STRANGE THINGS

By Nelson Ascher

Francophile intellectuals like Tony Judt like to compare the Intifadah to the Algerian terror war against the French half a century ago. One of the reasons they do it, obviously, is because it belongs to their field, that is, French studies and so, they’re kind of acquainted with at least a certain version of it. Another reason, arguably, is because, since it happened, and happened in a certain way with the known results, all this looks inevitable in retrospect and, therefore, it’s attractive to use that specific version of a particular past history as a predictive model, a model according to which the Palestinians will inevitably win (because the Algerian terrorists have won). Finally, for them, one of the most interesting reasons for drawing such a parallel is because, whenever it is not stated clearly, then it is transparently suggested that the Jews are foreign colonizers as, according to their version, the French (and Spanish, Italian etc.) “colons” were. After all, the official Gaullist and leftist history of the Algerian war leaves us in no doubt that the “colons” would be defeated anyway because their presence in North Africa was illegitimate: that was not their land and they had nothing to do there.

This very same people, after 911, began also to compare Al Qaeda tactics to what the Algerians did against the French. (And, by the way, the simple fact of calling Arab Muslims born in Algeria Algerians, and Christian or Jewish or atheist Algerian born descendants of people coming from the North Mediterranean French should already be considered a partial way of interpreting the facts.) The implications are clear: terrorism is unbeatable and terror is a winner. That the Algerian war (as Vietnam too) was one of a kind and that, in the end, it’s result spelled disaster for Algeria and, maybe in the near future, for France too, these are points seldom considered. Thou there are some similarities between the Intifadah and Algeria, the differences seem to be much more important. And in the case of 911, except for the fact that the attacks were perpetrated by Arabs and that they were terror attacks, it is hard to find any meaningful or relevant kind of parallel.

Except, in both cases, for one, perhaps the most important and less discussed.

One of the main dissimilarities between the Algerian war and the Arab-Israeli conflict (of which the Intifadah is just the newest chapter) is that, in spite of many problems, the majority of the so-called native population of North Africa was not rejecting the so-called colonizers, while the Jews have been rejected by the Arabs since it became clear that they didn’t want to be “dhimmis”, or third-class citizens (because in Arab societies the natives themselves, with the exception of the ruling clan, group or family, are the second-class citizens). The Algerian war was initiated by a non-representative minority that used terror as a way of inviting French/”colon” hostility against and suspicion of each and every Arab. Their goal seems to have been that of provoking a French overreaction that would, in its turn, excite an Arab hostility against the French thus reversing, anyway, all tendencies that worked in favour of a dissolution of ethnic-racial-religious differences and animosity. Whatever else such tactics may accomplish, one result is something that could be called the “burning of the ships”, that is, a situation from which no retreat is possible.

Now, bombing a bus full of kids in Jerusalem or destroying an office-building in Manhattan are not exactly effective ways of winning any kind of war. They are manifestations of pure, irrational hatred, that goes almost without saying. But they are also ways of making sure that the perpetrators and whoever else is or could be associated with them will be hated. The consequence of the deliberate and indiscriminate massacre of innocent civilians is that , with or without the creation of a Palestinian state, with or without real peace, the Palestinians will be hated by the Israeli Jews for at least one whole generation and, if Muslim fundamentalist terror succeeds in striking once more the US in such a scale, the same can be expected from the Americans in relation to the Arab world. What’s in both these cases different from the Algerian war is that the Arab Muslim hatred is not a consequence of any Israeli or American “overreaction”, because it already existed. There’s something even stranger: while any kind of “overreaction” would have anyway been (and was) counter-productive in Algeria, there’s nothing to prove that, on the contrary, it wouldn’t be highly productive for both Israelis and Americans to “overreact”. Actually, Hamas and Islamic Jihad count on Israel being forced by the US, the EU and the UN to “underreact” and, as far as is known, Bin Laden and the Taleban were expecting at most a token reaction from the US. Arafat probably wanted to provoke an Israeli overreaction in order to internationalise the conflict, but if this didn’t happen during or immediately after “Jeningrad”, then it becomes each day less likely. And surely that’s not the way Hamas or Islamic Jihad think: they don’t seem eager to welcome foreign, Christian, even American troops, in Gaza.

