Realism Revisited
VDH does it again.
Yet somehow the labels got switched, and the "antidote" has become the "reactionary" or "conservative" or "un-progressive" approach, at least as viewed from my newsroom.
In the Middle East, the tenets of the old realism went something like this: These people are either crazy or backward, and usually both. We are interested in them only to the extent they pump oil and deter Communists. So authoritarians get a pass if they don’t rock the boat and don’t kill too many of their own on television like Saddam or Assad did. Under no circumstances spend American blood or treasure in any pie-in-the-sky project to ameliorate the misery of the Arab people. That will both fail and only earn us disdain as being naïve as well as inept.
Where did this cynical policy lead us? The Saudi royal family — autocratic, corrupt, and unpopular — kept Russians out. Despite embargos and cartels, they mostly pumped overpriced oil. We nodded and stationed troops — and won for our efforts global Wahhabism, whose petrol-fueled mosques and madrassas were the laboratories of thousands of anti-Western terrorists.
The shah, unloved and dictatorial, likewise bought things American. So we kept our nose out of his politics: Khomeini and a quarter century of a nightmarish theocracy ensued. Pakistani dictators, we knew, might hate the Soviets as much as we did, and remind a socialist India to play it straight. Yet American de facto sanction of such strongmen inevitably led to the nuclear conspiracies of Dr. Khan, to the most anti-American and strident Islamists of the Middle East, and to unnecessary tension with the world’s largest democracy India. The formula for an Islamic “republic” is prior Western support for an anti-democratic strongman; the antidote for Islamic fascism is consistent promotion of democratic dissidents.
Yet somehow the labels got switched, and the "antidote" has become the "reactionary" or "conservative" or "un-progressive" approach, at least as viewed from my newsroom.
