Dumb and Dumber. By David P. Goldman. Tablet, May 20, 2013.
How neocons and Obama liberals have
created catastrophe by consensus in the Middle East.
Middle East Mess: When Dems and GOPers Agree, Be Afraid. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, May 20, 2013.
Better a Pharaoh or a Tempest? By Fouad Ajami. Tablet, December 13, 2012.
Goldman:
It is a
salutary exercise to consider the views we hold with impassioned conviction and
ask: “What would it imply if we are wrong?” Neoconservatives of all stripes
believed with perfect faith that the desire for liberty is a universal human
impulse, requiring only the right institutions to reinforce it. The Obama
Administration believed that all cultures have equal validity and that—as Obama
said early in his presidency—that he thinks of American exceptionalism the same
way that the Greeks think about Greek exceptionalism. In both cases,
Republicans and Democrats believe that there is nothing inherently unique about
America—except that this country was the first to create the political
framework that corresponds to the true nature of every human being.
Kristol’s
2011 assessment of the Arab Spring was erroneous, but he was right to link
America’s state of being to events in the Middle East. We stumbled by national
consensus into a strategic morass, from which there is no apparent exit, in the
naïve belief that under every burka was a prospective American ready to emerge
like a butterfly from a chrysalis.
But if
large parts of the Muslim world reject what seemed to be an historic
opportunity to create democratic governments and instead dissolve into a
chaotic regime of permanent warfare, we might conclude that there really is
something different about America—that our democracy is the product of a unique
set of precedents, the melding of the idea of covenant brought here by radical
Protestants, the traditions of Anglo-Saxon democracy, and the far-reaching
wisdom of our founders. To present-day Americans, that is an unnerving thought.
We do not wish upon ourselves that sort of responsibility. We eschew our debts
to deep traditions. We want to reinvent ourselves at will, to shop for new
identities, to play at the cultural cutting-edge.
What
these events might teach us, rather, is that America really is exceptional and
that there is no contradiction in cultivating our democracy at home while
acting elsewhere in tough-minded pursuit of our security interests.
