Roger L. Simon eviscerates Ross Douthat on the future of freedom in the Middle East. As he notes:
The problem is that Douthat et al have no answer other than the snide to Ledeen’s optimism because they have no answer, no proposal, at all. They offer fashionable hard-boiled realism which, in the end, is only laziness. Whoever said democracy would be easy in those places? (Maybe some did, but they were wrong in that. But that doesn’t make them wrong in their intention.) We are in this for the long haul, the very long haul. I would suggest Mr. Douthat suck it up and give the optimists their due. They’re the ones driving the car forward… unless he has a better concrete suggestion.
That’s one of the big problems I have with the left. On international issues, what does the left stand for? When they stand for anything, it’s usually the vision of some kind of hazy multipolar world where everyone just gets along. They believe in the idea of the UN, but seem to be completely unconcerned that their vision and the reality of the UN don’t even remotely meet. Most of the left’s foreign policy consists of nihilism, the idea that the US should become isolationist and try to ignore events beyond our shores. Is it any wonder that the far left is seeing eye-to-eye with the xenophobic paleocons. Both want America to go home humbled.
Meanwhile, it is the “neocons” that have some kind of vision for the future of the international sphere. Representative government is the only system of government that coincides with the doctrine of human rights. If we believe that human rights are indeed universal, we can’t ignore governments that egregiously violate those rights. One can argue that such a view is a bit too ambitious or naive, but to argue as Douthat does that the people of Iran are somehow so alien and insular to us that they do not share the most basic human aspirations reaks of xenophobia, intentional or otherwise.
The fact is that it is the right that are the ones defending the doctrines of human rights worldwide. The left continues to mire in a pit of cultural relativism, moral nihilism, virulent anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism, and the idea that anything that involves the use of military power is instantly morally tainted. Such an attitude is not only morally and intellectually lazy, but in a world where the events in a backwater like Afghanistan can have world-altering consequences, dangerous.
It used to be that it was the left lecturing everyone about the value of democracy. Now it appears that the left has joined with the far right in rekindling the spirit of isolationism and xenophobia.
I can’t speak for “The Left,” that abstract bogeyman meant to identify everybody who doesn’t call Milton Friedman their hero, but I think I can speak for the 56% of Americans who oppose the war in Iraq. When engaged in a war against terrorists who defend the blood they spill through religion, it might not be the best idea to, in mid-course, expand that war to include a secular state unconnected to the terrorists that had no means of doing us harm until we planted more than 100,000 of our troops on their soil.
As far as grandiose themes of nation-building and expanding human rights, we were told for years that free markets would peacefully move all the world’s people towards Western ideals. So far, the righties are 0-for-1 in predicting foreign policy outcomes. This is kind of surprising seeing as how Republicans are winning elections at home on the grounds that cultural purity is more important than economics. Why on Earth do you continue to believe that Coca-Cola and Levis are gonna replace the Koran on the other side of the globe?
For all its faults, the United Nations realizes that any chance of transitioning hostile regions of the world towards civilized societies is going to take time and patience. It will not be achievable by thrusting the U.S. and British military into every dissenting nation with guns-a-blazing. The well-documented Christian extremist movement in America, where top military commander William Boyken speaks for a third of our population by declaring war in the Middle East as a re-enactment of the Bible, will only fuel the fires of those who view our endgame as the evisceration of everything Islam. Simply put, any attempts at nation-building headlined by the United States are likely to go just as poorly as our current experiment.
Another good example why human rights language from the right rings hollow abroad is the fact that the same voices dismiss the need for human rights provisions in trade agreements with countries like China. A sixth-grader from any nation could easily discern that American rhetoric about human rights is only on the table when there is a perceived political or economic benefit for the American right in embracing them, such as Cuba or Iraq.
Countless imperialists from Alexander the Great to Joseph Stalin have discovered that world takeover is alot more difficult that it may seem for the naively ambitious. Much as liberals would like to see every corner of the world share human rights values consistent with the West, we recognize that it’s a much more difficult task than those who believe it can be done in a few short years with guns, Bibles and Hershey bars.
But it does make sense to go after a country that had already posed a threat to the region, was widely believed to have weapons of mass destruction, had well-documented ties to terrorism, was funding terrorist groups, and would have eventually posed a threat that would have had to be dealt with.
In short, your arguments are the typical lefty canards that don’t have any bearing on the actual rationales behind the war.
Except the Reaganite right predicted the fall of the Soviet Union, were widely criticized for it, and just so happened to be absolutely right. In case you missed it, the Soviet Union fell and the Berlin Wall is no more.
The UN has done absolutely nothing to promote human rights and democracy and based on its actions had no interests in doing so.
And Christian extremists? Give me a break. When Bush appears in a mosque after September 11 and specifically states that Islam is not the enemy, that argument holds no water. Boykin’s idiocy was roundly condemned by nearly everyone and has no bearing on US policy. This is another asinine conspiracy theory and canard used to avoid talking about the real issues.
