Posted on 03/02/2005 8:43:39 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!"
wrote William Wordsworth about the enthusiasm that gripped so many throughout Europe in the aftermath of the French Revolution. In the end, the Revolution failed to live up to its expectations, having first devoured most of its children (not to mention its many enemies, and an even greater number of innocents) and then leading into the fifteen-year nightmare of the Napoleonic Wars. Other, less sexy revolutions (the American one and Britain's earlier "Glorious Revolution") have proved to be a lot more durable, not to mention more positive in their overall impact.
Yet, despite its original association, I can't think of a better quote when contemplating of the democratic revolution that swept the Eastern Europe fifteen years ago and led to the dissolution of the Evil Empire. And I can't think of a better quote when contemplating today's second wave of the democratic revolution seemingly sweeping the Middle East, Central Asia and those parts of the former communist empire which didn't quite catch the wave the first time.
Granted, we're watching raw history unfold and we cannot be sure where it will all end. Much can still go wrong and the spring can turn out to be a false one. It is an uncertain and confusing time - for us the sympathetic observers and supporters, for the people themselves caught in the maelstrom of history, and not the least for those caught on the wrong side of the debate, as this unintentionally hilarious exchange between Comedy Central's Jon Stewart and a former Clinton aide Nancy Soderberg so well illustrates.
Democracy is not a panacea for all the societal problems. As Churchill once remarked, it's "the worst system of governance except all those other systems which have been tried from time to time." In the Middle East, in particular, it might not always, and certainly not at first, produce the open, liberal, pro-Western societies we all hope for. But overall, in the long run, and despite all the problems, who can think of a better alternative to the current predicament of the region? Who can argue that the countries of the Eastern Europe and the rest of the world are now worse off for their new-found democracy? You can quite easily have governments that are both democratic and anti-American - for example in France - but who could possibly think that any alternative (a dictatorship?) in Paris would be a better option for the French, Europe, and for the United States?
It is ironic to contemplate that the Bush Sr. Administration has been at best very ambivalent about the first democratic revolution, instinctively opting for "stability" and persisting in an effort to put the Soviet Humpty Dumpty together long after it was no longer a tenable policy. It is a kind of a strange closure that George H. W.'s son is now presiding over another revolution, one he is actually keen to perpetuate and see through till the end.
Yes, it is bliss, indeed, to be alive today. The next time you see a sour face, ask: I am on the side of democracy. Which side are you on? We might not always get it right, but we are right. And that's a pretty good place to be.
(thanks to Niner Charlie for providing the initial inspiration for this rant.)
'But as an American . . .'
We hardly ever watch Comedy Central's "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart," but our TV happened to be tuned to it last night when erstwhile Clinton aide Nancy Soderberg, author of "The Superpower Myth: The Use and Misuse of American Might" (foreword by Bill Clinton, blurb by Madeleine Albright) came on. We're not sure what possessed us to turn on the sound and watch, but we're glad we did, for it was a fascinating interview. Here's a TiVo-assisted transcript of most of it:
Stewart: This book--it talks about the superpower myth of the United States. There is this idea, the United States is the sole superpower, and I guess the premise of the book is we cannot misuse that power--have to use it wisely, and not just punitively. Is that--
Soderberg: That's right. What I argue is that the Bush administration fell hostage to the superpower myth, believing that because we're the most powerful nation on earth, we were all-powerful, could bend the world to our will and not have to worry about the rest of the world. I think what they're finding in the second term is, it's a little bit harder than that, and reality has an annoying way of intruding.
Stewart: But what do you make of--here's my dilemma, if you will. I don't care for the way these guys conduct themselves--and this is just you and I talking, no cameras here [audience laughter]. But boy, when you see the Lebanese take to the streets and all that, and you go, "Oh my God, this is working," and I begin to wonder, is it--is the way that they handled it really--it's sort of like, "Uh, OK, my daddy hits me, but look how tough I'm getting." You know what I mean? Like, you don't like the method, but maybe--wrong analogy, is that, uh--?