Finally, it would be useful to compare all this with a similar kind of probably self-defeating behaviour. Before, during and after the liberation of Iraq there have been countries, in Europe for instance, that had no real, realistic, rational hope of influencing the American administration’s decisions. Those countries don’t seem to have acted so much to change the course of events as in order to enrage, as much as possible, American opinion against them. In this they have been quite successful. This outcome seems to have been actively wished. How long will it take for us to know exactly why?

Sorry I haven't posted here on EuroPundits for so long; I've been busy with my own blog and everything else that's part of life. But there's some really big political news coming out of Spain.

Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar of the conservative People's Party promised, back in 1996 when he was first elected, that he would serve only two terms. He's kept his promise. Mariano Rajoy, First Vice-Prime Minister, Minister of Presidency (Chief of Staff, more or less), and PP spokesman, will be the PP's candidate in the March 2004 general elections. The question is who he will face; Socialist leader Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero may very well not be leader for much longer. Zapatero is widely viewed as weak, vacillating, and not very smart.

Here is Fernando Onega's analysis from today's La Vanguardia. I think it's very good and so I've translated it here.

Viewed with hindsight, with the easy logic of predicting the past, Mariano Rajoy Brey wasn't chosen as the successor this weekend. He was chosen the day Jose Maria Aznar named him first vice-prime minister. That is, Aznar made him his number two. And being the prime minister's number two means being his right-hand man and acting as prime minister in case of absence or illness.

That is, Rajoy has been situated in the best place, definitely at the head of the race for the succession, for more than three years, since spring 2000. During that time he had to do nothing more than make no mistakes and not disappoint the man who chose him. And he knew it. He knew it, because he often describes the Prime Minister as a "perfectly forseeable man". And he knew it, of course, last Friday when he appeared before the press after the Cabinet meeting; his face of happiness was that of the athlete who has just crossed the finish line first.

Why didn't the rest of us figure out or want to see something so elementary? For three reasons we all remember: because they have entertained us wisely, or astutely, with the troika completed by Rodrigo Rato and Jaime Mayor; because we doubted Don Mariano's ambition; and because Rodrigo Rato was too clear in his desire to be the successor. We supposed that so much clarity--some say daring--was a symptom that he felt secure in his aspirations.

Now, there are two questions that must be analyzed. The first, why the calendar of the succession was moved up, though only by a few weeks. And the second, why Rodrigo Rato lost the race. Regarding the calendar, we are doubtlessly in the presence of another wise move by Mr. Aznar. At a moment when he felt himself under pressure from the opposition and part of public opinion because of the Iraq situation (as Jordi Barbeta pointed out yesterday), the most intelligent thing to do is put another spotlight on the stage. And, regarding the leak last Saturday, it was aimed, simply, at stealing attention from the Socialist Party's plans on the status of the regions (comunidades autonomas). Mission accomplished: what was on the front pages of the newspapers Friday disappeared the next day. One of the norms of Spanish politics was thus fulfilled: the magic of a name is more important than a proposal for the distribution of power by the State.

But this is all anecdotal now. Why did Rato lose this race? Didn't they say that he was, or is, Aznar's best friend within the People's Party? They did say that. Nevertheless, we must apply logic again: if Aznar had wanted Rato to be his successor, he'd have made him first vice-president. And he never did. That means that, at least, he has had doubts during all these years. Then, the poor choices made by Rodrigo Rato in the naming of certain public servants in the economic sector, the mud splattered from the Gescartera scandal, the questions about some loans made to his family members, made him less attractive to the Prime Minister.