Trade can have a liberalizing effect. If China were economically isolated they’d have no reason not to try to retake Taiwan or militarize even more than they have. Would you support sanctions on China, costing millions of Americans their jobs?
Except if you can’t understand the difference between empire and democracy you can’t even remotely begin to understand the real world.
“Iraq would have eventually posed a threat that would have had to have been dealt with…”
Earlier today, in a rare display of humility, you poked fun at your litany of erroneous predictions for 2004. Undeterred, you press onward, declaring the inevitably of an attack from a regime that had no imminent capacity to attack us. Had WMD been found, you may have been able to vindicate your war-mongering in the minds of a majority, but I think you’re gonna find the premise that the unarmed, disempowered Iraq of February 2003 had sinister plans of inevitable attack on the horizon as a tough sell to most Americans north of the Ohio River.
Also funny how you list your rationales for war including false expectations of WMD capability in Iraq, then have the balls to dismiss my arguments as “typical lefty canards”. Only in righty-land….
Yes, the Soviet empire fell. Reagan accelerated that process, but the transition was inevitable. The difference, of course, was that the cultures of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union were much closer to those of the West than is Iraq. Just as it will be impossible to convince Bible Belt Christian conservatives that the threat to their way of life is economic and not cultural, it’ll prove equally troublesome to convince indoctrinated Muslims in Iraq and elsewhere in the Arab world that the mystical inerrancy of free markets can out-Allah Allah. The forces of religion were not an obstacle in the Soviet bloc nations, so once the governments crumbled, the people had no cultural reason not to embrace the West. In case you missed it, the transition hasn’t went nearly as smoothly since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
If William Boyken was really an aberration as you claim, his remarks would have been a blip on the radar screen. However, Boyken’s beliefs are shared by a very large minority in America as can be discerned from any number of evangelical websites and publications, which you can be sure Al-Jazeera propagandists are on top of. As for Bush going to a mosque and declaring that Islam is not the enemy, would you believe Osama bin Laden if he walked into a Christian church and declared a truce? With that in mind, I can’t imagine why the Iraqi insurgents aren’t convinced by Bush’s mosque gambit. I guess they haven’t seen the footage. Clearly if they had, they’d lay down their weapons and begin training for the Iraqi Security Force.
The bottom line is that as much as you may want to marginalize Boykin, he provided the Arab world an insight into the minds of our vast ocean of evangelical crazies, giving Iraq and everybody else on the globe a huge reason to distrust America’s motives even if Bush wears a towel on his head and clutches the Koran the next time he walks into a mosque to declare himself and America a friend of Islam.
“If you can’t understand the difference between empire and democracy you can’t even remotely begin to understand the real world.”
The real world happens to be a place where the vast majority of people on the globe don’t trust America’s motives. As pious as your rhetoric about democracy may be, achieving the common good of the globe is not something that America under the Bush administration is frequently associated with. Every sweetheart no-bid contract with Halliburton and every predictable chapter from the Abu Gharib/William Boyken playbook serves to reinforce this sentiment. When we stopped killing murderous terrorists and started overthrowing secular Arab governments, we lost the hearts and minds of the Muslim people for a generation. There is no good solution to wiggle our way out of Bush’s mistake.
Then you should read the Duelfer Report which indicates that the sanctions regime against Saddam was flagging and the he had maintained the capability to restart WMD production in short order.
Expectations that were shared by the UN, France, Germany, Egypt, Russia, Jordan, Italy, Iran, the UK, and every single credible intelligence agency on the face of the planet. Hell, Saddam’s own generals thought they had WMD when they did not, which is why we found chemical warfare suits and atropine on the drive to Baghdad.
The left was predicting that the Soviet Union would survive for decades and that the West would never influence the Communist world. Of course, they were wrong.
The people of the Middle East aren’t mind-numbed killbots for Allah. In case you haven’t noticed, there is an increasingly large movement for reform in the Middle East. Even the Arab League has admitted that because of the astonishing lack of political freedom in the Arab world, Arab countries remain behind the rest of the world.
As for Boykin, I rather doubt enough people in the Arab world even know who he is. His comments were stupid and widely and publicly disavowed. Arguing that one lone nutball constitutes the view of an entire people is as odious as saying that all Muslims believe the same as Osama bin Laden.
You have absolutely no clue about the Arab world. Arabs don’t give a damn about the often ridiculous charges against Halliburton unless they see some gasbag like Michael Moore spouting off about them.
The jihadis had lost the Arab people when they started killing Iraqi civilians left and right and beheading aid workers. The people of the Arab world were rightly shocked by these actions. If you’re really going to try to convert someone to your cause, you don’t do it by indescriminately killing.
