…So what makes Americans think we can plop down a democracy on the ashes of Saddam’s Gulag, or see free elections in a Beirut that was once the Murder, Inc. of the 1970s and 1980s? How can we even imagine that Dr. Zawahiri’s dream of theocracy won’t follow from the end of the Mubarak dictatorship?
As the ripples from Iraq and Afghanistan spread, we are warned that success, not failure, is our new concern: The problem is not that the Middle East cannot vote, but that it can — and that the results will be worse than the mess that preceded it.
Aside from the fact that we could never have even dreamed of such a “problem” less than four years ago when an ash cloud hovered over the crater in Manhattan, we need to reflect on a few often-forgotten realities.
First, America had few alternatives. This war was never between good and bad choices, but always a call between something bad and something far worse. The challenge was not about a post-Nazi Germany, which for a decade and a half ruined the old protocols of Prussian parliamentarianism. Iraq was not quite like prompting post-Franco Spain to allow elections when surrounded by European democracies….
Go and read. (Hat tip: LGF)
