Matthew Yglesias demonstrates an absolute cluelessness on Lebanon:
While it’s obviously A Good Thing in a broad sense to see the people of Lebanon standing up and trying to get the minions of a quite odious Syrian regime to leave their country, I feel like there are a few skeptical notes that ought to be sounded here. One is that, near as I can tell, there’s no really clear sense in which the Syrian sphere of influence in Lebanon is bad for the United States of America. Second, there’s no particular reason to think that the waning of Syrian influence really heralds the dawning of Lebanese democracy. Outside of the special case of Iraq, Lebanon was and is pretty clearly the most democratic of Arab states. They have elections which are vigorously contested. They have a quite robust politics at the local level. The legislature is a closer facsimile of a proper democratic one than anything else in action in the Arab world. And they have a reasonably free press and free media.
First of all, Lebanon was hardly democratic under Syrian rule – they were occupied by Syrian troops, President Lahoud had used his cronies to rig it so he could break the Constitutional term limits, and Damascus essentially controlled the Lebanese government. Lebanon was hardly free enough to be considered a democratic state (although it once was one of the most vibrant places in the Middle East before the Syrian-influenced civil war).
Furthermore, Lebanon has been used as a major terrorist center, and the Syrians have been using the Bekaa Valley as a center for Hizb’Allah and other terrorist groups. Hizb’Allah has killed several American CIA officers and was responsible for the 1982 bombings of US personnel in Beirut. Last I checked any action that undermines an enemy of the United States and one of the world’s most dangerous terrorist organizations should be seen as a prima facie good thing.
But even more disturbing are the philosophical implications of Yglesias’ statement. Last I checked, democracy was supposed to be a classically liberal value – exactly when did liberals stop upholding the values of democracy worldwide and were perfectly content to leave people in slavery so long as they couldn’t hurt the US? How capricious is that sort of attitude, and what does it say about the nature of today’s “liberals?”
John F. Kennedy said that we would bear any burden, help and friend, and oppose any enemy in the aid of freedom. I think he would have much more in common with President Bush that with his own party were he alive today.
The universe has been turned on its head. One of the always difficult moral issues for Republicans during the cold war – in which the Democrats seemed to take the high road – was our argument that its OK to support autocratic, bad regimes if it helped us in the major struggle of the day – against Communism. Democrats always told us we were morally wrong to support a Pinochet under any circumstance. They would send their “witnesses for peace” to El Salvador to undermine the evil government and our support of it. They complained that we didn’t take out these bad guys.
And it never was a comfortable argument for us Republicans to say “he may be an evil son of a bitch, but he’s our evil son of a bitch.” Hell, Saddam was ours in the 80s because we saw him as a good check on Iranian Islamism. Dems didn’t like that either. And as our alliance with Stalin against Hitler showed, sometimes you have to make friends in bad places to defeat the worst.
But now the Dems don’t seem to care about these things anymore. Was their “caring” in the past more about opposition to Republicans than about worrying about the oppressed of the world? That’s what it looks like today.