Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Is the bush doctrine dead?   [Rich Lowry]

Norman Podhoretz's latest essay is typically brilliant and bracing. He scores lots of points. To my mind, there are two weaknesses in the piece, however:

1) There's this passage:

Surely what makes more sense is the opposite interpretation of the terrible violence being perpetrated by the terrorists of the so-called “insurgency”: that it is in itself a tribute to the enormous strides that have been made in democratizing the country. If this murderous collection of diehard Sunni Baathists and vengeful Shiite militias, together with their allies inside the government, agreed that democratization had already failed, would they be waging so desperate a campaign to defeat it? And if democratization in Iraq posed no threat to the other despotisms in the region, would those regimes be sending jihadists and material support to the “insurgency” there?

This comes close to the if-we're-attacking-us-we-must-be-winning view that administration spokesmen have flirted with at times. It is certainly true that jihadists feel threatened by what we're doing in Iraq. But their attacks aren't necessarily "a tribute to the enormous strides that we have made in democratizing the country." If we were succeeding even more, does that mean there would be 200 people dying a day instead of 100? Even if the violence is a tribute to our democracy-building, it certainly isn't a tribute to our ability to establish order, something that people value more than democracy. If we (and the Iraqi government) continue fail to establish order, I suspect our progress on democratization is eventually going to disappear. In general, I think Podhoretz avoids truly grappling with the current state of Iraq by keeping it all at a less-discomfiting level of abstraction. (One pet peeve: Why do conservatives have such a problem with the term "insurgency"? It's not necessarily a positive term. There are good insurgencies and evil insurgencies.)

2) I don't think the essay fully addresses the challenge the Bush doctrine faces from Islamic radicals winning power at the ballot box. In response to a George Will passage noting darkly that elections brought Hamas to power and gave Hezbollah significant representation in Lebanon's parliament, Podhoretz mostly brandishes a quote from Foud Ajami that recent elections have "broken the pact with Arab tyranny." Perhaps it has broken our pact with traditional Arab tyrants (although we certainly worked with them in the current Lebanon crisis), but the point is that elections risk bringing to power a new set of Islamic radicals who enjoy a measure of popular support.

Those are my two criticisms. But, again, I think it's a very successful essay. It leans against the current tide of pessimism. It saves the Bush Doctrine from caricature. And I think it demonstrates that there really isn't any good alternative to some version of the current Bush approach.

08/15 04:45 PMShare