Jowitt's wit and his "movements of rage"
Provocative piece by Ken Jowitt in the April & May 2003 issue of Policy Review. Called "Rage, Hubris, and Regime Change", it's filled with insight and wit of the driest kind: "... it is true that a more democratically inclined Iranian middle class exists. The problem? Most of it lives in Los Angeles." Or this: "the Bush administration has replaced Clinton?s 'Mother Teresa' foreign policy with a 'Mother Superior' foreign policy."
Jowitt's "movements of rage" has a ring to it and it might well become part of the vocabulary. He defines it as "a malignant political coalition that relentlessly pursues and may succeed in possessing and using weapons of mass destruction (wmd) against the United States and its allies."
The focus of the article is the Bush administration's "trinitarian" doctrine: Dominance, Preemption, Regime change. Regarding the latter, Jowitt says: "The Bush administration?s fundamental solution to the danger of terrorism, regime change, has a decidedly Jekyll-and-Hyde quality ? to wit, in trying to create democratic Dr. Jekyll regimes, it is likely to create enraged Mr. Hyde regimes."
On preemption, Jowitt is equally sceptical: "?its strategic application demands the combined wisdom of Pericles and Solomon. To begin with, the premise for an anticipatory attack posits a hostile leader and regime platonically impervious to any environmental changes whether domestic or international. This is not always a mistaken premise ? Hitler and Pol Pot are cases in point ? but it is almost always mistaken. Over time, most regimes do change substantially if not essentially. One has only to look at the Soviet Union after 1956 and China after 1978."
Jowitt's conclusion is sobering:
"Given enough power, a conquering authority can impose any kind of rule it wishes on a defeated society. More often than not, however, military-political imposition produces social dissimulation, not cultural assimilation of the conqueror's way of life. As Aristotle and Durkheim knew, the types of political innovation most likely to be accepted by a defeated society must closely resemble previous, familiar forms of political life. In the case of a defeated Iraq that requires, at a minimum, the Bush administration?s recognition of and respect for the reality of ruling families as the central feature of Arab political life. Surely an easy task for what the Financial Times considers the most successful political family in American history."
Again, that final subtle dart is typical of the man's style. Recommended reading.
Diarist of the day: Iris Origo, 17 April 1944[Italy] "Spent the morning trying to alter the date of birth on the identity card of a young deserter who turned up this morning and firmly requested this service -- with the same confidence with which others have asked for a clean shirt or some food. It is much more difficult to do than on would think, even though the type of my machine is fortunately of the same size as that used in his document, the difficulty being to put the new figure precisely in line with the others. And clumsiness is lent to one's fingers by the thought that the boy's life may hang on it being well done."
