a question that leads to even more questions about whether this conflict can have anything at all to do with religion if no one involved is actually following what their religion says.

The justification for the wall and for much of Israeli foreign policy today comes from a more general acceptance of the two main myths. The dual beliefs that Palestinians are religiously inclined to fight the Jews, along with a belief that they're not capable of governing themselves, have devolved into an untenable policy of both occupation and separation. And no group is more enamored with these myths than the American Zionists. Since many of them have never even met a Palestinian, it was always very easy for them to see instances of Palestinian intolerance throughout the years and conclude that it's representative of the entire Palestinian people; just as many Soviet children saw the video tape of that Klan rally and concluded the same thing about us. And for much the same reason, anti-illegal-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. runs highest in the states with the fewest Mexicans. The paranoia has led to a situation where all Palestinians are assumed guilty, and therefore all Palestinians feel they must fight back.

In 1982, the Likud government of Menahem Begin and Ariel Sharon sent the Israeli army into Lebanon to destroy the PLO, the beginning of a disastrous occupation that served as a prime example twenty years later of why we should have thought twice before marching into Baghdad. As if to underscore the oddity of 2002, the author of the book that helped me understand why we shouldn't go into Iraq, was missing the big picture as well. This is what Tom Friedman once wrote about it in From Beirut to Jerusalem:

Yet for all his need for a war, Begin did not quite have the guts or the know-how to manipulate a whole country and a whole army to satisfy his quest. Ariel Sharon did. Sharon didn't share Begin's victim complex, but he had his own fantasies about power. Sharon knew how strong Israel was, and he believed, wrongly, that this military strength could, in an almost mechanical fashion, solve a whole knot of complex, deeply rooted political problems - that tiny Israel could drive the PLO out of Lebanon, install Bashir Gemayel as President, neutralize Syria and the Lebanese Muslims, get Lebanon to sign a peace treaty, and then force the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to accept Israeli rule. Unlike Hafez Assad, Sharon did not know when to stop; he did not understand the limits of power in a fragmented, unpredictable place such as Lebanon. Assad was a brutal realist with a very limited agenda - survival. Sharon was a brutal realist with a strategic design, or, as Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi liked to say, "Sharon was a realist at the tactical level and both a mythmaker and a man possessed by myths at the strategic level." That is precisely what made him so dangerous in Lebanon. He behaved with a decisiveness and unwavering sense of direction, as though he knew exactly where he was going strategically, when in reality he didn't have a clue about the world he was charging into. His strategic design in Lebanon was based entirely on self-delusions, which is why it eventually led Israel into a disaster. His was a classic example of false leadership.

How Tom Friedman didn't see the parallels between the Begin government in 1982 and the Bush Administration in 2002 will long remain a mystery to me. Bush and Cheney were both clearly living in a fantasy world that we'd be welcomed as liberators and that people who'd lived through centuries of conflict would quickly adapt to a "future time orientated" culture of venture capitalism as soon as they saw an American tank. In the beginning, the neocons at least seemed to acknowledge the notion that Arabs are not capable of autonomy was a myth (it fit their plan better), but quickly forgot it once they made it to Baghdad and found out that no one was dealing with them in a way they were culturally accustomed to, especially that Chalabi guy.

And three years later, while we do nothing about global warming and New Orleans stays in ruin, we've become fixated on Iran, a country with a broken government and a leader who seems eager to look as dangerous as he can. Ahmadinejad's bluster is nothing more than his own political posturing, playing for support among those Iranians who still believe their own myths of America as the Great Satan. But he's also hoping for something else: That we'll forget about the Iranians who came out after 9/11 and held candlelight vigils for us. That we'll forget that many average Iranians are fairly pro-west. That we'll ignore the fact that they've had an elected Parliament for generations. That we'll start to believe the old myths about how they hate us because of their religion and that they can't govern themselves. Ahmadinejad is betting that as we stand on their doorstep, our phasers are set to miss. For a C-list dictator, it's his best hope of winning.

Several weeks ago, Republican Senate candidate Mike McGavick thought long and hard about the Iran situation and came up with a plan for solving it.

His solution? Kick Iran out of the World Cup.

I breathed a sigh of relief when I first heard that. For a while there, I thought Maria Cantwell was going to have a tough time winning re-election this year.

Like most of the world, soccer is Iran's most popular sport. Their team is called the "People's Team." McGavick's proposal to send them home is not so much rooted in the two myths, but instead an attempt at preserving them. To him, Iran is a petulant child who needs to be punished, rather than a nation with thousands of years of history, a nuclear program, and 75 million people who are looking forward to 3 soccer games in June. The internal politics of Iran are a blank. Bad country, you can't play.

As I was chatting with my Ukrainian friend on that lake 10 years ago, a little paddle boat came up. It was a grandfather and his grandson, and neither one spoke English very well. The older man was trying to say something to us in Finnish. We figured out pretty quickly he was drunk, but we didn't figure out he was blind until he stepped where the dock wasn't and fell into the lake. Even in the summer, it's still pretty fucking cold in a Finnish lake in the middle of the night. So we helped him out and built a fire.

For each of us growing up during the last days of the Cold War, myths were told and shattered, and we'd entered a new age when we could do our small part together to build a better future. It wasn't much, but a godless communist and a racist capitalist were warming up a soaking-wet, blind, drunken, old Finn, and we didn't need to win a war for that to happen. As we navigate a difficult situation with Iran, America needs leaders who are not afraid to acknowledge that the people of Iran are human beings, and that calls for isolating them are not a strategy for defeating them, but a way to preserve the myths that provide a clearer path to war.

The rules of the game have not changed since 9/11. Human nature remains what it was and what it always will be. Those who keep pointing to 9/11 as a justification for what we do today have lost their future time orientation. And despite what the Seattle school board seems to think, it's not racist to favor a future time orientation. It's the approach that made America the greatest nation on earth. And more importantly, it's the only approach that will solve problems like global warming, poverty, and disease.

It's also something the Bush Administration should consider as they deal with Iran, before we all regret (once again) that their phasers were set to miss.