Iran and Syria Won't Be Riding to Our Rescue By Charles Krauthammer

[Demeter]

This Is Realism?
Iran and Syria Won't Be Riding to Our Rescue

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, December 1, 2006; A29



Now that the "realists" have ridden into town gleefully consigning the Bush doctrine to the ash heap of history, everyone has discovered the notion of interests, as if it were some new idea thought up by James Baker and the Iraq Study Group.

What do people think we've been doing for the past five years? True, the president's rhetoric has a tendency to go soaringly Wilsonian, e.g. the banishing-tyranny stuff in his second inaugural address. But our policies of democratization in Iraq and Afghanistan and Lebanon have been deeply rooted in the most concrete of American interests.

If we really had been in the grip of "idealism," we'd be deep in Chad and Burma and Darfur. We are not. We are instead trying to sustain fragile democracies in three strategically important countries -- Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon -- that form the geographic parentheses around the principal threat to Western interests in the region, the Syria-Iran axis.

We are trying to bring democracy to Iraq in particular because a pro-Western government enjoying legitimacy and popular support would have been the most enduring means of securing our interests there. Deposing Saddam & Sons was essential because they posed a permanent strategic threat to the region and to U.S. interests. But their successor -- the popularly elected Maliki government -- has failed.

The cause of that failure is rooted in an Iraqi political culture that makes it as yet impossible for enough of the political leadership to act with a sense of national consciousness. We should nonetheless make a last effort to change the composition of the government and assemble a new one composed of those -- Kurds, moderate Sunnis, secular Shiites and some of the religious Shiites -- who might be capable of reaching a grand political settlement.

MORE ELABORATE AND TORTURED THINKING FOLLOWS--IT IS FASCINATING TO SEE HOW A MIND WORKS

[e-mail]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/30/AR2006113001159_pf.html

[Ken Burch]

1. IT would be more accurate to say

"MORE ELABOROATE AND PRO-TORTURE THINKING FOLLOWS".

Krauthmammer seems to be obsessed with putting the rest of the world into just as much misery as he himself feels. The man is living proof that suffering does NOT ennoble.

[Demeter]

2. I Think He Thinks Too Much

Krauthammer and many other RW apologists spend too much time in the little, deformed world in their heads, and too little in the real world with the rest of us, trying to cope with the atrocities their world model creates.