Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Star Trek, Captain Kirk, and Ariel Sharon

"The best diplomat that I know is a fully-loaded phaser bank."
Lt. Cdr. Montgomery Scott ("A Taste of Armageddon")

"A Taste of Armageddon" is the name of one of the episodes of the original Star Trek during its first season. Here's a short summary by Tom Keogh on Amazon.com:
the crew of the Enterprise gets caught in the middle of an interplanetary war between Eminiar and neighboring planet Vendikar. The twist is that the war is being fought on computers, and compliant residents of those "destroyed" areas obediently report to disintegration chambers, where their "virtual" death is made literal. When the Enterprise is "hit" in one of these simulations, both the warlords of Eminiar VII and Ambassador Fox fully expect Capt. Kirk and crew to report to the disintegration center. The feisty Kirk has other plans, of course.
In the conclusion of the episode, Kirk destoys the disintegration chambers and Vendikar declares real war on Eminiar when it sees that the virtual victims are not reporting to the chambers. When the war was kept artificially neat, clean, and tidy, the war between the 2 planets went on for generations, but with the prospect of a real and bloody war on their hands, there is an opportunity for negotiating a real peace between the two planets.

I was reminded of this episode by a piece by Amir Taheri (". . . And The Palestinians'?")

For a war to be won, it is not enough for one side to claim victory. It is also necessary for one side to admit defeat. Yet in the Arab-Israeli wars, the side that had won every time was not allowed to claim victory, while the side that had lost was prevented from admitting defeat. Why? Because each time the United Nations had intervened to put the victor and the vanquished on an equal basis and lock them into a problematic situation in the name of a mythical quest for an impossible peace.

With the UN artificially keeping the war as a stalemate with no real victor, there has never been an opportunity for real peace.
This novel situation saw bizarre new concepts invented to prevent the normal mechanisms of war and peace from functioning. These include such concepts as "land for peace" and "peace with justice." Yet there is no instance in history in which the winner of a war has given the loser any land in exchange for peace. Nor is there a single instance in which justice and peace went together as Siamese twins. In every case, the winner wins the land and gives the loser peace. In every case, the peace that is imposed is unjust to the loser and just to the winner.

Thus for more than 50 years Israel and the Arabs were asked to achieve what no others had ever achieved in history.

While I would not compare Ariel Sharon with Captain Kirk (wouldn't that make Ehud Olmert...Mr. Spock?), according to Taheri, Sharon does find his own way out of the conundrum:
Sharon understood that if such a formula remained in force, there would never be peace. It was necessary for the victor to claim victory, regardless of what anyone else said. It was also necessary for the victor to take unilateral action, imposing the peace it could live with.

I think there is alot to what Taheri writes about how the West in general, and the UN in particular, has prevented peace by preventing victory. At the same time, we are talking real life--and real death--as opposed to TV and movies, so whether Taheri's conclusions about the validity of Sharon's decisions themselves is another issue altogether. With expelled Jews still without homes and Kassams still being fired, the reality trumps the prose on the editorial page. Still, there is no denying the strong leadership of Sharon.

In an interview with Hugh Hewitt, Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal, and formerly of the Jerusalem Post, said of Sharon:
it would be hard to gainsay the fact that he's probably the most significant prime minister Israel has had since the founder, David Ben-Gurion.
There is something to such a claim, and considering that Sharon was in office for just 5 years (he was elected in February 2001) as Prime Minister of a country that is perpetually facing dilemmas--yet always finding a way to survive and succeed--that is saying quite a bit.

Maybe the comparison to Captain Kirk is not so far off. After all, in the original series--wasn't the Enterprise on a 5-year mission as well?

Crossposted at Israpundit

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2 comments:

PsychoToddler said...

First of all, I'm a big star trek fan.

Second, I blame this episode (and fiction like it) for perpetuating the myth of the "cycle of violence" and "moral equivalence."

The point of the show was that it was so easy just to sacrifice a few pawns with each attack cycle that there was never any incentive to stop the war. The episode also makes great pains to state that there isn't any real difference between the two sides, and nobody really even knows what the conflict is about. It's just revenge for revenge.

I don't see a parallel here. It's not like one side isn't totally trying to destroy the other and take their land. Israel would be glad to end the conflict.

Daled Amos said...

I guess I don't see the episode the same way--but it has been a long time.

My memory of the show is that there were more than a few pawns--that there were a number of disintegration centers. I don't recall a theme of a cycle of violence.

The point, I thought, was that the war was articifially maintained in such a way that since they no longer suffered the realities of war first hand, the conflict was going to go on indefinitely.

Similarly, since the Arabs do not have to really suffer the consequences of the wars they provoked. [See Caroline Glick's Washington Won't Let Israel Win] Instead, land that is lost is either returned or called "occupied"--as if they had a right to it to begin with.

Maybe I'm just making the comparison more broadly while you are going a little deeper.