February 12, 2004

World Democracy post-9/11

CalPundit remains Bush/Guard central, with new stories from the suddenly energized media appearing nearly hourly.

Budget five minutes and read this remarkable article from the New Yorker.

A DEMOCRATIC WORLD by GEORGE PACKER Can liberals take foreign policy back from the Republicans?
In treating the war on terrorism as a mere military struggle, the Administration’s mistake begins with the name itself. "Terrorism" is a method; the terror used by the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka is not the enemy in this war. The enemy is an ideology—in the German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer’s phrase, "Islamist totalitarianism"—that reaches from Karachi to London, from Riyadh to Brooklyn, and that uses terror to advance its ends. The Administration’s failure to grasp the political nature of the war has led to many crucial mistakes, most notably the Pentagon’s attitude that postwar problems in Afghanistan and Iraq would essentially take care of themselves, that we could have democracy on the cheap: once the dictators and terrorists were rooted out, the logic went, freedom would spontaneously grow in their place.

[snip]

Another approach remains available to the Democrats—one that draws on the Party’s own not so distant history. The parallels between the early years of the Cold War and our situation are inexact. The Islamist movement doesn’t have the same hold on Westerners that Communism had. It draws on cultures that remain alien to us; the history of colonialism and the fact of religious difference make it all the harder for the liberal democracies of the West to effect change in the Muslim world. Waving the banner of freedom and mustering the will to act aren’t enough.

Packer indicts both parties about equally; the Republicans for thinking there is a finite number of "terrorists" which can be killed, and the Democrats for not formulating a policy other than one of shouting "you're doing this wrong." It's extraordinarily thought-provoking. The anecdote Senator Biden tells at the beginning will break your heart.

Posted by Linkmeister at February 12, 2004 12:01 AM
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