"On September 11, the aim of a democratic Middle East became a matter of our national well-being, even survival," writes Lawrence F. Kaplan in The New Republic. But the Conventional Wisdom Inside the Beltway has gone wobbly. "Indeed, it appears nearly everyone in Washington is a realist now," preferring to revert to the nation's "decades-old bargain with the Arab world":
The Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy has become the anti-Committee for the Liberation of Iraq . . . unveiled at the National Press Club last October, [the Coalition] quickly attracted a bipartisan who's who of foreign policy experts, including former Democratic Senator Gary Hart; a campaign adviser to John Kerry, Charles Kupchan; and former Reagan aide Doug Bandow. All count themselves foreign policy "realists" who support a foreign policy grounded in narrowly conceived "vital interests" and loathe America's efforts to "impose" democracy around the world.
Exemplifying the trend, in April Kerry said the goal in the present war should be "a stable Iraq, not whether or not [Iraq] is a full democracy." But, says Kaplan,
The United States is obligated -- because either pressure for democracy in the Arab world will come from the United States or it will come from nowhere at all. For the source of America's entitlement, look no further than the region's "friendly regimes." Not only has repression fueled terrorist movements in places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt; the very governments we prop up have sanctioned the worst elements as a way to deflect popular anger from their palace gates.
Neatly summarizing the revised wisdom, The Washington Post's George Will recently argued that America's errors in Iraq flow not so much from the bungled implementation of the democratic idea as from the idea itself -- "the Jeffersonian poetry of democratic universalism." The new realism, moreover, has already been enshrined in official policy . . . Which is too bad. Because, no matter what you think of Iraq, realism can't win the war on terrorism.
"Yet what a human comedy it has now all become," writes Victor Davis Hanson on a similar note in National Review:
Nearly three years after 9/11 we are in the strangest of all paradoxes: a war against fascists that we can easily win but are clearly not ready to fully wage. We have the best 500,000 soldiers in the history of civilization, a resolute president, and an informed citizenry that has already received a terrible preemptive blow that killed thousands.
The billionaire capitalist George Soros — who grew fabulously wealthy through cold and calculating currency speculation, helping to break many a bank and its poor depositors — now makes the moral equation between 9/11 and Abu Ghraib. For this ethicist and meticulous accountant, 3,000 murdered in a time of peace are the same as some prisoners abused by renegade soldiers in a time of war.
"Trouble is," Kaplan regrets, "the very realists whom Bush decries are now running his foreign policy":
The Pentagon's neoconservative democratizers have been losing influence for months now . . . The neoconservatives' decline was already apparent last October, when, in an attempt to centralize Iraq policy at the NSC, Condoleezza Rice formed the Iraq Stabilization Group--again, without consulting the Pentagon. The official chosen to chair the group, Rice's boss in the first Bush administration, Robert Blackwill, has "reduced the Defense Department's influence to zero," says a senior administration official. Iraq czar L. Paul Bremer, who worked with Blackwill under Kissinger, now reports to his fellow realist at the White House rather than to the Pentagon . . . Bremer and Blackwill favor the sort of technocrats with limited democratic credentials touted by U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, a man Blackwill has championed inside the White House as the solution to all that ails Iraq.
The genesis of the new realism is, of course, America's problems creating democracy in Iraq. But today's problems in Iraq do not derive from failures of democracy. They derive from failures of security, which have made democracy difficult to achieve. Those failures owe to a well-chronicled fact -- the United States lacks the troop levels required to provide security.
Stepping into the vacuum created partly by the mistakes of the Pentagon and White House, realists now counsel that the quickest path to stability in Iraq lies in abandoning our democratic hopes for the country.
[via Andrew Sullivan]
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