Transformation's Toll
By George Will
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
WASHINGTON -- ``Grotesque'' was Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's
characterization of the charge that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was
responsible for the current Middle East conflagration. She is correct,
up to a point. This point: Hezbollah and Hamas were alive and toxic long
before March 2003. Still, it is not perverse to wonder whether the
spectacle of America, currently learning a lesson -- one that
conservatives should not have to learn on the job -- about the limits of
power to subdue an unruly world, has emboldened many enemies.
Speaking on ABC's ``This Week," Rice called it ``short-sighted" to judge
the success of the administration's transformational ambitions by a
``snapshot" of progress ``some couple of years" into the transformation.
She seems to consider today's turmoil preferable to the Middle East's
``false stability" of the last 60 years, during which U.S. policy
``turned a blind eye to the absence of democratic forces."
There is, however, a sense in which that argument creates a blind eye:
It makes instability, no matter how pandemic or lethal, necessarily a
sign of progress. Violence is vindication: Hamas and Hezbollah have,
Rice says, ``determined that it is time now to try and arrest the move
toward moderate democratic forces in the Middle East.''
But there also is democratic movement toward extremism. America's
intervention was supposed to democratize Iraq which, by benign
infection, would transform the region. Early on in the Iraq occupation,
Rice argued that democratic institutions do not just spring from a
hospitable political culture, they also can help create such a culture.
Perhaps.
But elections have transformed Hamas into the government of the
Palestinian territories, and elections have turned Hezbollah into a
significant faction in Lebanon's parliament, from which it operates as a
state within the state. And as a possible harbinger of future horrors,
last year's elections gave the Muslim Brotherhood 19 percent of the
seats in Egypt's parliament.
[...]
The administration, justly criticized for its Iraq premises and their
execution, is suddenly receiving some criticism so untethered from
reality as to defy caricature. The national, ethnic and religious
dynamics of the Middle East are opaque to most people, but to The Weekly
Standard -- voice of a spectacularly misnamed radicalism,
``neoconservativism'' -- everything is crystal clear: Iran is the key to
everything.
``No Islamic Republic of Iran, no Hezbollah. No Islamic Republic of
Iran, no one to prop up the Assad regime in Syria. No Iranian support
for Syria ... '' You get the drift. So, The Weekly Standard says:
``We might consider countering this act of Iranian aggression with a
military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait? Does
anyone think a nuclear Iran can be contained? That the current regime
will negotiate in good faith? It would be easier to act sooner rather
than later. Yes, there would be repercussions -- and they would be
healthy ones, showing a strong America that has rejected further
appeasement.''
``Why wait?'' Perhaps because the U.S. military has enough on its plate,
in the deteriorating wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which both border
Iran. And perhaps because containment, although of uncertain success,
did work against Stalin and his successors, and might be preferable to a
war against a nation much larger and more formidable than Iraq. And if
Assad's regime does not fall after The Weekly Standard's hoped-for third
war, with Iran, does the magazine hope for a fourth?
As for the ``healthy'' repercussions that The Weekly Standard is so
eager to experience from yet another war: One envies that publication's
powers of prophecy, but wishes it had exercised them on the nation's
behalf before all of the surprises -- all of them unpleasant -- that
Iraq has inflicted. And regarding the ``appeasement'' that The Weekly
Standard decries: Does the magazine really wish the administration had
heeded its earlier (Dec. 20, 2004) editorial advocating war with yet
another nation -- the bombing of Syria?
Neoconservatives have much to learn, even from Buddy Bell, manager of
the Kansas City Royals. After his team lost its 10th consecutive game in
April, Bell said, ``I never say it can't get worse.'' In their next
game, the Royals extended their losing streak to 11 and in May lost 13
in a row.
