I agree with much of Hanson's assessment of Islam, but articles like this tend to beg the question: why are conservatives who are so openly (and rightly) critical of the illiberal, anti-modernist beliefs that Islam engenders, otherwise such optimists when it comes to establishing secular democracies in the heart of the Moslem Middle East? Something doesn't add up here. Either Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority are fertile grounds for liberal democracy--as we have been repeatedly told--or they are not. Which is it?
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
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Likely the same reason we supported brutal repressive thuggish dictatorships in the Third World as "bastions of freedom" against "communism." Remember Jeanne Kirkpatrick's famous lecture on the difference between "authoritarianism" and "totalitarianism"? Still waiting for her to admit she was wrong, btw.
I don't remember that lecture, but I'd love to read it if you can find it online and send a link.
To some extent our support of third-world despots during the Cold War makes some sense to me, for the same reason that our alliance with Stalin during WWII made sense (though of course the stakes were MUCH higher then). I'm not saying we were 100% right in every case during the Cold War, nor am I denying that our support didn't indirectly cause a great deal of harm in some countries. I'm just saying there was some degree of diplomatic and military logic to it... which I don't see in the present case of the modern Middle East. If we were interested in making Iraq a bulwark against some other enemy (say Iran or Syria), then I'd say destroying Iraq's central authority and replacing it with a chaotic infant democracy was about the worst way imaginable to do it, even withOUT the insurgency, civil war and al Qaeda all factored in.
They make have made sense from a realpolitik view but in the end, they likely prolonged the Cold War by allowing brutal dictators in the USSR and PRC to fob themselves as "liberators" in the Third World. Remember, Ho Chi Minh only turned to the communists AFTER the US decided to support French colonialist ambitions. That's not to say we NEVER have to hold our noses and support people we wouldn't normally want to associate with, and Stalin during WWII is a perfect example; but not EVERY dictator who labelled all his enemies "communists" before having them all shot was worthy of our support and aid, putting aside the moral issue of lying down with pernicious vermin like the military dictators of Guatamala and Chile, to name just two.
Well, I'd like to think we could learn from our foreign policy blunders in the Cold War and since, but the weight of history suggests otherwise. No doubt we will support bad governments again in the future and come to regret it (again).
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