MICHAEL MORRIS: Pragmatism trumps idealist’s rage in times of bloodshed - Business Day
Michael Morris
Conservative US television commentator Tucker Carlson will conceivably have earned approval from hitherto unimagined places for saying recently that Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley’s bellicose statement on what Israel should do to Hamas and Iran amounted to the “tantrum of a child”.
To Haley’s saying on Fox News that she would gladly advise Benjamin Netanyahu: “Hamas did this, you know Iran’s behind them ... finish them!”, Carlson responded: “This is not sober leadership. She is a child and this is the tantrum of a child ... ignorant, cocksure, bloodthirsty.”
Strong words all round — inevitably perhaps, under the circumstances. Or necessarily, some might say; how else but with strong words could we convey what is morally — or otherwise — at stake? Whichever side we took, wouldn’t it only be worse if we succeeded in being dispassionate, coldly pragmatic?
Well, that probably depends on the chances — or the risks, actually — of heartfelt fury having any immediate influence on action.
One of the most striking expressions of this risk came from British commentator Simon Jenkins in early September 2001, only hours after 9/11. As critic Chris Harmer recalled in 2015: “While debris was still falling in Manhattan, Jenkins urged that reason should prevail over revenge in response to the attacks — which should be recognised not as casus belli, but as a monstrous crime”.
Jenkins had written: “The message of (9/11) is that for all its horror ... (and it) is a human disaster, an outrage, an atrocity, an unleashing of the madness of which the world will never be rid... it is not an act of war... The cause of democracy is not damaged, unless we choose to let it be damaged. Maturity lies in learning to live, and sometimes die, with the madmen.”
In their way, these are tough words too — easy enough to say, harder to mean at the ground zero of the moment. But that doesn’t make them ridiculous.
Ever since listening to the audiobook of American journalist Thomas L Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem — his compelling 1989 chronicle of covering the Lebanese Civil War from Beirut in the 1980s, then the first year of the Intifada in Jerusalem — I have sought out his thinking for its signal credibility.
Just last week Friedman cautioned in the New York Times against allowing rage to direct strategy. His thinking, he explained, was set off by reading of a young tank commander reportedly saying of the looming invasion of Gaza to “restore honour to Israel”, that “(the) citizens are relying on us to defeat Hamas and remove the threat from Gaza once and for all”.
This caught his ear, Friedman said, because “over the years, I’ve learned that four of the most dangerous words in the Middle East are ‘once and for all’.”
He went on: “All these Islamist/jihadist movements — the Taliban, Hamas, Isis, Al-Qaeda, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Houthis — have deep cultural, social, religious and political roots in their societies. And they have access to endless supplies of humiliated young men, many of whom have never been in a job, power or romantic relationship: a lethal combination that makes them easy to mobilise for mayhem.” Hence, “none of these movements have been eliminated once and for all”.
They could, however, “be isolated, diminished, delegitimised and decapitated ... But that requires patience, precision, lots of allies and alternatives that have legitimacy within the societies from which these young men emerge.”
In this light, the wisdom of setting the idealist’s rage aside is the prize that stands to reward the pragmatist.
Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations.