The Significance of January 30th

Great editorial from Bill Kristol in The Weekly Standard on the notion that the January 30th Iraqi election will prove to be a "turning point", affecting politics in the Middle East for years to come.

History is best viewed in the rear-view mirror. It's hard to grasp the significance of events as they happen. It's even harder to forecast their meaning when they're only scheduled to happen. And once they occur, it's usually the case that possible historical turning points, tipping points, inflection points, or just points of interest turn out in the cold glare of history to have been of merely passing importance.

But sometimes not. Just four weeks after the Iraqi election of January 30, 2005, it seems increasingly likely that that date will turn out to have been a genuine turning point. The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, ended an era. September 11, 2001, ended an interregnum. In the new era in which we now live, 1/30/05 could be a key moment--perhaps the key moment so far--in vindicating the Bush Doctrine as the right response to 9/11. And now there is the prospect of further and accelerating progress.

He quotes Walid Jumblatt, the Lebanese Druze Muslim leader (quoted on this site in an earlier post), saying,

It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world. . . . The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it.

Next in line is Claus Christian Malzahn of Der Spiegel, in his article "Could George W. Bush Be Right?"

President Ronald Reagan's visit to Berlin in 1987 was, in many respects, very similar to President George W. Bush's visit to Mainz on Wednesday. . . . The Germany Reagan was traveling in, much like today's Germany, was very skeptical of the American president and his foreign policy. When Reagan stood before the Brandenburg Gate--and the Berlin Wall--and demanded that Gorbachev "tear down this wall," he was lampooned the next day on the editorial pages. He is a dreamer, wrote commentators. Realpolitik looks different.

But history has shown that it wasn't Reagan who was the dreamer as he voiced his demand. Rather, it was German politicians who were lacking in imagination--a group who in 1987 couldn't imagine that there might be an alternative to a divided Germany. . . . When George W. Bush requests that Chancellor Schröder--who, by the way, was also not entirely complimentary of Reagan's 1987 speech--and Germany become more engaged in the Middle East, everybody on the German side will nod affably. But . . . Bush's idea of a Middle Eastern democracy imported at the tip of a bayonet is, for Schröder's Social Democratic party and his coalition partner the Green party, the hysterical offspring of the American neocons. Even German conservatives find the idea that Arab countries could transform themselves into enlightened democracies somewhat absurd...

Just a thought for Old Europe to chew on: Bush might be right, just like Reagan was then.

And finally...Kurt Anderson in New York Magazine...

Our heroic and tragic liberal-intellectual capaciousness is facing its sharpest test since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Back then, most of us were forced, against our wills, to give Ronald Reagan a large share of credit for winning the Cold War. Now the people of this Bush-hating city are being forced to grant the merest possibility that Bush, despite his annoying manner and his administration's awful hubris and dissembling and incompetence concerning Iraq, just might--might, possibly--have been correct to invade, to occupy, and to try to enable a democratically elected government in Iraq. . . .

It won't do simply to default to our easy predispositions--against Bush, even against war. If partisanship makes us abandon intellectual honesty, if we oppose what our opponents say or do simply because they are the ones saying or doing it, we become mere political short-sellers, hoping for bad news because it's good for our ideological investment.

It is too early to declare victory. The Middle East has a long and tortured history. There will doubtless be multiple setbacks and struggles ahead. But to quote Alexis de Toqueville:

"Patiently endured as long as it seemed beyond redress, a grievance comes to appear intolerable once the possibility of removing it crosses men's minds."

Perhaps the greatest gift of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush is their shared conviction that freedom is a possibility for all people and therefore allowing that dream to cross the minds of people everywhere.