John Hopkins professor and geopolitical progressive Fouad Ajami wrote masterfully in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Tony at Across the Bay helpfully reprinted the opinion piece in its entirity. If there is moral confusion in the West about the war on terror, Ajami writes, there is startled hope and excitement in the Near East and broader Third World — quite simply because over there liberty is an aspiration, not a convention to flippantly deconstruct:
"George W. Bush has unleashed a tsunami on this region," a shrewd Kuwaiti merchant who knows the way of his world said to me. The man had no patience with the standard refrain that Arab reform had to come from within, that a foreign power cannot alter the age-old ways of the Arabs. "Everything here — the borders of these states, the oil explorations that remade the life of this world, the political outcomes that favored the elites now in the saddle — came from the outside. This moment of possibility for the Arabs is no exception."
The article is a sharp abstract of the revolution today: silent, gentle majorities work under the illumination of reason, merit and trust while tiny authoritarian minorities wield fear and violence, the only instruments both understood and preferred.
On our side of the world, disagreement on policy and strategy, contrary to accusations from the left, occurs daily on the right; though all seriously competing propositions are founded in a mutual understanding of good and evil intentions, free and oppressed, and directed towards a shared definition of victory that entails the end of dictatorship. From afar, it all may look the same. But opposing the diplomatic and military confrontation of tyranny outright or condemning it as the arbitrary domination of another — the very abomination this war has demonstrably weakened in several countries — is a telling mischaracterization of the free world's twin desires to protect and empower common men. It is an abdication of discernment, responsibility and, at a point, sanity. What has made debate so frustrating in the last half-century — tragically, the modern embrace of liberty brought with it the temptation of relativist abandon — is that the parties most opposed to one another can no longer agree on basic facts or principles, and that the relativists enjoy cultural standing and a certain credibility. You can't prove green is really green, can you? they jeer. Discouragingly, a lot of time is wasted reestablishing for them what should be obvious. But they concede something when they bristle at aphorisms from the reverent. So for Ajami's work, we recognize what is good; and for those who would out and scoff at the man's recounting, what is nonsense.