southchild

My favorite commentator on the US military and current policy, Victor Davis Hanson keeps it real. This essay looks at the War on Islamic Terrorism noting past mistaken assumptions and current realities. Hanson sums up our mideast foreign policy challenge:

After all these years, do not expect praise or gratitude for billions poured into Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, or Palestine or thanks for the liberation of Kuwait, protection of Saudi Arabia in 1990, or the removal of Saddam — much less for American concern for Muslims in Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Somalia, the Sudan, or Afghanistan. Our past sins always must be magnified as much as our more recent benefactions are slighted.

In response, American policy should be predicated not on friendship or the desire for appreciation, but on what is in our national interest and what is right — whose symbiosis is possible only through the current policy of consistently promoting democracy. Constitutional government is not utopia — only the proper antidote for the sickness in the Middle East, and the one medicine that hateful jihadists, dictators, kings, terrorists, and theocrats all agree that they alike hate.

A great read.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 23rd, 2005 at 11:42 pm and is filed under General, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.