And one small detail: Mr. Rato went through the breakup of his marriage at the worst, most inopportune moment, when the athletes in the race were already on the track. You may wonder whether, these days, a family conflict can affect a political race. And the answer, in influential PP circles, of course close to the minister of Economics (that is, Rato), was very straightforward: "In Spain, and especially in Aznar's Spain, these situations are determining. It may be as lamentable as you want to make it, but that's the way it is." If we also consider that Rato is the manager of Spain's economic success, but his aspiration is a program somewhat different from pure Aznarism, we have all the facts to explain the decision.

In contrast to this, Rajoy has a balance sheet with no blots on it to show his mentor: he's always been at his side, when Aznar took the reins of the party or when he suffered the assassination attempt (Note: In 1995, before Aznar was elected PM, ETA blew off a car bomb as Aznar's armored limousine passed by. A bystander was killed and Aznar survived only because of the armor on his car. His unflappability at the scene of the crime was taken by many people as a sign of either a cool head or cold blood, both important qualities in a leader.--JC); he was one of the authors of the initial purge of the PP(Note: The first thing Aznar did when he took over as PP leader was kick out the old Franquistas and machine politicians.--JC) in order to form a political party made to order for Aznar and for these times; his bank accounts are above all suspicion; and his sentimental life, despite some rumors from Pontevedra this summer, is stable.

From the point of view of the Administration, Rajoy's biography seems prepared for the objectives that have been set for him: He has been a cabinet minister since those early days of clumsiness and allainces made under pressure; he has run four difficult ministries, which gives him experience that no other candidate has; he has managed communication in a way never before seen by public opinion; and he has always been by Aznar's side, in the Cabinet and the crises, in reciprocal influence which has made him, if not imprescendible, necessary. Aznar found in Rajoy the strategist capable of directiong a campaign that gave him an absolute majority, and something not very frequent among the political class: deep common sense expressed with humor and a calm character that provided peace and quiet for his leader.

During the race, Rajoy has had the advantage over Rato in details very significant for Aznar: he has known how to save the Prime Minister's face in the most difficult moments. Rato specialized in speaking only at the most favorable moments, and this was interpreted in the Moncloa (the Spanish "White House") as an excess of selfishness. Rajoy, on the other hand, took the reins in the Prestige (the tanker that sank off the Galician coast causing a serious oil spill) situation and carried the burden of the most difficult part of that tragedy and of the explanations given to the press and the Parliament. Whatever your judgment of the role he played, there is no doubt that he was the strongest support the Prime Minister had. And a fact that is unignorable: he moved into first place in the surveys.

And what is to be said about the Iraq crisis? Last March 4, Mariano Rajoy surprised everybody by requesting the floor in the Congress of Deputies (the lower house of Parliament). The minister of Foreign Affairs or perhaps the Minister of Defense should have spoken. But it was Rajoy who asked for the floor. And he gave a speech that was not improvised, but rather full of facts and dates and historical events. That day he did not act as the vice-prime minister. He acted as the authentic second-string prime minister. His words filled out the image of a man who, up to that point, seemed only to manage questions of domestic policy. He was much more "universal" than that; much more, certainly, than any of the other aspirants.

March 4 was, because of that, another important date in the race for the succession. If Aznar still had any doubts, that day Rajoy cleared them up. And he cleared them up in front of his own party; the PP deputies enjoyed themselves like they never had before. They brought down the house with applause. They laughed, like every time Rajoy brought out his Galician irony. They were full of "Marian enthusiasm" (an untranslatable pun--JC), without realizing it, they were acclaiming and proclaiming their future leader. Aznar, at a distance, saw his impressions confirmed: "This is the man". Even if in the PP there had been any impulses of resistance, something improbable, those parliamentary scenes cleared up the horizon.

Looking into the future, as in Machado's poem, nothing is written down yet. But something has been made obvious: the People's Party, as well as Spanish politics, is going down the path of continuity. Don't expect big novelties or acrobacies in general policy. There will be a formal co-leadership, but so much is agreed upon by these two politicians that any discrepancies are improbable. Economic policy will stay the same. Foreign policy will be run according to an identical pragmatism. And the big question of these times, that of territorialism (the division of power between the central government and the regions--JC), will not change: Mariano Rajoy was the first minister of an Aznar Administration whom this journalist heard--seven years ago!--saying that the regional map was already set. Since then there have been no symptoms of change in this area. The opposite: Rajoy's references to the nationalisms and nationalist tensions are suaver than Aznar's in their form, but just as radical as those of Aznar in their reality. One Spanish nationalist will succeed another, but this time with a smile on his face.

