Saturday, January 29, 2011

This Would Have Worked Why?

I've got to respectfully disagree with Glenn Reynolds, whose says this about the uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen:

On what is Professor Reynolds basing the idea that things would've been better if only we'd also toppled Saudi Arabia and Egypt? Did any of the neo-con plans in the countries we actually invaded work out as they predicted? If you click through to that "Egypt as the prize" link, you'll be brought to a Power Point presentation on the overthrow of Saudi Arabia and Egypt that isn't even much of a prediction. It's just a bunch of bullet points. Here's what the last one says: "Iraq is the tactical pivot. Saudi Arabia the strategic pivot. Egypt the prize." This is the source cited in an argument for the overthrow of governments in two more countries? It isn't even clear to me if direct military intervention is being called for.

I don't mean to suggest that we shouldn't be worried about the possibility of a populist Islamist explosion in Egypt. How the most extreme US meddling in Saudi Arabia and Egypt would've forestalled that I cannot imagine. The worldview articulated by Professor Reynolds in that post is like a caricature of what I worry that a Republican presidential candidate might think deep down. "If only we'd have shaken things up more it might've worked out fine!" He and I have drawn very different lessons from the debacle in Iraq.

1 comment:

Mr. Mcgranor said...

This why we're the enemy of the mid-east. They are mainly an authoritarian personality, so they get the dictators by default -- no matter if they're elected or not. Liberty is foreign to them. They watch western television and join the gothic market of postmodern nihilism and call that freedom? Let the Mohammedans' be the culture they are. They recognize cultural autonomy. Stop selling pornography after liberating them for the Great Satan. As for mid-east Christians -- they have been under the people-of-the-book tax for so long -- that they think its the will of God.

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