Quote of the Day: Nation-Building In Iraq

Yes. THIS:

"The problem in Iraq isn't that we tried to impose democracy by the point of the figurative bayonet, but that we stopped trying to do that too soon."

I'm a historian.  One major problem is that too many people trying to say/do things about Iraq don't know much (anything?) about history, let alone much (anything?) about playing the long game.  I find it absolutely incredible that anybody can seriously think we can just leave after a mere decade and think it's all going to be OK.  That's barely any time at all in the historical perspective.  (Remember Germany?  Japan?)  But hey, who cares about this stuff when your main concern is political optics at home?

On Iran, Syria, Human Rights, and Democracy

Take a look at this and at the actual testimony (in PDF).

Errors in Judgment and Errors of Doctrine

The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend?

Three Views on Egypt

Take a look at:

1. Natan Sharansky in the WSJ on the chance for liberalism in Egypt
2. Aluf Benn's essay in Haaretz arguing that Obama has lost Egypt
3. Tim Cavanaugh of Reason on Egypt (partly in response to Benn).

Nerd Analysis: Prof. Springborg on "Game Over" for Egyptian Democracy

Robert Springborg, a professor of national security affairs, has a piece in Foreign Policy in which he grimly opines that the chance for democracy in Egypt is over.  Link via Tigerhawk, who has his own commentary.

RELATED POST:  Other analyses by professors are linked in this post.

A Festivus Miracle

Well, whaddyaknow?

The HopeChange Chronicles: Humiliating Israel Is Now Apparently Our Foreign Policy

See this and this and this. Look, you don't have to like Binyamin Netanyahu or his policies, but he is a foreign head of state come here to visit, and you do NOT treat him like garbage. Maybe Bibi should now compare notes with the also-shabbily-treated Gordon Brown of the UK.

I am utterly appalled at what this White House's approach to American allies. What a weird poisonous cocktail of contempt, arrogance, carelessness, ignorance, and fatuousness. Really, is anything quite as pathetic and dangerous as a person who cannot distinguish friends from foes? In the end, if he should fall into trouble, he finds himself utterly alone. As Nile Gardiner has repeatedly noted, most recently here,

The ritual humiliation of the Israelis is an absolute disgrace, and yet another example of how the Obama administration views its allies with indifference, contempt, and at times outright hostility. It is extraordinary how far the Obama team has gone out of its way to grovel to state sponsors of terrorism, such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Muammar Gaddafi, while kicking America’s friends in the teeth.

. . . President Obama’s top priority in the Middle East should be preventing Iran from building a nuclear weapons programme. Instead he seems obsessed with kowtowing to America’s enemies by bashing Israel at almost every opportunity.

This is a foreign policy doctrine that is both destructive and fundamentally against the US national interest. The future security of the United States rests not upon the degree to which it can appease her enemies, but upon the strength of her enduring alliances with the rest of the free world. Israel needs Washington’s support and vice versa, not a slap in the face from a president whose idea of world leadership seems to consist largely of apologising for his country while throwing America’s friends to the wolves.

I'm gratified to see, though, that folks are pushing back. 327 members of the House of Representatives, of both parties, told the president to change his disastrous approach to US-Israeli relations.

UPDATE 1: Well, this is no surprise, because if I were Bibi, this is probably what I would do. "So Obama disses me? Fine, I'll just do whatever I want then, since no matter what I do, I get the shaft from a hostile White House." More here. Oy vey.

UPDATE 2: I hope Powerline is wrong, but I'm afraid that they're right with this observation:

The divide in perceptions about the PA may have driven disagreements between Washington and Jerusalem during the latter part of the Bush administration. But today we see not a disagreement but a feud, including an attempt by Washington to bring down the Israeli government. It's implausible, I think, to attribute such a bitter rift to a mere disagreement about facts on the ground.

In my opinion, President Obama's tilt towards the Palestinians is rooted in ideology, a considerably softer version of the ideology espoused by Jeremiah Wright. The facts that matter to this president do not pertain to the PA's intentions. Rather, I suspect the key facts are these: compared to Israelis, Palestinians are downtrodden and non-Western. They are what leftist academics call "the other." And promoting the interests of "the other" is a big deal for Obama -- indeed, this imperative seems like the closest thing he has to a religion.

