Liberals “troubled” by non-liberal reality

The same New York Times article discussed below reports:

[C]oncern among senior lawmakers of both parties is growing over a troubling dichotomy: even as Iraq takes important steps toward democracy—including the election of a permanent government this spring—the violence has gotten worse.

Since it is the essence of a liberal always to be surprised and “troubled” at a real world that does not fit liberal expectations, only liberals could regard the co-existence of “democracy” and violence in Iraq as a “troubling dichotomy.” It’s only a troubling dichotomy if you assume, like the whacked-out Bushites, that having elections and forming some kind of government (a government that depends for its existence on the U.S. military) means that you have “democracy,” and that this “democracy” means that the enemy has been defeated and that all men will now live in peace, each under his own vine and fig tree. As I’ve been arguing for three years, the truth is just the opposite. See, for example, my article at FrontPage Magazine on April 20, 2004:

What has gone wrong? As I’ve been saying since last summer, the erection of a new government in Iraq presupposes the first law of all governments, that it have a monopoly on the use of force. Yet instead of focusing on the need for such a government and on the practical requirements for creating such a government, we’ve been pouring most of our energy and hopes into creating the mechanisms of democratic elections—imagining, in excited reverie, that the cart of universal rights and democratic proceduralism could pull the horse of sovereign national existence…. Thus we not only lack a policy aimed at victory in Iraq, we have not even had a national debate aimed at formulating such a policy. We have had a parody of a debate, in which the Left mindlessly screams, “Bush lied,” and the Right stolidly replies, “Stay the course.”

So, there is no “troubling dichotomy” here. There is only the logical and inevitable result of the Bush policy. We helped arrange elections and we facilitated the erection of a government in a country that was and remains filled with undefeated terrorist enemies and religious denominations that mortally hate each other. So we have “democracy” and a “government”—and we have ever-worsening barbaric violence. I would like to see a U.S. national leadership that is not surprised at this “dichotomy.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 17, 2006 04:20 PM | Send