Soderberg: Well, I think, you know, as a Democrat, you don't want anything nice to happen to the Republicans, and you don't want them to have progress. But as an American, you hope good things would happen. I think the way to look at it is, they can't credit for every good thing that happens, but they need to be able to manage it. I think what's happening in Lebanon is great, but it's not necessarily directly related to the fact that we went into Iraq militarily.
Stewart: Do you think that the people of Lebanon would have had, sort of, the courage of their conviction, having not seen--not only the invasion but the election which followed? It's almost as though that the Iraqi election has emboldened this crazy--something's going on over there. I'm smelling something.
Soderberg: I think partly what's going on is the country next door, Syria, has been controlling them for decades, and they [the Syrians] were dumb enough to blow up the former prime minister of Lebanon in Beirut, and they're--people are sort of sick of that, and saying, "Wait a minute, that's a stretch too far." So part of what's going on is they're just protesting that. But I think there is a wave of change going on, and if we can help ride it though the second term of the Bush administration, more power to them.
Stewart: Do you think they're the guys to--do they understand what they've unleashed? Because at a certain point, I almost feel like, if they had just come out at the very beginning and said, "Here's my plan: I'm going to invade Iraq. We'll get rid of a bad guy because that will drain the swamp"--if they hadn't done the whole "nuclear cloud," you know, if they hadn't scared the pants off of everybody, and just said straight up, honestly, what was going on, I think I'd almost--I'd have no cognitive dissonance, no mixed feelings.
Soderberg: The truth always helps in these things, I have to say. But I think that there is also going on in the Middle East peace process--they may well have a chance to do a historic deal with the Palestinians and the Israelis. These guys could really pull off a whole--
Stewart: This could be unbelievable!
Soderberg:---series of Nobel Peace Prizes here, which--it may well work. I think that, um, it's--
Stewart: [buries head in hands] Oh my God! [audience laughter] He's got, you know, here's--
Soderberg: It's scary for Democrats, I have to say.
Stewart: He's gonna be a great--pretty soon, Republicans are gonna be like, "Reagan was nothing compared to this guy." Like, my kid's gonna go to a high school named after him, I just know it.
Soderberg: Well, there's still Iran and North Korea, don't forget. There's hope for the rest of us.
Stewart: [crossing fingers] Iran and North Korea, that's true, that is true [audience laughter]. No, it's--it is--I absolutely agree with you, this is--this is the most difficult thing for me to--because, I think, I don't care for the tactics, I don't care for this, the weird arrogance, the setting up. But I gotta say, I haven't seen results like this ever in that region.
Soderberg: Well wait. It hasn't actually gotten very far. I mean, we've had--
Stewart: Oh, I'm shallow! I'm very shallow!
Soderberg: There's always hope that this might not work. No, but I think, um, it's--you know, you have changes going on in Egypt; Saudi Arabia finally had a few votes, although women couldn't participate. What's going on here in--you know, Syria's been living in the 1960s since the 1960s--it's, part of this is--
Stewart: You mean free love and that kind of stuff? [audience laughter] Like, free love, drugs?
Soderberg: If you're a terrorist, yeah.
Stewart: They are Baathists, are they--it looks like, I gotta say, it's almost like we're not going to have to invade Iran and Syria. They're gonna invade themselves at a certain point, no? Or is that completely naive?
Soderberg: I think it's moving in the right direction. I'll have to give them credit for that. We'll see.
Stewart: Really? Hummus for everybody, for God's sakes.
We've long been skeptical of Jon Stewart, but color us impressed. He managed to ambush this poor woman brutally, in a friendly interview. She was supposed to be promoting her book, and instead he got her to spend the entire interview debunking it (at least if we understood the book's thesis correctly from the very brief discussion of it up top).
