Middle East in Sea of Change

Fire of Liberty

Victor Davis Hanson has a moving piece over @ National Review Online on the monumental changes that have occurred throughout the Middle East since the dark days of September 11th. It's always a relief on to read VDH's positive pieces every Friday just to have a little relief from all the sanity that's being dished out everyday in the MSM. I wished VDH worked in our State Department to bring some sense to the white striped pant fellows over @ Foggy Bottom. Luckily, the good professor has a modicum of sanity himself and wouldn't touch that madhouse with a forty-foot pole, let alone would he have a chance of being invited to the entity with strong views like his. Just see for yourself:

The Middle East is in flux, as the autocracies in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia reel from the earthquakes in Afghanistan and Iraq. Like it or not, this is not the time for half-measures, but rather the hour for a uniform American policy that promotes democratic reform and thus predicates our aid, weapons, friendship — almost everything — on the degree to which Middle Eastern societies are free.

How odd that conservatives, usually derided for their multicultural insensitivity and blinkered approach to the world abroad, had far more confidence in the Arab street than did liberals at home and Euro elites who patronized Arabs as nice "others" who were "different" rather than oppressed by murderous thugs in the manner of former Russians, Hungarians, Bosnians, and Afghans.

Every time the United States the last quarter century had acted boldly — its removal of Noriega and aid for the Contras, instantaneous support for a reunified Germany, extension of NATO, preference for Yeltsin instead of Gorbachev, Gulf War I, bombing of Milosevic, support for Sharon's fence, withdrawal from Gaza and decapitation of the Hamas killer elite, taking out the Taliban and Saddam-good things have ensued. In contrast, on every occasion that we have temporized — abject withdrawal from Lebanon, appeasement of Arafat at Oslo, a decade of inaction in the Balkans, paralysis in Rwanda, sloth in the face of terrorist attacks, not going to Baghdad in 1991 — corpses pile up and the United States became either less secure or less respected or both.

Good ole VDH, he always has the best way of putting things. Keep up the good work.