If I'm right, then Netanyahu will never be able to placate Obama. And he should not try.

Uh-oh.

Jeff Jacoby on the New Iraq

Read this. Blurb:

Ronald Reagan liked to say that there was no limit to what a man could accomplish if he didn’t mind who got the credit. The transformation of Iraq from a hellish tyranny into a functioning democracy will be recorded as a signal accomplishment of George W. Bush’s presidency, and he probably doesn’t mind in the least that the Obama administration would like to take the credit.

As a historian, I think Jacoby's right.

Human Rights Watch in the Middle East

Here is a piece worth reading by the former head of Human Rights Watch. He makes a good point about moral equivalency. Blurb:

At Human Rights Watch, we always recognized that open, democratic societies have faults and commit abuses. But we saw that they have the ability to correct them — through vigorous public debate, an adversarial press and many other mechanisms that encourage reform.

That is why we sought to draw a sharp line between the democratic and nondemocratic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in human rights. We wanted to prevent the Soviet Union and its followers from playing a moral equivalence game with the West and to encourage liberalization by drawing attention to dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and those in the Soviet gulag — and the millions in China’s laogai, or labor camps.

When I stepped aside in 1998, Human Rights Watch was active in 70 countries, most of them closed societies. Now the organization, with increasing frequency, casts aside its important distinction between open and closed societies.

Nowhere is this more evident than in its work in the Middle East. The region is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region.

Read the whole thing.

Quote of the Day + HopeChange Chronicles: Obama's Foreign Policy

Caroline Glick is not impressed:

From Iran to Venezuela to Cuba, from Myanmar to North Korea to China, from Sudan to Afghanistan to Iraq to Russia to Syria to Saudi Arabia, the Obama administration has systematically taken human rights and democracy promotion off America's agenda. In their place, it has advocated "improving America's image," multilateralism and a moral relativism that either sees no distinction between dictators and their victims or deems the distinctions immaterial to the advancement of US interests.

The whole thing is beyond even the most extremist parody of Realpolitik's worst excesses.

Even more damning is this passage:

So if Obama's foreign policy has already failed or is in the process of failing throughout the world, why is he refusing to reassess it? Why, with blood running through the streets of Iran, is he still interested in appeasing the mullahs? Why, with Venezuela threatening to invade Honduras for Zelaya, is he siding with Zelaya against Honduran democrats? Why, with the Palestinians refusing to accept the Jewish people's right to self-determination, is he seeking to expel some 500,000 Jews from their homes in the interest of appeasing the Palestinians? Why, with North Korea threatening to attack the US with ballistic missiles, is he refusing to order the USS John McCain to interdict the suspected North Korean missile ship it has been trailing for the past two weeks? Why, when the Sudanese government continues to sponsor the murder of Darfuris, is the administration claiming that the genocide in Darfur has ended?
The only reasonable answer to all of these questions is that far from being nonideological, Obama's foreign policy is the most ideologically driven since Carter's tenure in office. If when Obama came into office there was a question about whether he was a foreign policy pragmatist or an ideologue, his behavior in his first six months in office has dispelled all doubt.

An additional thought: Is it now safer and more beneficial/advantageous to be one of America's enemies than one of her friends and allies?

I can't quite believe it's come to this. But even the most cursory glance at Obama's domestic policies reveals pretty much the same desire to operate on ideology despite the strictures of objective and practical reality. It's almost the active, aggressive desire to live in defiance of reality. Seriously, why else would any sane person decide unprecedented government spending and interference in the private sphere is the way to resuscitate a moribund economy? what person with even a rudimentary grasp of international history could have given the (in)famous "Cairo Speech" with a straight face?

Analysis: Jose Maria Aznar on Iran and Dissidents

Former Spanish prime minister Aznar has a new editorial on Iran. Blurb:

Those who protest against the blatant electoral fraud that handed victory to the fanatical Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are in reality demanding a change of regime. Thus, the regime has resorted to beating and shooting its citizens in a desperate attempt to squash the pro-democracy movement.

This is no time for hesitation on the part of the West. If, as part of an attempt to reach an agreement on the Iranian nuclear program, the leaders of democratic nations turn their backs on the dissidents they will be making a terrible mistake.

