Victor Davis Hanson offers five lessons we should take from our experience in the Middle-East since 9/11. Here's #5:
Do not look for logic and consistency in the Middle East where they are not to be found. It makes no sense to be frustrated that Arab intellectuals and reformers damn us for removing Saddam and simultaneously praise democratic rumblings that followed his fall. We should accept that the only palatable scenario for the Arab Street was one equally fanciful: Brave demonstrators took to the barricades, forced Saddam's departure, created a constitution, held elections, and then invited other Arab reformers into Baghdad to spread such indigenous reform - all resulting in a society as sophisticated, wealthy, free, and modern as the West, but felt to be morally superior because of its allegiance to Islam. That is the dream that is preferable to the reality that the Americans alone took out the monster of the Middle East and that any peaceful protest against Saddam would have ended in another genocide.
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.
There is much wisdom in this as well as the rest of the prescriptions in his article. We hope that Washington is listening.
