Liberal fantasyland in the Middle East
Max Boot:
REMEMBER HOW idyllic the Middle East was before that crazy cowboy moved into the White House? Oh for the good ol' days when Saddam Hussein would invite Kurdish and Shiite leaders to his palace for a lamb roast followed by a nice game of checkers. When the Iranian mullahs would host Fourth of July festivities in Tehran in honor of the Great Angel. And when Hamas and Hezbollah big shots would balance yarmulkes on their turbans and visit Yad Vashem, Israel's memorial to victims of the Holocaust.One of the problems with liberals is that they want to project the bad conduct of others onto the US. If only we had done this or that the bad guys would not act bad. It is a repeat of what Jean Kirkpatrick called the "Blame America first" foreign policy of Democrats.
Wait. You mean my memory is playing tricks on me? None of that actually happened? Well, then, why on earth are so many pundits blaming President Bush for the current mess in the Middle East? A typical example comes from fellow Los Angeles Times columnist Rosa Brooks, who writes: "The Bush administration's tunnel-vision approach to foreign policy has pushed the U.S. and the world into a devastating tailspin of conflict without end….We promised to make the world safer, but we've turned it into a tinderbox."
We've turned the world into a tinderbox? Wasn't it a tinderbox long before 2001? And why is the United States, much less Bush, responsible for every conflagration?
Iran was developing nuclear weapons and sponsoring terrorism long before Bush came into office. Critics attack him for not being diplomatic enough with Tehran, but in fact he has been supportive of the efforts of France, Germany and Britain to strike a deal. More recently, his secretary of State has offered to talk to Tehran directly. So keen is the Iranian government for such talks that it hasn't deigned to reply to the U.S. offer.
Bush hasn't exactly been a warmonger when it comes to Iran's ally, Syria, either. Even as Syrian dictator Bashar Assad was turning his country into a staging ground for the Iraqi insurgency, the Bush administration repeatedly sent envoys to Damascus in an attempt to negotiate. Far from being interested in a deal, Assad was only emboldened into thinking that he would suffer no consequences for his hostile acts.
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I think many times whenever a conservative hears a liberal criticize the US, said conservative generalizes and simplifies the liberal's point by saying he or she "blames America."
ReplyDeleteThe truth is that many people on both sides of the aisle have criticism for various US policies and for terrorists or criminals.
For example, there's no excusing the behavior and policies of the religious extremists running Iran. They bear a majority of the responsibility for doing things like supporting terrorists.
However, you know what would have been great? If we hadn't deposed Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister in 1953 and installed a corrupt and murderous Shah who was eventually overthrown in the 1979 revolution.
Are we responsible for the extremists in power in Iran? No.
Are we complicit in destroying Iran's democratic institutions? Absolutely.