As someone whose career involves debating a number of personalities on the left, Jonah Goldberg has my sympathies as he criticizes a Lebanese journalist's paralogism on the respective alliances of Iran and Syria and Hezbollah, and the United States and Israel. Iran and Syria, two countrywide gangsterdoms of demonstrable brutality, and Hezbollah, a terrorist cadre working towards a philosophically muddled but operationally precise goal of genocide; indistinguishable from two free, generous, prosperous — longanimous — nations?
The place for rational discussions of foreign policy seems to be increasingly confined to the broad right. A conservative may be skeptical or even dismissive of the practice of nation-building but will probably agree with a democratist that when achievable, liberalization and its object, electoral democracy, are incomparably better — for natives and neighbors alike — than autocratic control, oppression and the resulting belligerence. I recently tried to discuss foreign affairs with a number of leftists and found that a rejection of moral values and the empirical evidence behind them (for instance, that a Syrian or Iranian citizen cannot stage a public protest of his government without risking his status or health, whereas an American or Israeli can't do the same without a good chance of his picture in the newspaper) is essential to this perception of the left's. An attempt, I presume, at a simpler equation — but as the equation is stripped of moral judgment it is also one removed from logic.