April 16, 2005

History is the best revenge....

Victor Hansen has channeled my thoughts and written the piece I would write, if I could write...a good roasting of people like Madaleine Albright, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Brent Scowcroft, whose FAILED Middle East policies have somehow given them the moral authority to sneer and carp and denigrate Bush's policies...

...For the last year, such well-meaning former "wise people" have pretty much assured us that the Bush doctrine will not work and that the Arab world is not ready for Western-style democracy, especially when fostered through Western blood and iron.

But too often we discuss the present risky policy without thought of what preceded it or what might have substituted for it. Have we forgotten that the messy business of democracy was the successor, not the precursor, to a litany of other failed prescriptions? Or that there were never perfect solutions for a place like the Middle East — awash as it is in oil, autocracy, fundamentalism, poverty, and tribalism — only choices between awful and even more awful? Or that September 11 was not a sudden impulse on the part of Mohammed Atta, but the logical culmination of a long simmering pathology? Or that the present loudest critics had plenty of chances to leave something better than the mess that confronted the United States on September 12? Or that at a time of war, it is not very ethical to be sorta for, sorta against, kinda supportive, kinda critical of the mission — all depending on the latest sound bite from Iraq?...

That "sound bite" crack is so true. The terrorists shape their attacks to accommodate the news media, the news media performs its part in the symbiosis and fills our TV screens with smoldering rubble, and then the ponderous figures of the old establishment do some mental adjustments and say things starting with: "It's becoming increasingly obvious that [fill in the blank]."

(And us bloggers have spent the last few years writing about news that the Gasping Media ignored, news which painted a rather different picture.)

Well, history is the best revenge. Scowcroft will little more than a footnote in future books with titles like Geopolitical Revolution: The Age of George W. Bush. Ha ha ha...

Posted by John Weidner at April 16, 2005 8:38 AM
Weblog by John Weidner