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March 07, 2005

Will The Last Critic Turn The Lights Out?

First, it was Hillary Clinton [1], who drew brickbats from the MoveOn crowd for breaking ranks with the far left on the war.

Then, on the Sunday talkies, Ted Kennedy and Bill Richardson both credited the President's policies in the Middle East with the explosion of democratic agitation in the region.

Now, Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria, heretofore no friend of the President, says:

The other noted political scientist who has been vindicated in recent weeks is George W. Bush. Across New York, Los Angeles and Chicago—and probably Europe and Asia as well—people are nervously asking themselves a question: "Could he possibly have been right?" The short answer is yes. Whether or not Bush deserves credit for everything that is happening in the Middle East, he has been fundamentally right about some big things.
We're getting somewhere.

Zakaria notes something that has to drive the elite media insane:

People have often wished that the president had traveled more over the years. But Bush's capacity to imagine a different Middle East may actually be related to his relative ignorance of the region. Had he traveled to the Middle East and seen its many dysfunctions, he might have been disheartened. Freed from looking at the day-to-day realities, Bush maintained a vision of what the region could look like.
...in other words, ignorance is wisdom. That's gotta be a finger in the eye of the Paul Krugmans (Krugmen?) and all the other assembled PhDs clogging the Beltway.

Zakaria correctly sounds a note of caution:

But therein lies the danger. It is easier to imagine liberal democracy than to achieve it. Ronald Reagan imagined a Soviet Union that was politically and economically free. Twenty years later, except for the Baltic states, not one country of the former Soviet Union has achieved that. There have been more than 50 elections in Africa in the past 15 years—some as moving as those in Iraq, had we bothered to notice them—but only a few of those countries can be described as free. Haiti has had elections and American intervention, and still has foreign troops stationed there. Yet only a few of these elections have led to successful and free societies.

Every country, culture and people yearns for freedom. But building real, sustainable democracy with rights and protections is complex. In Lebanon, for example, the absence of Syria will not mean the presence of a stable democracy. It was the collapse of Lebanon's internal political order that triggered the Syrian intervention in 1976. That problem will have to be solved, even after Syrian forces go home. In Iraq, the end of the old order has produced growing tendencies toward separatism and intolerance. Building democracy takes patience, deep and specific knowledge and, most important, the ability to partner with the locals.

Bear in mind that the showcase elections in Haiti, South Africa and Zimbabwe were not accompanied by a number of the other things necessary for a liberal democracy; property rights and the rule of law. South Africa retained one of the worst aspects of apartheid, the socialist system under which the blacks (but not the capitalist whites) lived; Zimbabwe is ruled by a man, not laws. Haiti has perhaps the worst combination; a social slave mentality that exalts petty authority, combined with an oligarchical economy and no legal system at all.

Will Iraq, Lebanon and the rest be any different? Lebanon, after all, was a fairly prosperous, moderately democratic nation until 1976, when its internal stresses (and some external ones imposed upon it) tore it apart; those stresses have been driven underground by Syrians on the ground and Israelis above it.

My theory: Lebanon will have trouble until the Ba'athists are gone in Syria. And in Iraq, Islam will help; Iraqis are fairly literate, secularized people, but the moderate Shi'ite and (absent Ba'athist politics) Sunni Islam provides them the same framework of civilization that Christianity provided the early Americans.

It's a theory...

[1] And by "first", I mean "after most Republicans".

UPDATE: Yep. I know. Zakaria is more of a barometer than a buoy. He's flip-flopped on this war, and on the wisdom of the war on terror, more than John Kerry.

But the fact that he - and Hillary, and Splash Kennedy and Bill "Two Choppers" Richardson - are blowing the right way is interesting, to say the least.

Posted by Mitch at March 7, 2005 06:22 AM | TrackBack
Comments

I hope you're right. But Zakaria tends to flip-flop based on whatever is happening that week. One big bomb somewhere and next week he'll be throwing in the towel.

Posted by: Gideon at March 7, 2005 12:20 PM

It is my understanding that the PLO and Arafat started, or at least participated in, the Lebanonese Civil War. Am I correct? It would certainly explain the viciousness of it all

Posted by: Silver at March 7, 2005 12:54 PM
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