GOT MINE--GET LOST:

Free at Last?: Some Arabs welcome American democratic browbeating (Michael Young, 2/24/05, Reason)

Nick Gillespie was right to pooh-pooh the view that "[a]t every step of his career, [George W.] Bush has been written off as a lightweight and a loser, a dim bulb whose grasp exceeds his reach and whose I.Q. is stuck somewhere in the high double digits." I once referred to him as a "cretin," and the laugh is surely on me, though this was in the context of a successful endorsement. Like Ronald Reagan in Eastern Europe, Bush has shown in the Middle East that simple, indeed simplistic, ideas can go a long way when expressing the frustration and anger of populations afflicted with tyrannies refusing to accord them even minimal respect.

For most Lebanese, the killing of Hariri was very much perceived as an outrage against the normal order of things, because it targeted a rare Arab leader who left behind a constructive legacy and didn't pack a gun. Even recognizing the former prime minister's faults, one often-heard refrain somehow makes perfect sense, particularly against the backdrop of photographs of Hariri's burned body widely disseminated in the local press: "It was unnatural for such a man to die in such a sordid way." This suggested the extent to which the Lebanese today understand (as many should have, but not so long ago didn't) that autocracy is the triumph of the aberrant and the promotion of the inferior.

As the debate continues in the U.S. and elsewhere over Bush's merits and demerits, and over his dissembling, indeed lying, before dispatching forces to Iraq, the Lebanon example shows the advantages of selective interpretation. It matters little where Syria's Lebanese foes stand in disputations over Bush's record, nor did voters in Iraq much care either; both populations took what was relevant to them, accepted Bush's broad sound bites of democratization, and carried the idea on from there according to their parochial interests.

Should the United States pursue its democratizing path, particularly in the Middle East? It is remarkable how Bush's critics, both from the political left and libertarian right, found themselves in a bind after the Iraqi election. Unlike Jumblatt, most scurried to a fallback position when their predictions of a fiasco proved wrong. A favored option was to warn that Washington had roused an Islamist monster. In that way the critics did a 180-degree turn: implying, initially, that the U.S. was avoiding democratic elections, then, when that proved wrong, that the elections would fail, and, when that again proved wrong, that elections should never have taken place because the victors were mullahs.

This magazine alone is proof that there is no consensus among American liberals (in the classical sense of the term) as to whether defense of liberty at home should somehow imply defending it abroad. As Christopher Hitchens bitingly observed in a 2001 Reason interview with Rhys Southan, when asked about why he was growing more sympathetic to the libertarian critique: "It's hard to assign a date. I threw in my lot with the left because on all manner of pressing topics—the Vietnam atrocity, nuclear weapons, racism, oligarchy—there didn't seem to be any distinctive libertarian view. I must say that this still seems to me to be the case, at least where issues of internationalism are concerned. What is the libertarian take, for example, on Bosnia or Palestine?"

Indeed, what is the libertarian take on Iraq or Lebanon? Or, for that matter, that of those leftist internationalists who cannot bring themselves, even temporarily, to walk in step with the Bush administration? Should the priority be freedom? Should it be to deny the president recognition for being true to his democratic word? Is American democracy an island, an isolated city on the hill that can be an inspiration but must not otherwise challenge the status quo buttressed by the prescriptions of national sovereignty?

What's the liberterian critique of everything? I'm an affluent young white male--leave me alone.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 1, 2005 6:53 PM