David Ignatius on the moral obligations of arsonists

David Ignatius is sort of the farm team Tom Friedman, regarded by his admirers as an astute and sophisticated observer of world affairs. When Friedman fell off the turnip truck and concussed himself on the road to Baghdad, only the lack of Friedman’s gift for incoherent analogy and metaphor kept Ignatius from replacing Friedman as the universally recognized dean of foreign policy pundits.

Analogy and metaphor are the keys to foreign policy punditry success. They’re like owning a good curve ball or change-up is for a major league pitcher. When your audience just can’t see the truth — when they’re too thick to understand your plain, incisive language, when even speaking s-l-o-w-l-y and L-O-U-D-L-Y doesn’t work — it’s essential that you have the ability to come up with a way to sneak your idea over the plate into the reader’s subconscious and flip the switch that illuminates it all.

So when Friedman, for instance, realized that some of his readers just couldn’t grasp his sophisticated “Hulk Smash” brand of foreign policy analysis, he came up with the simple but brilliantly subversive notion of the terrorism bubble. Countless hours of field research had shown him that the few among his audience who didn’t understand the need to attack Iraq were mostly drug-addled taxi drivers who had spent their formative years entranced by soap bubbles in broad meadows while massively under the influence of hallucinogens and would therefore, and perhaps only, understand the worthiness of the invasion in terms of the imperative of chasing and catching bubbles, and the regrettable inevitability of popping them. Bingo. Green light. The colors … who knows how many converts he won that day?

That was before his breakdown and subsequent incarceration in the Home for Shell-Shocked Pundits, and the subsequent high-voltage therapy that left him trapped in an endless feedback loop of Friedman Units.

When Friedman went down, Ignatius took note of both the great man’s successes and failures. Not for him the unending mockery Friedman incurred by repeatedly insisting, during the course of four years, that the next six months would tell the tale in Iraq; Ignatius wants us to stay forever, or until Iraqi forces are capable of securing the country on their own, whichever comes first.

But where Friedman was unparalleled, in the realm of metaphor and analogy, Ignatius challenged. And thus we have last Friday’s column, in which Iraq is a house on fire and we’re both the arsonists and the firemen, with responsibilities attached to both roles.

“Sometimes you just have to let a fire burn.” George Shultz, a former secretary of state who was trained as an industrial economist, is said to have made that remark about labor negotiations that have reached an impasse. There is a growing sense among Americans that we must apply this precept to Iraq.

But how far should we let the Iraqi fire burn, and at what cost to the rest of the neighborhood? And how do we keep faith with people trapped inside the building?

[...]

This nation is so angry about Iraq that we sometimes forget what would be obvious if it was a four-alarm blaze in a nearby city. Some fires do have to burn, but leaving the scene isn’t an option.

Imagine if you will that the mayor of Ignatius’s nearby city orders a large apartment building firebombed — which isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds — and then orders his firemen in to both douse the blaze and pour fuel on it, and orders them to help some of the residents and shoot others of them, all the while refusing to let the ones who want to leave, out. And then imagine that this goes on for five years, or six, or ten, with firemen and residents all dying at an escalating pace. And no one on the town council sees fit to do anything about it.

Of course the analogy isn’t that straightforward. It was the mayor of a city halfway across the country who took it upon himself to firebomb your neighbours, who decided that high explosives were a better firefighting tool than water and who refused to take your advice or anyone else’s about how best to manage the conflagration.

And of course even the more limited analogy breaks down pretty quickly, since we’re not just ignoring neighborly advice but actively threatening the neighbors with more of the same. “You want a piece of this?”

Analogies are inherently tricky things, and they work worst when you’re inventing them to explain a theory that is born almost entirely of desire. After 911, Friedman wanted to kill someone, or rather to have someone killed on his behalf; he didn’t particularly care who, but it was a pressing need. So he invented a theory under which that was required, and then he invented a whole series of crippled analogies aimed at persuading people to his point of view when, inexplicably, they didn’t understand that we had to go kill some people more or less at random. The analogies don’t hold up because his understanding of the circumstances they were meant to explain was, in the most charitable description, fatally flawed.

Ignatius is starting from an opposite but equally primal point: we can’t leave because there are lives to be saved. He can’t examine whether or not staying is actually helpful because in his mind, there’s no alternative to staying, just as in Friedman’s mind, there was no alternative to invading (if not Iraq, then Saudi Arabia or Syria or whomever— someplace with lots of Muslims and unattractive leaders). The alternatives for Ignatius are only to pour less fuel on the fire, or different kinds of fuel, or at different locations within the blaze; he can’t consider any other option. It’s a virtuous impulse but it’s as divorced from reality as was Friedman’s more violent one.

You can find a painfully telling example of Ignatius’s urge toward faith in another column, from May of this year, when he wrote about the progress of Iraqi troops under U.S. tutelage, and the significance of the American willingness to arm them.

We pass a squadron of Iraqi soldiers who have just been issued M-16 rifles to replace their old Saddam Hussein-era AK-47s. They hoist the American-made weapons and let out what sounds like a spontaneous cheer. “The M-16s are telling them there’s a change,” says Capt. Matthew Sparks. In procuring U.S. weapons for these soldiers, the idea was that America would be around for many years to help train and supply a friendly Iraqi military. You don’t give combat rifles, after all, to potential adversaries.

We do, though, give combat rifles to potential adversaries; we’ve been doing so since we got there, and as we learned not long after Ignatius’s stirring portrait of the training regime, we’re also giving them to people we know have been shooting at us and will likely do so again when it suits them. The story of the cheering troops is a measure of Ignatius’s determination to not just suspend disbelief but permanently erase it from his repertoire; after all, his own newspaper has printed multiple stories about U.S. troops resigned to the reality that people they train with by day are shooting them by night.

But that’s what makes a top-drawer pundit: the ability to create one’s own universe, with its own internal (and eternal) logic. By that standard, Ignatius has arrived among the greats. Who cares if his work suffers a bit in translation?