President Obama has said he refuses to "meddle" in Iran's internal affairs, but this is a poor excuse for passivity. If the international community is not able to stop, or at least set limits on, the repressive violence of the Islamic regime, the protesters will end up as so many have in the past -- in exile, in prison, or in the cemetery. And with them, all hope for change will be gone.

To be clear: Nobody in the circles of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei or Ahmadinejad is going to reward us for silence or inaction. On the contrary, failing to support the regime's critics will leave us with an emboldened Ahmadinejad, an atomic Iran, and dissidents that are disenchanted and critical of us. We cannot talk about freedom and democracy if we abandon our own principles.

Do read the whole thing.

RELATED POST: Natan Sharansky on the same topic.

Quote of the Day: Obama's Response to Iran -- "Diplomatic In the Worst Sense"

This is from an editorial in the left-leaning Nation:

The president says he entertains "deep concerns about the election" in Iran. Well, who doesn't? Expressing concern is "nice," it's "diplomatic"--in the worst sense--but it is not sufficient to the circumstance...

By every measure, the US president's response has been less than that of other world leaders, especially French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has branded the announced election "result" a fraud and bluntly decried the government's clampdown on dissent "brutal," "totally disproportionate" and "extremely alarming."

Read the whole thing. Hmmm, are we all neocons now?

Iran and Nerd News: 500+ Arrests, Including Students at Campus Clashes

The Guardian reports that Iran has arrested some 500 activists, reformers, journalists, and students as the post-election protests continue.

Here is a blurb about students specifically:

The detention of prominent people has added to multiple arrests of students at Iran's universities. An estimated 200 were arrested after clashes at Tehran University at the weekend, although many were later released. More than 100 were taken into custody on Monday after security forces fired tear gas at protesters at Shiraz University.

I add a personal opinion that the completely spineless non-response and seeming lack of interest from the Obama White House is a towering disgrace. State's bit with Twitter was good, but not enough.

One more thing: See this from CNN. The remark about Iranian students comes around the 0:50 mark.

Pigs Do Fly at The "New York Times": Acknowledging Progress in Iraq

READ THIS!

Cautious optimism, but optimism all the same.

More from Instapundit.

Israel at 60, plus Nerd Analysis on 1948 by Benny Morris

The nation of Israel celebrates its 60th anniversary this year.

As Mark Steyn reminds us, various publications are filling pages and spilling ink by rather wolfishly wondering if Israel can survive.

Here is a quote, though, that expresses one of my thoughts:

It’s darkly ironic that Israel was the first state to be created by the United Nations and ever since has endured a unique and sustained campaign of attempted delegitimisation. For the dictatorships and sclerotic monarchies that rule much of the Arab world, criticism of Israel is the best diversion from examining their own dismal human rights records.

Hm. Look, I'm not saying that Israel is perfect -- it is far from it, and indeed it's riddled with problems and contradictions. (One headline even uses the phrase "a Jekyll and Hyde nation.") Still, I dare say part of that is because it's constantly riddled with bullets and rockets from people determined to destroy it outright. Anyway, at the risk of receiving angry comments, I note Israel's 60th birthday and trust that it will have many more.

Meanwhile, here's some new nerd analysis by well-known and occasionally controversial Israeli historian Benny Morris, who has a new book on the events of 1948 (from Yale University Press). Morris, by the way, is one of those academics who's been both loved and hated in the political sphere: adored by some on the Left, abhorred by some on the Right. In this, his latest publication, Morris seems to have finally realized that the war in 1948 was not only a territorial dispute, but also about an attempt to annihilate the Jews.

Nerd Analysis: Fouad Ajami on the Bush Legacy in the Middle East

Fouad Ajami, professor of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins University, has an interesting piece about Bush and the Middle East.

Do take a look. Here's one piece of it:

It is to Mr. Bush's singular credit that he was the first American president to recognize that Palestine was not the central concern of the Arabs, or the principal source of the political maladies.

Yowzers! That's unconventional, isn't it?

Link via Tigerhawk, who notes that Ajami's opinion piece won't win him many friends on the academic Left. Clearly not. It's a firecracker, all right.

Nerd Analysis: Prerequisites for Democracy -- Middle East Edition

Some Harvard eggheads have an interesting post about the foundations and prerequisites of democracy as they apply to the Middle East.

The post begins with an astute observation by a nerd in 1956.