Furthermore, you don’t even remotely understand the psychology of the jihadi movement. Osama bin Laden began his terrorist campaign against the United States after the incidents in Somalia as recounted in Black Hawk Down. His reasoning was clear: if the jihadi movement could score a victory against America, it would make them look strong and America look weak. And throughout the 1990s he continually did that.
Look at what happened after September 11 — right after the attacks there were numerous pro-bin Laden marches throughout Pakistan. After tha fall of the Taliban, there were almost none and those that did happen were sparsely attended. The reason is simple, as bin Laden himself noted, people want to be on the winning side.
The war in Iraq isn’t a recruitment tool for al-Qaeda. You don’t recruit people by telling them to join a fight that is likely to involve them getting killed in a pointless battle. A US withdrawl from Iraq would be the biggest gift that al-Qaeda could ever have. It would signal that once again they are the strong horse, they are the winners, and the jihadis can defeat the Americans if they only kill enough of us.
At best Iraq would split into three, and at worse we’d end up with Lebanon writ on a nightmare scale. It would ensure that the United States would always be seen as weak, it would embolden al-Qaeda, and it would ensure that the war on terror would drag on for decades more.
Such a policy would be national suicide, but the pettiness of Democrats like yourself blinds you from even remotely understanding it.
“Expectations that were shared by the UN, France, Germany, Egypt, Russia, Jordan, Italy, Iran, the UK, and every single credible intelligence agency on the face of the planet. Hell, Saddam’s own generals thought they had WMD when they did not, which is why we found chemical warfare suits and atropine on the drive to Baghdad.”
I suppose….based on our crackpot intelligence that they were naive enough to trust. 😀
Whatever level of “reform” that Middle Easterners are clamoring for, you may also notice that aside from Kuwait, they are not giving the American war and occupation in Iraq the thumbs up. Seems the reform that they seek is not the kind of reform we’re peddling.
Living in your Sioux Falls enclave has blinded you to the political realities here at home as badly as it’s blinded you to those in the Middle East. If you seriously believe that William Boykin is the only American who believes we’re engaged in a holy war rather than a war of liberation, you obviously haven’t been to Alabama lately….or Kansas for that matter. You’re probably right that a majority of Iraqis don’t know who Boykin is, but those watching al-Jazeera undoubtedly do, and are passing the information onto anyone who will listen. Even if they don’t know Boykin by name, I trust that Iraqis have a better grasp on the depth of America’s Christian radicals than you do.
The same goes for Halliburton. My guess is that their antics would be far more recognizable to Iraqis than you seem to believe, apparently believing they have no access to information (accurate or inaccurate) that lets them know what’s going on around them. It’s curious how you seem to believe the Iraqis are such uninformed bumpkins that they couldn’t possibly be familiar with the radical Christianity prominent in growing circles in America or the corruption of Halliburton barons, yet you seem to believe they have the intellectual and technological capacity to respond favorably to the American occupation every time Gallup pollsters contact them.
Furthermore, any Iraqi sixth-grader can see through the rhetoric of you and the Bushies about human rights. It’s amazing how you can argue with a straight face that the installation of market forces render human rights obligations and obsolete…and when called on it, the best justification you can provide for your double standard between China and Iraq is “if you want to stop doing business with China it’ll do untold damage to the U.S. economy.” Skeptics in the Muslim world thank you for inadvertantly validating their fear.
“The war in Iraq isn’t a recruitment tool for al-Qaeda. You don’t recruit people by telling them to join a fight that is likely to involve them getting killed in a pointless battle.”
After all your patronizing lectures about “how Muslims think,” it’s pretty ironic that you’re willing to ignore the very basic theory of radical Islam that dying for what one believes is noble…and will help them get their hands on 72 virgins. That’s the simple explanation for nineteen middle-class Muslim hijackers flying planes into the World Trade Center. That’s the simple explanation for thousands of Palestinian suicide bombers splattering themselves all over Israel and taking out as many Jews as they can in the process. Every report I’ve read from the past year says al-Qaeda recruitment is thriving due to the war on Iraq. Unless you can cite some evidence that disproves what everybody else is saying, it’s merely another example of you and your ilk creating a reality that suits your design.
Iraq appears destined to split into three. Unless you plan to instill another dictator like Hussein who holds the disparate ethnic tribes together through fear and brutality, I see very little chance of sustained government encompassing all of Iraq’s current territory. There seem to be two types of people who disagree with this assessment…..those currently on the payroll of the Bush administration, and people like you who prostitute your propaganda services for the administration free of charge.
Given that my “blinded” worldview on everything from the faked Bush ANG documents to Bush’s prospects at re-election have been exactly right, I’m not holding your breath for your same predictions to come true. Let’s face it, you can huff and buff and bloviate to your heart’s content, but that doesn’t change the facts.
The fact that so many on the left seem to want Iraq to fail and completely ignore the disastrous repercussions that would occur if we did is morally reprehensible.
It is exactly as Roger L. Simon discusses, the only foreign policy the left has is a stream of unrelenting petty pessimism.