She also admitted repeatedly that Democrats are hoping for American failure in the Middle East. To be sure, this is not true of all Democrats, Soderberg speaks only for herself, and she says she is ambivalent ("But as an American . . ."). But we do not question her expertise in assessing the prevailing mentality of her own party. No wonder Dems get so defensive about their patriotism.
Interesting too is Stewart's acknowledgment of his own "cognitive dissonance" and "mixed feelings" over the Iraq liberation. It's a version of an argument we've been hearing a lot lately: As our Brendan Miniter puts it, "The president's critics never seem to tire of claiming that the war in Iraq began over weapons of mass destruction and only later morphed into a war of liberation."
Miniter correctly notes that "this criticism isn't entirely right," but for the sake of argument let's assume it is. What does it mean? President Bush has altered his arguments to conform to reality, while his critics remain fixated on obsolete disputes. This would seem utterly to refute the liberal media stereotype. Bush, it turns out, is a supple-minded empiricist, while his opponents are rigid ideologues.
LOVE IT!!!
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“Revolutions do not always come when things are going from bad to worse ... Usually the most dangerous time for a bad government is when it seeks to reform itself.”The incubator for the Islamist terrorism spawned in the Middle East has not been economic poverty, but rather the democratic deficit and consequent dysfunctional societies. The door is till open for the critics of the democracy agenda to get on board the ‘freedom train’ now running through the Middle East. This applies equally to liberal Democrats in the United States, the Left in Australia (Labor, Democrats, Greens), much of Old Europe and apparently even to significant sections of the British Conservative Party.
The Arab Street
A vanquished cliché.
By Christopher Hitchens
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Posted Monday, Feb. 28, 2005, at 10:26 AM PT
The return of politics to Iraq has had many blissful secondary consequences, one of them apparently minor but nonetheless, I think, important. When was the last time you heard some glib pundit employing the phrase "The Arab Street"? I haven't actually done a Nexis search on this, but my strong impression is that the term has been, without any formal interment, laid to rest. And not a minute too soon, either.
In retrospect, it's difficult to decide precisely when this annoying expression began to expire, if only from diminishing returns. There was, first, the complete failure of the said "street" to detonate with rage when coalition forces first crossed the border of Iraq, as had been predicted (and one suspects privately hoped) by so many "experts." But one still continued to hear from commentators who conferred street-level potency on passing "insurgents." (I remember being aggressively assured by an interviewer on Al Franken's quasi-comedic Air America that Muqtada Sadr's "Mahdi Army" in Najaf was just the beginning of a new "Tet Offensive.") Mr. Sadr duly got a couple of seats in the recent Iraqi elections. And it was most obviously those elections that discredited the idea of ventriloquizing the Arab or Muslim populace or of conferring axiomatic authenticity on the loudest or hoarsest voice.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~SNIP~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
See link for the full article.
Overviews!
fyi
I would love to see a replay of the show....priceless.
Stewart's intellectually honest enough to know that if America just stopped being a Superpower and some other country took that mantle, he wouldn't have the freedoms that created the person you see on "The Daily Show". He's orders of magnitude more genuine than most of Hollywood and / or liberal politics. That's one of the reasons why I believe he's is so popular.
I used to enjoy that show, a few years ago, but he's become just another partisan cheap-shot specialist. I don't regard him as anything but an entertainer who isn't particularly entertaining.
saved for offline reading and contemplation
"this unintentionally hilarious exchange between Comedy Central's Jon Stewart and a former Clinton aide Nancy Soderberg"
It was intentional that it be hilarious (it's an alleged comedy show) but Stewart thought he had a more nimble straight "man". The overwhelmingly partisan viewers of the show will laugh because it's a safe venue, and because they don't have an ideology in the first place, merely a bunch of catchphrases and catechisms.
This week Stewart mocked conservatives and Republicans, referring to Terry Schiavo by saying "this is how sick you have to be before these guys [three Republicans in congress being lampooned] will do something about your health care."
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