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A War of Narratives

[New York Times, 8Apr07] David Brooks - The Walt and Mearsheimer paper on the Israel lobby has had a profound effect on Arab elites. It has encouraged them not to be introspective, not to think about their own problems, but to blame everything on the villainous Israeli network. And so we enter a more intractable phase in the conflict, a war over narratives. The Arabs will demand that the U.S. and Israel adopt their narrative and admit historical guilt. Failing politically, militarily and economically, they will fight a battle for moral superiority, the kind of battle that does not allow for compromises or truces. Americans, meanwhile, will simply want to get out. Most Americans have given up on their ability to transform the Middle East and on Arab willingness to change. Faced with an arc of conspiracy-mongering, most Americans will get sick of the whole cesspool, and will support any energy policy or anything else that will enable them to cut ties with the region. What we have is not a clash of civilizations, but a gap between civilizations, increasingly without common narratives, common goals or means of communication.
2007-04-12 01:00:00
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