Thursday, January 01, 2009

Realism   [Michael Ledeen]

Andy and Caroline are right about the misnamed "realists." They are actually fervent, religious Utopians. It requires an act of religious faith to believe that our enemies will agree to a durable peace, and respect its conditions. Or, to put it differently, one of the definitions of a madman is a person who keeps doing the same thing, hoping for a different outcome.

And then there is the moral dimension. As I said a few days ago:

There is a disgusting conceit that underlies the realist position that negotiations will solve these problems: the conceit that tyrants will be easier to deal with than free peoples. Rabin and Peres actually said this, once upon a time, with their smug statements to the effect that Arafat and the others would control the terrorists because they didn't give a damn about the Geneva Conventions or other legal niceties. They, and those who think the same applies to the Iranians, forget that our enemies want us dead or dominated, they don't want a world at peace in which they will have to deal with real problems of governance. They are waging jihad, not diplomacy.

01/01 11:06 AMShare