Abstract Musings

In this week’s column Victor Davis Hanson explains who the real humanists are.

If someone wonders about the enormous task at hand in democratizing the Middle East, he could do no worse than ponder the last days of Yasser Arafat: the tawdry fight over his stolen millions; the charade of the First Lady of Palestine barking from a Paris salon; the unwillingness to disclose what really killed the “Tiger” of Ramallah; the gauche snub of obsequious Europeans hovering in the skies over Cairo, preening to pay homage to the late prince of peace; and, of course, the usual street theater of machine guns spraying the air and thousands of males crushing each other to touch the bier of the man who robbed them blind. Try bringing a constitution and open and fair elections to a mess like that.

But that is precisely what the United States was trying to do by removing the Taliban, putting Saddam Hussein on trial, and marginalizing Arafat. Such idealism has been caricatured with every type of slur — from both the radical Left and the paleo-Right, ranging from alleged Likud conspiracies and neo-con pipe dreams to secret pipeline deals and plans for a new American imperium in the Middle East shepherded in by the Bush dynasts. In fact, the effort not just to strike back after September 11, but to alter the very landscape in which our enemies operated was the only choice we had if we wished to end the cruise-missile/bomb-’em-for-a-day cycle of the past 20 years, the ultimate logic of which had led to the crater at the World Trade Center.

Oddly, our enemies understand the long-term strategic efforts of the United States far better than do our own dissidents. They know that oil is not under U.S. control but priced at all-time highs, and that America is not propping up despotism anymore, but is now the general foe of both theocracies and dictatorships — and the thorn in the side of “moderate” autocracies. An America that is a force for democratic change is a very dangerous foe indeed. Most despots long for the old days of Jimmy Carter’s pious homilies, appeasement of awful dictatorships gussied up as “concern” for “human rights,” and the lure of a Noble Prize to ensure nights in the Lincoln bedroom or hours waiting on a dictator’s tarmac.

In the struggle in Fallujah hinges not just the fate of the Sunni Triangle, or even Iraq, but rather of the entire Middle East — and it will be decided on the bravery and skill of mostly 20-something American soldiers. If they are successful in crushing and humiliating the fascists there and extending the victory to other spots then the radical Islamists and their fascistic sponsors will erode away. But if they fail or are called off, then we will see Days of Sorrow that make September 11 look like child’s play.

Here is a rather pessimistic appraisal of the Iranian nuclear deal I mentioned before. The article takes President Bush and the Europeans to task for giving Iran what amounts to a free pass to tacitly develop nuclear weapons just as North Korea has done.

The only question is whether the world is going to do anything about all this. The Europeans are essentially arguing that any deal with the mullahs is better than nothing, given Tehran’s repeated threats to withdraw altogether from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But what’s really more dangerous: immediate clarity regarding Iran’s real intentions, or the country going nuclear with the quiet blessing of the IAEA and the permanent discrediting of the multilateral arms control system?

President Bush needs to pay some overdue attention to Iran now that the election is over, and put the above case to his friend and ally Tony Blair. The model for disarming Iran ought to be the process the two countries have just gone through with Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi: unambiguous cooperation, including the handover of all nuclear and WMD-related facilities. Anything less–like the Agreed Framework Part II now on offer–deserves only one response in Washington and London: No deal.