From my most recent NRO article, on developments in the Arab world: “The potential for most Islamic countries to become completely dysfunctional and erupt in atrocities and disintegrate into terrorist breeding grounds is now too familiar to merit much elaboration. The George W. Bush crusade for democracy — and, to be fair to him, it was the policy of Jimmy Carter also — now appears to be a product of the same painfully naïve school that held in 1964 and 1965 that we could defeat the Communists in South Vietnam by building schools, bridges, and clinics, as if the opposition response would be anything except to blow them up and kill anyone who collaborated. Despite the vast experience accumulated in America’s unexampled rise from colonial obscurity to unprecedented paramountcy in the world in less than three long lifetimes from Yorktown to the fall of the Berlin Wall, there seems to be some hobgoblin that washes and hijacks the brains of American policy planners from time to time and propels them like Gadarene robots toward an ahistorical fantasy that altruism alone will make the world right.”
Whether you agree or disagree, your comments are, as always, most welcome.