This is precisely the change that was expected and which one could even demand: that Rajoy, if he finally becomes Prime Minister, will incorporate a different style: no one will tell Arzalluz, "with this man there is nothing to discuss"; the Socialist regional prime ministers will not ask vainly for meetings in the Moncloa; those who disagree will not be considered enemies; ingenuity will replace insult; and irony will replace intransigence. And one thing is sure: we're going to have a lot more fun.

AN ART APART

By Nelson Ascher

(I’ve promised some time ago to discuss the translation of literary works and, particularly, of poetry here. As JFK himself once said: let us begin. If there’s something I hate about those Muslim fanatics who’ve perpetrad 911 is that they have forced me to write about other subjects. Let’s, please, win this war quickly so that I can get back to the topics that really interest me like, say, the translation of poetry. What follows is part of the foreword I wrote, in Portuguese, in 1998, for my collected translations of foreign poetry.)

The translation of poetry is an art apart, singular, surrounded on every side by misunderstandings and crossed, in all its levels, by paradoxes. It looks like poetry, but it is not poetry; it resembles and, sometimes, is confused with translation proper (the activity that consists in transposing, reproducing, transplanting from one language into another the content and/or sense of some text, be it the manual of operation of a video-player or “The Critique of Pure Reason", be it a report of the meeting of the managing board of the Bank of Tokyo or “Madame Bovary"), but it is not translation proper. In a value order that is at least rational and provides a hierarchy of intellectual activities according to their complexity and dignity, it wouldn’t be considered something intrinsically below poetry itself, but neither would it be seen as necessarily above translation proper.
The criteria, whichever they are, according to which a poem or a translation is evaluated are not enough to really evaluate the translation of a poem. There are two sayings regarding that activity that are frequently quoted. The first, attributed to the American poet Robert Frost, says that poetry is “what is lost in the translation”, and (particularly if we are thinking of the characteristics of translation proper) it is rigorously true. The second, on the other hand, typically French and older, as it asserts that translations, like women, when they are faithful are not beautiful and when they are beautiful are not faithful, could hardly be wronger. And that because the result of this art we are discussing can be" beautiful", but not in the way the poem that has been translated is beautiful; and it can also be "faithful", but not in the way the translation of the manual of operation of a video-player or of "Madame Bovary" are faithful. To be considered good, however, it has to be both “beautiful" and" faithful", but in its own ways.
Many of the misunderstandings come from the usual, but mistaken, identification of this art with those other activities from which it differs in many relevant things. The paradoxes, in their turn, derive precisely from the many things, no less important, that all of them, in different degrees, share among them. To translate poetry is not the same as, let us say, to translate prose fiction. Why? Because a story, a soap-opera, a novel (even if splendidly written) are made WITH words, while a poem, any poem, is by definition made OF words.
A translation of "Madame Bovary", made from the Spanish rendition of its English translation, into an ugly and bad Portuguese, if it manages to retain the narrative’s skeleton and to keep recognizable the characters and their actions - the fiction - will still be, in spite of everything and despite of its terrible presentation, even if deprived of at least half its charm, Flaubert’s oeuvre. On the other hand, even the best, more meticulous, sensitive and refined of its renditions, a translation made with dedication and ability by someone who, besides being absolutely fluent in the language of the original, besides being a scholar and an expert on that author and book, is also an accomplished stylist in the language into which he/she is translating, will continue to be the French author's property, although, in that case, the reader of the translation and the language into which the book has been translated (not to speak of the book itself and its author) can be considered to be in debt with the translator.
Nevertheless whoever limits himself to reproduce, even if perfectly, in another language the plot, the narrative, the argument and even the stylistic elegance of a sonnet written by Dante (or Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Rilke etc.), leaving aside both the rigorously physical way in which the choice of a word determines the choice of the others, and the ambiguities, the intentional double and triple senses, the symmetries and asymmetries of sound, grammar, syntax, the calculated cadence of syllables and their stresses, the consonances and dissonances that amalgamate one phoneme to the others, the various ways according to which all this, in different degrees of nuance, is articulated with words, sentences, periods as well as with the several registers of this or that language in such or such time and place - whoever carries out in this way such a task might have done quite a useful and necessary job, but, besides having not actually translated a poem, he has created a text that, in a way, does not belong to anyone, not to him nor to the poet, because it does not exist by itself, and is at best an instrument or a tool to help the reader to get to the original poem.
