Storytelling

I link to this not to start an argument about the Israeli-Palestinean situation, nor even to decry America's perennial stance on that issue. It's not even up-to-date, for heaven's sake. No, I simply point it out to remind us all that all country's, allies or not, vote and act, in the end, according to their own interests. These interests may not be the "will" of the people necessarily, even in the most stridently democratic countries like Britain and America, but they are official position nonetheless. My point: when a country takes such a position, it often contravenes those of its closest allies. The same holds true whether it be France or the United States.

Yes, I realize there are some marked, qualified differences between the resolutions linked above and those that call for aggressive military action, like resolution 1441 of today; moreover, neither am I suggesting a (necessary) moral equivalence between the Israeli and Iraqi situations. The point is, though, that much of the UN's power in certain situations lies in its symbolism. A cynic, i.e. many an American, thus dismisses it as irrelevant, perhaps even perniciously so ("they're slowing us down!"). The danger in that kind of thinking should be evident by now in the fact that the U.S. is still playing the UN-support game, even when it is quite obvious that America will not be beholden to UN resolutions. All the same, the U.S. wants and needs to appear as to have international support.

What has become problematic is that the veneer of American compromise and cooperation has become a bit tarnished. Consequently, the appearance that America attempts to uphold in the UN is, at best, not taken too seriously; at worst, it is regarded as isolationistic cynicism. When the story one tells oneself and one's neighbor is regarded as too much of a story, it is no longer convincing. When this story is one of geopolitics, and it is inserted into a complex web of regional violence, oppression, and manipulation, much of which is interpreted through an equally isolationistic worldview, the story America attempts to tell, the appearance it attempts to project, the alternative reality it seeks to create, had better be convincing for the people of that region. (Like in a criminal court of law, the truth is secondary to the proof used to convince a jury of a truth, guilt or innocence -- the truth between / of two competing narratives.) One need not agree with everything Henry Porter writes here (and I don't) to agree that the story America has told to the Middle East for the past thirty years has not been bought.

If American is truly serious about combatting the terrorism that is rooted in the region's Islamic fundamentalism, then it needs to get more serious about the power and the coherence of it stories and the means and reception of its storytelling. Sadly, but maybe inevitably(?), this is something that yesterday's protesters, even if they don't always realize it themselves, have a firmer grasp upon than the centres of power they're protesting against.