Conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer recently published an excellent article titled The Neoconservative Convergence, detailing the events and forces leading to the current ascendancy of neoconservative policy in the United States. It's an excellent article, and I highly recommend sitting quietly somewhere for an hour or so to absorb it carefully — for it's quite sobering to realize how close we really came to having a very different reality. One that I'm pretty sure I'd have been quite unhappy about.
Here's an excerpt to give you the flavor of this piece:
In Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere in the Arab world, the forces of democratic liberalization have emerged on the political stage in a way that was unimaginable just two years ago. They have been energized and emboldened by the Iraqi example and by American resolve. Until now, it was widely assumed that the only alternative to pan-Arabist autocracy, to the Nassers and the Saddams, was Islamism. We now know, from Iraq and Lebanon, that there is another possibility, and that America has given it life. As the Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, hardly a noted friend of the Bush Doctrine, put it in late February in an interview with David Ignatius of the Washington Post:
"It’s strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world. The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."
The Iraqi elections vindicated the two central propositions of the Bush Doctrine. First, that the desire for freedom is indeed universal and not the private preserve of Westerners. Second, that America is genuinely committed to democracy in and of itself. Contrary to the cynics, whether Arab, European, or American, the U.S. did not go into Iraq for oil or hegemony but for liberation—a truth that on January 30 even al Jazeera had to televise. Arabs in particular had had sound historical reason to doubt American sincerity: six decades of U.S. support for Arab dictators, a cynical “realism” that began with FDR’s deal with the House of Saud and reached its apogee with the 1991 betrayal of the anti-Saddam uprising that the elder Bush had encouraged in Iraq. Today, however, they see a different Bush and a different doctrine.
There's much, much more. My favorite Krauthammer line:
In the absence of omnipotence, one must deal with the lesser of two evils.
He's explaining that the Bush doctrine's apparent policy inconsistencies (we topple Hussein, but leave Assad in place) are actually pragmatism at work. But he says it in a much pithier way <smile>. Don't miss this one...
