Jonah Goldberg at NRO

Fire of Liberty

I really enjoyed Jonah Goldberg's recent Goldberg File "The Stuff Nations are Built On," where he noted that some predictions and assessments on Iraq and the terror war by Fareed Zakaria and David Brooks havn't come to fruition.

His argument against Zakaria is that he mocked Francis Fukuyama's wonderful article and subsequent book The End of History and the Last Man. Zakaria argued in a post 9/11 article that Fukuyama's end of history was ending with these attacks. Unfortunately Zakaria was wrong because the end of history, i.e. the best way to organize one's society is via a liberal democracy not in the totalitarian style that exists in the Outposts of Tyranny.

Whats more interesting is what Goldberg points out in his article. While Zakaria argued in his article that Fukuyama saw terrorism only as a mere opponent to liberal democracy rather than a competitor. Zakaria implied in his article that Bin Laden and his minion had restarted a new struggle to history. Unfortunately, Goldberg pointed out that any group that offers only death and pain will always lose to the ideology of freedom the exists in a liberal democracy. With these choices, the Iraqi's chose the liberal democracy route.

The other notion that was dissolved was David Brooks New York Times article "For Iraqi to Win, the U.S. Must Lose." Brooks argued that since we didn't defeat the Iraqi people like we did Saddam or the Germans in WWII, we had taken a sort of ownership of the country from the population.

Based on Goldberg's assessment, It seems like the Iraqis have gotten behind the wheel of dad's Buick and is about to take the learners license test of democracy. Yes it is true that the U.S. will come along for the ride but the people of Iraq are driving the car down the road to the city known as liberal democracy.

Check out Jonah's interesting article.

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