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Andrew Sullivan: Civil War In Republican Party
The conservative pundit/religious right hater, Andrew Sullivan, sees a WOT hardline forming, and misreads it as a Party coup against Neo-Cons. No way! The hardline has always been there. Sullivan mentions unsettling facts such as Iraqi Parliamentary support for Hizbollah, but says nothing of potential Arab re-alignment against Shiite Iranians. And who says that President Bush won't defer to hard-liners? Newt Gingrich recently declared that our current military-political position was "World War III." But Bush said that in a May interview with AFP (France). Maybe a pre-emptive war climate isn't best suited for advancing democracy. A consensus is building on WOT revamping. by Andrew Sullivan ...To be fair, some neoconservatives long expected this potential irony. Their ultimate analysis of the Middle East was, to my mind, a largely persuasive one. It was that decades of propping up Arab dictatorships and kleptocracies in return for cheap oil was no longer a viable foreign policy. The repression in the region had given life and legitimacy to radical Islamism, spawned terror, and eventually cost the lives of thousands of Americans. The only way to tackle this problem at its roots was to shift American policy towards favouring democracy in the Muslim and Arab world - even if this meant instability and an Islamist explosion in the short term. In the medium and long run, neocons hoped, democratically elected governments would behave more rationally towards the West and Israel - and to their own citizens. In theory, this makes a good deal of sense - and neocons are, of all people, adept at theory. The trouble, of course, is that theory always melts when it meets something called reality. And non-neoconservatism has always been defined as a political temperament acutely aware of the discrepancy between theory and practice. It is, from Edmund Burke through to Michael Oakeshott, a tradition that grasps that imperfection, doubt and complexity are the only reliable guides to navigating politics - and life as a whole. Conservatives are not averse to theory or argument - they just understood that it is never, ever enough in the world of practical life... Posted by: Griper Whegum8464 2006-07-27 |
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