Free the Godforsaken Wogs!
Aug. 8th, 2006 01:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kent_allard_jrSomething always bothered me about the "neoconservative" project for the Middle East, and Matthew Yglesias has expressed it for me:
* I know some of them are friendlier to Israel, but they are a small minority. For every Bernard Lewis there are 10 Juan Coles. It's hard to spend your life studying people without taking their side.
The neoconservative right's combination of gung-ho democracy advocacy and utter contempt for actual Arab public opinion is bizarre.Not only was it bizarre, but the Iraq project has been a fiasco largely because of that contempt. Experts from the State Department, the UN and elsewhere had to be excluded because they were too sympathetic to Arab causes, particularly in Palestine.* The CPA was run by clumsy amateurs and by the time of the elections the country was ungovernable. The Iraqi occupation may have been a failure in any event, but the contradictions in neoconservative thinking made it infinitely worse than it had to be.
* I know some of them are friendlier to Israel, but they are a small minority. For every Bernard Lewis there are 10 Juan Coles. It's hard to spend your life studying people without taking their side.
