Eight years ago, we were visited by the furies of Arab lands. We were rudely awakened from a decade whose gurus and pundits had announced the end of ideology, of politics itself, and the triumph of the world-wide Web and the “electronic herd.” We had discovered that on the other side of the world masterminds of terror, and preachers, and their foot-soldiers were telling of America the most sordid of tales. We had become, without knowing it, a party to a civil war in the Arab-Islamic world between the autocrats and their disaffected children, between those who wanted to live a normal life and warriors of the faith bent on imposing their will on that troubled arc of geography.

Our country answered that call, not always brilliantly, for we are fated to be strangers in that world and thus fated to improvise and make our way through unfamiliar alleyways.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Cohen writes:

Tony Blair, now also a Middle East envoy and Mitchell’s partner in Belfast, once put it to me this way: “The only reason we got the breakthrough in Northern Ireland was we did in the end focus on it with such intensity over such a period that every little thing that went wrong — and everything that could go wrong did at some point — was all the time being managed and rectified.” He described the approach as: “Any time we can’t solve it, we have to manage it, until we can start to solve it again.”

Bush had the ideological framework wrong. Obama has righted it by ending the war on terror. Now comes the hard Middle Eastern slog of solve-manage-solve. It will need the president’s unswerving focus.

Barry Rubin, however, writes (on Facebook):

Second, two blocs contend for regional power. The better-organized, more coherent side is led by Islamist Iran, with junior partner Syria, Lebanese Hizballah, Palestinian Hamas, and Iraqi insurgents. Also on the Islamist–but not Iranian–side are Muslim Brotherhoods and al-Qaida. All want to destroy Western influence, Arab regimes, and Israel.
The other grouping consists of the other Arab states, Israel, and the West. Yet this alignment is weak, disorganized, and full of internal conflicts.

This illustrates the mistake Cohen is making. Cohen pretends that the West and the Iranian axis have enough in common that differences can be negotiated away. Prof. Rubin, on the other hand, is arguing that Iran’s interests diverge dramatically from those of the West. There is no managing and no accommodating Tehran.

Furthermore Fouad Ajami writes that this change is ironic.

The irony now is obvious: George W. Bush as a force for emancipation in Muslim lands, and Barack Hussein Obama as a messenger of the old, settled ways. Thus the “parochial” man takes abroad a message that Muslims and Arabs did not have tyranny in their DNA, and the man with Muslim and Kenyan and Indonesian fragments in his very life and identity is signaling an acceptance of the established order. Mr. Obama could still acknowledge the revolutionary impact of his predecessor’s diplomacy, but so far he has chosen not to do so.

Despite his oh-so-openminded approach to Iran (and other tyrannies) Cohen fails to grasp that he is acting as an apologist for its despotism. George Bush, for all his faults, tried to change the status quo in the Muslim world and make its citizens free. I had not remembered that President Bush had been interviewed numerous times on Al Arabiya. Unlike his successor, the former president was, at least at times, unapologetic for his actions and beliefs:

Q- But would these moments — I mean, these emotional moments, would they make you reconsider or rethink about what’s going on in our area now (Middle East)?

THE PRESIDENT: Not really. As a matter of fact, I leave most of the meetings reassured that the loved one, in this case, fully understanding what we were doing. See, I believe that, one, it’s noble to liberate 25 million people from a tyrant; two, that we cannot allow Iraq to be a safe haven for people who have sworn allegiance to those who have attacked us. In other words, I believe we must defeat the extremists there so we don’t have to face them here at home. And three, I believe the spread of liberty will yield peace. And I believe the Middle East is plenty capable of being a part of the world where liberty flourishes. That’s what I believe people want.

And so I leave those meetings saddened by the fact that a person has pain in her heart — and yesterday she had pain in her heart — but encouraged by the fact that her son died for a noble cause and a necessary cause. And that’s exactly what she told me.

President Obama’s outreach has been met with an angry slap, (via memeorandum) not a hand of conciliation. Apparently, Ahmadinejad did not have the benefit of reading Cohen’s column before reacting to President Obama’s words.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

One thing is sure to go with Mr. Bush when he departs to Crawford, Texas: his “diplomacy of freedom.” That diplomacy — which propelled the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which drove the Syrians out of Lebanon after they had all but destroyed the sovereignty of that country, and had challenged pro-American allies in Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula — is gone for good.

It was an odd spectacle, the time behind us: a conservative American president preaching the gospel of liberty for lands beyond, his liberal detractors at home giving voice to a deep skepticism about liberty’s chances in inhospitable settings. No one was more revealing of the liberal temper — and of things to come — than Vice President-elect Joe Biden (then the point man for foreign policy among the Democrats) speaking in December 2006 about the hazards of believing in liberty’s appeal to Muslim lands. Of President Bush, he said: “He has this wholesome but naive view that Westerners’ notions of liberty are easily transported to that area of the world.” Mr. Biden knew better: He warned the president, he said, that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani’s view of liberty differed from “our view of liberty . . . I think the president thinks there’s a Thomas Jefferson or Madison behind every sand dune waiting to jump up. And there are none.”

In an op-ed yesterday, Max Boot lamented how President Bush fell short in the area of foreign policy. He summarized his argument here.

You can defend Bush by saying that it is appropriate to use presidential speeches to set ambitious goals; even if they are not met, they can nudge lower-level officials in the right direction. The problem is that Bush seems to have done so little to turn his goals into actions, especially in the second term, that he has created a damaging credibility gap. Iran is a case in point. Bush has long talked of holding states to account for their support of terrorism and attempts to develop weapons of mass destruction. But there is not much evidence that he is doing much to hold Iran to account. Or Pakistan. Or Syria. That breeds contempt for American power-and lack of fear is far more dangerous for a superpower than lack of love (the problem that Obama et al. always complain about).

Here’s an example of that failure to follow through. Natan Sharansky and Bassam Eid gave a fuller treatment of President Bush’s’ failure to follow through regarding his calls for freedom.

Both Ajami and Boot supported President Bush’s freedom agenda. Ajami, I think, feels President Bush successfully advance the cause of freedom but that he did not effectively consolidate his gains. Boot is less generous in his assessment of the president.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.