Kathryn: Fouad Ajami did
indeed get up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. Never having
shared his dream, though, I can’t be much affected by its air of gloom.
Here is what I said back in
February:
“The key issue in the Iraq war, it seems to me, is the degree to which the
administration believes its own rhetoric about bringing democracy to the
Middle East. Completely, says Ms. Pond. The Europeans, she notes, would have
been happier if they could discern some cynicism beneath the Bush team’s
crusading zeal. They saw none, only ‘a Manichean perception of good and
evil.’ Those childish Americans, so obsessed with their outdated moral
categories! So unlike us worldly Europeans, who can perceive a hundred
different shades of gray!
“I don’t myself believe this picture, though. When I contemplate Donald
Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and George W. Bush, the phrase ‘naive
moralizers’ is not the one that first leaps to mind. If, following the
pullout our administration seems determined on, Iraq should lapse into
anarchy, I doubt much sleep will be lost in Washington. The despots of the
world will have been taught a useful lesson: that if they make themselves a
serious nuisance to us, we will go and smash up their regimes and humiliate
their leaders. The satisfaction of having delivered a punitive lesson is the
least we should hope for, and we can hope for more. For the American people
at large, however, the knowledge that we ended the career of Saddam Hussein
and woke his fellow despots from their dreams of invulnerability may be
sufficient justification for the war of 2003.”
I stand by that. Now, it would be a very cynical asperity indeed to suggest
that the administration’s guff about “bringing democracy to Iraq” was just
colored smoke from the beginning. Probably senior admin. officials believed
it at some level. Perhaps they still do. And it is not impossible; it
might yet happen, and here is one cynical old Jacksonian who’ll be cheering
with the Wilsonians if it does. But let’s face it — as Ajami, to his
credit, has done in this Op-Ed piece — the Arabs are probably hopeless,
and despotic squalor is their natural order. If this is not so, it’s for
them to show us it’s not so, by building stable societies under
constitutional government, that are not a threat to each other, to our
allies, or to us directly. Until that day comes, let’s expect the worst
from them.