What He Said

Greg Djerejian writes:

Call us skeptical realists, perhaps. . . . [W]e understand that
a moral dimension has its place, and always will, in the
prosecution of U.S. foreign policy. We realize too, as security
hawks, that the spread of democracy typically has the effect
of reducing the specter of war and conflict. Which is to say,
we like democracy, and are happy to see it spread. But we
are not fanciful adventurers--and we want to ensure
requisite resources are brought to bear, and utopic outcomes
are not breezily assured, and we suspect the effort will take
place in gradualist fashion, via economic liberalization as
much as political reform, and certainly not under the barrel
of Israeli (Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon) or American (Iraq
and, for some of the dimmer neo-cons salivating away,
prospectively 'Syran') guns. We realize that democracy is
more than a 'ballot-cracy', more than waving purple
fingers in what was mostly a national census showcasing
the rise of Shi'a revanchism in Iraq. We realize too that
Bush's clumsy attempts to spread democracy in the Middle
East are failing rather dismally (see, again, the 30-day carte
blanche to Israel to engage in a fanciful expedition to
'eradicate' Hezbollah, which helped put another nail in the
coffin of America's repute in the region, or the emptily
quixotic exercise that were the Palestinian elections, swiftly
met with aid cut-offs which predictably have spurred on a
grave humanitarian situation, and most of all, an Iraq
adventure that has unleashed, in the face of our inability
to provide for basic order, national furies that most
Americans don't even begin to understand, not to mention
great skepticism about America's policy objectives in the
region), and that in the face of such debacles, we must not
curl up like bovine Pavlovians and ask for more of the same
--but demand strategic changes. To do so, we must face
reality square-on, learning from our mistakes and
re-appraising our strategy, rather than rushing blindly
towards the next misadventure.

Read the whole post here.