Prison walls a’crumblin’ down, there is no end in sight

Also on the “second thoughts” front, NR’s editor Richard Lowry notes a dramatic change in the way certain mainstream journalists are talking about Islam. Writing at The Corner, Lowry expresses no opinion of his own on the matter, but prognosticates about where he expects the debate to have been moved to by other people over the coming months, namely the emergence into prominence of the very view I have been arguing for at this website for the last four years, that we use force against Islamic powers when necessary in order to defend ourselves, not to spread democracy. Fred Barnes’s remarks about Islam that Lowry is reporting are so interesting that I am copying the entire blog entry here. Reading Barnes’s stunning shift of language, I am inspired to paraphrase Ronald Reagan’s speech at the 1992 Republican Convention: “I have seen the birth of Euphemism, and I have seen the death of Euphemism.”

Also, the Bob Dylan line that serves as the title of this blog entry (from the song “Tough Mama” on his 1973 album Planet Waves) is obviously not appropriate to the cautious establishment types being quoted here. Rather it expresses my sense of the possibilities of a world in which we free ourselves from the deathly lies that have been controlling us for all these years. Kierkekaard wrote about the “sickness unto death.” Are there not “lies unto death”?

POST-BUSH FOREIGN POLICY? [Rich Lowry ]

There’s been some discussion lately about what conservative foreign policy will look like post-Bush. I think we might be getting a glimpse of it in the cartoon controversy. I was struck by this comment last night on the all-star panel by Fred Barnes:

It tells us a lot it tells us our enemy is not just al-Qaeda. That there’s Muslims all over the world are certainly enemies of western civilization. Look at what the showing of these cartoons which I originally thought was a mistake. They shouldn’t have run them. Now I think we’ve learned a lot from this. We see Muslims contempt for democracy, for freedom of speech, for freedom of the press and particularly for freedom of religion.

He added later:

…from the size of these demonstrations, these are not jihadists, these are not people that are trying to get into Iraq so they can blow up a Shiite mosque or something or kill American soldiers, I think this is mainstream Islam in Britain and Denmark and all over Europe and then we see these—some of them are supposedly friendly Arab governments like Egypt and other places promoting this. This is not a fringe protest against Western civilization.

What was so striking about this is that Fred is generally a fan of all-things-Bush in foreign policy. But it is at the least uncomfortable—although perhaps not strictly inconsistent—to believe the things Fred said last night and still support a sweeping program of democratization based on the belief that people everywhere have the same yearning for freedom.

I’m guessing this contradiction, or semi-contradiction, will work itself out in coming months and we will begin to see the real emergence of the “to hell with them” hawks (patron saint: Derb). They believe that it was right to invade Iraq, but wrong to try to make it better afterwards. They will support military action in Iran, but only if it doesn’t involve any re-building or sticky involvement with Iranians. They will want, more or less, to give up on the “hearts and minds” element of the War of Terror, since the people whose minds and hearts are in question haven’t been cooperating (so: “to hell with them”). In Walter Russell Mead’s terms, they will detach Bush’s Jacksonianism from his Wilsonianism. They will keep the Jacksonianism, but toss the Wilsonianism aside as fuzzy-headed and disproven by events, from the Iraq insurgency to the cartoon riots.

That’s my guess…
Posted at 01:12 PM

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 08, 2006 02:01 AM | Send