def Sparse(Matrix):

Via The Corner, Michael Young writes a stunningly relevant piece about how Arab liberals have allowed their salon preening and fashionable disdain for Bush’s “new imperialism” to destroy their own ostensible goals of liberalism in the Arab world.

There was considerable hypocrisy in the Arab liberal reaction to Bush’s wars. For decades, an unwavering lament of the liberals was that the US had abandoned democrats in favor of autocrats. That was true, particularly during the Cold War, when administrations pushing for greater openness on the part of their Arab allies were reminded by the latter that pushing too hard might induce them to lean toward the Soviet Union. In an era of superpower competition, the “realist” paradigm accepted such blackmail: It was better for the US to deal with states primarily on the basis of interests as opposed to values, even if values were never abandoned in Washington’s public rhetoric.

That’s where we are heading again today. American realists are making their comeback, most recently through Robert Gates at the Defense Department. However, Gates is part of a larger confederacy of old government hands rebounding thanks to the chaos in Iraq: “We told you so” is their leitmotif, and while many of these individuals can blend in an occasional value with their estimates of interests, their expectations remain decidedly low when it comes to the Middle East.

The Arab liberals wanted to be free from the thuggish autocrats that tormented them, but when the first American leader to actually show real concern for such injustice came to help them, they spat in his face, calling him a fascist. Well, now they’ve gotten what they wanted, and exactly what they don’t. The purveyors of Realpolitik, the Democrats and realists from George H.W. Bush’s administration like Baker and Scowcroft, are now in charge, and Arab liberals can watch, with prides and “intellectual honesty” intact, their last chance for real reform go up in the flames of the inevitable return to a fully dictatorial but “stable” Middle East.

Americans made their decision this past election day largely in ignorance of the struggle for democracy and classical liberalism in the Arab world. The Arab liberals had no such excuse. The saddening thing is that Bush will more likely than not be blamed in the future, by those same liberals in the Middle East, for not doing enough to help them, when in reality is was them cutting off their own noses to spite their faces.

~ by spmat on November 18, 2006.