And we cannot blame any translator for such a result because what is supra-idiomatic in almost every work of fiction is also what really counts in it, what defines it, while the majority of good poems, being so intimately and inextricably linked to the languages in which they are written, in the end become untranslatable. Ever since the remote day in which poetry appeared, most poems (good or bad) talk about the very same half-dozen banal subjects, developing them always according to some very few variations which have been repeated over and over for centuries without end.
What poets usually say is basically the following: you are young and beautiful and I love you, or you are old and ugly and I don't love you; my son or daughter or father or mother is a wonder or a disgrace; the cat (or the dog, the horse, the lion, the tiger etc.) is mysterious and unfriendly (or faithful, swift, proud, ferocious etc.); life (that may or may not be a dream) is good and short and I am afraid of dying, or life is bad and long and I am tired of it; my village (or city, region, country) is the most lovely of all and I miss it so much, or it is hateful and I want to leave it and never return; Jehovah or Zeus or Allah is good and we should respect him, or is cruel and bad to us, or simply doesn't exist; how competent, honest, just and kind, or incompetent, corrupt, overbearing and sadistic, our king or ruler or leader is; nothing is better (or worse) than war; everything changes in the world, or there is nothing new under the sun. Longer and/or complex poems habitually combine and recombine in various ways those cliches in order to arrive to other, larger ones such as: you are beautiful and I love you, but you are coy as and don't love me; because of this, life seems bad and long to me, and, being proud as a lion, I am leaving my village, the loveliest of villages, and will go to the war, because it is the best of things; remember, however, that you will soon be old and ugly and nobody will love you anymore.
Thus, what is supra-idiomatic in a poem is seldom important. In other words, foreign prose writers can exist, so to say, in person in a language different from the one in which they wrote, but the same cannot be said of the great lyrical poets. A great translation into Portuguese of a sonnet by Dante (or Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Rilke etc.) is not, cannot be, the original poem not even in the sense in which the worst Brazilian "Madame Bovary" continues to be Flaubert’s novel, because, among other reasons, the greater the distance between the languages in question, more will any similarity between the language of the original and that of the translation belong to the category of happy coincidences, coincidences, let it be said,, that may sometimes be the result of hard work. Poetry is, in fact, "what gets lost in the translation", and whatever poetry can be found in a translation, although correlated in a way to that of the original, cannot but be something different.
The translation of poetry is, therefore, an art (or a literary gender) that has its own characteristics. What it has in common with poetry in general is the fact that it has to reach, physically, the same degree of linguistic complexity (if it is at all possible to measure something like that). With translation proper it shares the obligation of keeping an empirically verifiable relationship with an original written in another language. Contrary, however, to what happens with an original poem, the subject of a translation is not just another among those classic platitudes, another among the consecrated irrelevancies: its subject or theme – uniquely important to it –is nothing less than another poem. And, differently from translation proper, it is required of the translation of poetry that, going beyond the transposition of the supra-idiomatic material, it show results that do not always keep a simple and easily verifiable relationship with its original. The translation of a poem, as that of any text, can be wrong; in the case of the poetry, however, the right translation does not exist: once it is not wrong, it will be (with all possible intermediate gradations) good or bad.
Nevertheless, maybe this art’s central element is not so much that one in which it resembles or differs from its obvious consanguineous relatives as its less evident relatedness to fiction. To seriously present a poem issued from the pen, or rather, from the computer of a living Brazilian writer (something written, say, in the late twentieth century’s Sao Paulo variant of the Portuguese language spoken in Brazil) as being the work of a Roman poet who wrote two thousand years ago his odes in Latin is something worthy of the imagination of a Jorge Luis Borges. But what kind of fiction is the translation of poetry?
The characters, plots, situations and the action of some stories, soap-operas and novels are 100% fictitious, but this is not the general rule. Writers, more frequently, use to get inspiration from what they have seen, heard, read. In certain cases, however, without being in fact writing biographies or historiographical works, they make the point that their characters (and everything else) correspond closely to existing people with whom they can thus be identified without undue difficulty. Their motivation can vary from lack of imagination, from the desire to find or preserve the meaning of a given time and place, from the political need to avoid censorship, to a simple personal revenge. Although appearing under several forms and sizes, that sub-gender’s official (French) name is roman-a-clef, and its best samples may transcend the limits of its time and place of origin, so that its characters, surviving the actual men and women who inspired them, become in the end (almost) genuinely fictional. The roman-a-clef, in a narrow sense, is considered a lesser form of literature.
