perfidy

Regarding Howard Dean's critiques of Bush's foreign policy towards libervaded nations, a caveat. Whereas it's all well and good for Dean to hope for egalitarian, non-gender-discriminatory, republican/democractic societies in the Middle East, it's quite unreasonable to actually expect such a thing anytime soon. And it may be for the better. I don't like the progress in Afghanistan or Iraq any more than Dean does (tho it's too soon to tell anything sure about Iraq), but I believe that trying to impose such a radical vision of equality in either nation would be a huge mistake.

Change happens in increments, and it's often painful. If it comes overnight, it's often catastrophic. Well, those nations have been through enough catastrophe without having us engineer one of our own for the sake being able to boast of a free election before it's time for one. If democratic government is going to come to the Middle East, the nations so choosing must find their own path. At the risk of sounding paternalistic, our job is to guide them and advise them when necessary, not to create by fiat institutions of democracy where none exist. Democracy must first make sense as a concept within the context of the nation, before it can thrive. That might happen in five years, and it might happen in fifty. But ideally when it happens, it will be because local leaders figured out how to adapt the principles of 1776 and 1792 to the Middle East in 2003. So, Dean riding Bush for not pushing for such a program now is a bit disingenuous, no matter how good it sounds. I hope that, if he is elected President, he has the sense to listen to his foreign policy advisors.