Samizdata

Taylor passed this article about the falling dominoes of the Middle East on to me late last night his time and in the wee hours Zulu here on the right bank of the pond. Articles by Taylor appear here from time to time as well as in a few other publications like WSJ. – ed

Last year I was having a drink with a space guy from the Pentagon and we started talking about the Middle East, Iraq etc etc. He made some comment about the need to ‘stabilize the region’. He is a great guy and definitely on the side of the angels but I had to tell him. The strategy is the opposite. Bush wants to destabilize the area. It is the only way there will be change. Stability is what brought us 9/11.

With what has been happening, with elections in the PA, in Iraq, and now in the instability in Lebanon; with the governments of Egypt and Syria floundering about and grasping at straws, the US strategy is beginning to work. It is going to be a long hard slog as our Rummy put it, but there is a sense that the corner has been turned.

You have to give Bush and the neocons credit, after the attack my first instinct was to say that these people deserved to have self government taken away from them. The administration chose the opposite path, they were going to try and inflict real self government on the Muslim and Arab world.

It is an imperfect and messy process and democracy by itself is not necessarily a friend of liberal human rights. Over time, if they keep it up they will soon find themselves practicing some form of grown up politics. That process will eventually dry up the pond of paranoia and rage which the terrorist scum have thrived on for the last three or four decades.

We, less than perfect human beings, make progress in the oddest and least likely ways. The bombs in Tel Aviv and Hilla are not going to stop this process. For the moment give Wolfowitz and the neocons credit, they did not let their anger after the attack blind them to the essential humanity of the Arab and Muslim people. Reagan used to hammer home the idea that Americans and Russian wanted pretty much the same thing, the giant Communist stone was in the way of the Russian people getting it.

The realist move would have been to get even deeper into bed with the Arab and Muslim despots: instead they chose to take a big chance and bet on democracy and on the people. For a while it looked like they would over reached and gone too far. They certainly have got a long ways to go. Today however they deserve a pat on the back.

Bravo Zulu.