In any case it is hardly deniable that, if we take the expression roman-a-clef in a wider sense, the masterworks of Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust or James Joyce belong, in smaller or greater measure, in this category, and that this, besides not making them less valuable, is delightful for both critics and readers who can thus extend and deepen the pleasure of reading by trying detective-like to find out what flesh-and-bone human being had inspired the creation of this or that fictional character. When some biography or a book of history, an encyclopedia, a collection of letters or some file reveals the "key", that is, the human being that is “behind" Leopold Bloom, or the Baron of Charlus, or Adrian Leverkühn, these creatures made of paper and ink become even more fascinating fictions. The translation of poetry is precisely this kind of fictional work.
It is easy, after such a definition, to describe and examine the pertinent (and not just the metaphorical) parallels that can be found between the roman-a-clef in the wider sense and the translation of poetry. Being at the same time an imaginative text and one linked to something real, that kind of translation can, taking off from the most different intentions, work its subject or" story", that is, a pre-existing foreign poem, according to multiple stylistic strategies and/or different combinations of these. It is not forbidden (and why should it be?) for it to process its raw material in ways that, opening a fan of stylistic strategies, go from the realistic and naturalistic to the magical realistic and the Baroque, passing by any school that has existed or could be invented. The narrator might, for instance, pretend that he is absent, that the facts speak by/for themselves and, in that case, we can speak of the famous illusion of the translator's invisibility. Or he can emphasize the obviousness of his own presence, either to become himself character, or to remind the reader that all that is but a story, the "stuff dreams are made of". But these other possible approaches are, of course, just fictional ARTIFICES, and thus it is quite strange that, in these post-modern times of ours, readers familiar with the vast repertoire supplied by successive narrative fashions still stick, when what is being discussed is the translation of poetry, to a single approach, naively believing that it is this and only this approach that has a privileged relationship with truth itself.
The quality of a translation of the kind discussed above is linked, on one hand, to its intrinsic poetic quality because it must be readable, without reference to the original, as an autonomous poem. And, in those terms, there is nothing that makes a translation something irrevocably inferior to its original. The qualitative textual inferiority, when not a mere illusion created by the Walter Benjaminian “aura”, by the temporal precedence of what is being translated, is not a logical but only a practical consequence of the trivial fact that the poems translators chose to work on are frequently the best, most complex, elaborate or perfect among those written in a given language. Consequently, a reader who, not vitiated by the previous knowledge of which one is the oldest text, compared, for instance, Villon’s “La Balade des Dames des Temps Jadis" to its splendid Brazilian translation (into sixteenth century Portuguese) by Guilherme of Almeida, or Apolinaire’s "Zone" to Samuel Beckett’s English translation, would not reach obligatorily the conclusion that the original is superior. There are many historical examples proving that the illusion due to the knowledge of temporal precedence and the consequent prestige of the earlier text are not always omnipresent: how many poems are there, after all, that owe their status as originals to the disappearance or the forgetting of a previous original?
This is no excuse, of course, for a translation of poetry to avoid satisfying the usual requisites of the translation proper, although it is its prerogative and, not seldom, its very obligation to deal with the same elements with which translation proper deals (literal or supra-idiomatic content) according to a different set of priorities. Thus the lack of an adequate literal understanding of the foreign poem and/or the incapacity of presenting it in the final result compromises the quality of the translation of poetry, although it is important never to forget that there are mistakes and mistakes. Even the most fluent of translators from a given foreign language can be a victim of lapses and Freudian slips. Any educated reader (but, as it seems, few among those who write about or review translations) is capable of, without any difficulty, distinguishing between a professional's understandable misunderstandings and the grotesque mistakes committed by an amateur. The malice present in the willing confusion of the first kind of mistakes (which should always, of course, be pointed out) with the second is everywhere a mark of the worst critics and reviewers.
But what in the end will (or will not) make of the products of that art something qualitatively good are those same peculiarities, difficult to define and still more difficult to measure (although usually easy to see), that are responsible for the quality both of the roman-a-clef and of fiction in general as well, actually, as of any literary work: skill, intelligence, sharpness of perception, sensitivity, elegance, the capacity of finding better and less obvious solutions etc. It is their inherent paradoxes as well as the unnecessary misunderstandings that impede, in many places, a lot of people of seeing and, worse, of enjoying the translation of poetry as an art that, amid its own splendors and miseries, is as complex and problematic, as refined and demanding, as pleasing and distressing, as useful and useless and, above all, as impossible as any other art.

