Brett of Arabia
rides again.
Pity poor Brett McGurk. His counterpart for the Far East, Kurt Campbell, gets the number-two slot at State. Brett is left playing pinch hitter number three this week nearer to home.
He’s presumably meant to persuade friends in the Near East that America’s number-one client state, whose cabinet members and diplomats have adorned themselves with black shirts and yellow stars as it carries on with murdering thousands of innocents, is not playing some kind of sick joke. Somehow, he’s meant to say that the happier grand designs to which he’s devoted the last two decades of his life are still worth pursuing.
The less said about all this, the better. Or better yet, to turn once more for enlightenment to the late Charles McCarry:
The genteel American has not yet been born who will not go to almost any length to avoid being disrespectful of a foreigner’s culture, no matter how silly it seems, no matter how transparent the foreigner’s contempt for that American’s monkey-see-monkey-do behavior might be. Foreigners will spit out our foot and drink in disgust, challenge the intelligence of every idea we express, look amazed when we act according to our own etiquette instead of making the hilarious mistake of mimicking what we mistake for their own good manners. In this we are alone among the great powers of history. Ancient China laid its disdain on lesser peoples with a trowel, and modern China does the same. Timur the Lame did not make nice to conquered peoples by acting like a Han or a Turk. When the British or the French in their palmy days Gatling-gunned a few hundred Chinese or other racial inferiors, they didn’t apologize. They just told themselves that the slant-eyed beggars obviously placed no value on human life, and had a drink.