MORE TROOPS ?

By Nelson Ascher

Most of the same commentators who were against the Anglo-Australian-American liberation of Iraq (and even some who were in favour of it), that is, those who were against the presence of foreign troops in sacred Arab-Muslim lands, are now backing the deployment of more American or foreign troops in the country.

If that sounds like a contradiction, that’s because it really is one.

But then, the situation has changed, and the Anglo-Saxons weren’t exactly defeated, either in the UN or on the ground. And since they didn’t lose the war, well, what’s needed now is a little help to make them lose the so-called peace.

There’s talk of enlisting UN or NATO (in other word, French and German) help in Iraq. Now, why the hell would someone invite people whose foremost goal is America’s failure? Even if their troops would go to Iraq, what kind of help could they provide? In the best case they’d supply more targets for the Saddamist diehards and for the Islamic radicals. In the worst, they’d actively undermine American rule there.

The situation is basically the same as in the contested territories: Gaza and the West Bank. The only troops that are needed there are the Israeli ones. To fight the terrorists. American troops, in such places, would be unwilling human-shields, while Euro troops would be there clearly to protect the terrorists. It’s not for nothing that the central objective of Arafat’s Intifada has been the internationalisation of the conflict. Besides pure and simple American pressure, the only reason for Sharon not having, up to now, smoked out the terrorats from their holes has been the need to avoid any kind of international interference. The Jenin massacre fiction was nothing but a stratagem to put in place a UN Trojan Horse.

Many nasty things may happen, but there’ll be no Palestinian victory without direct foreign help. The same can be said about Iraq. The only way the US can still lose the game is by allowing UN or NATO troops in the country. If Bush does this, the he can also invite in Saudi, Syrian, Lybian, Palestinian and Al Qaeda combatants too. Oh, wait: aren’t they already there?

On the other hand, the role of more American troops would be different. But just slightly. They wouldn’t necessarily mean an American defeat, though they’d probably make it more likely. But they would surely spell problem for Bush next year.

The UN compound has been bombed in Baghdad. The mosque in Najaff too. So what? Bombay and Bali have been bombed and I see nobody asking for international intervention either in India or Indonesia. Or, for that matter, in NY and Washington.