VDH: No Way But Forward

In his Friday column for National Review Online, Victor Davis Hanson points out that there is no going back to the era of "stability" in the Middle East. Whatever the risks of pushing for democratic change, and there are risks, they are greatly outweighed by the dangers of doing nothing:

So what makes Americans think we can plop down a democracy on the ashes of Saddam's Gulag, or see free elections in a Beirut that was once the Murder, Inc. of the 1970s and 1980s? How can we even imagine that Dr. Zawahiri's dream of theocracy won't follow from the end of the Mubarak dictatorship?

As the ripples from Iraq and Afghanistan spread, we are warned that success, not failure, is our new concern: The problem is not that the Middle East cannot vote, but that it can — and that the results will be worse than the mess that preceded it.

Aside from the fact that we could never have even dreamed of such a "problem" less than four years ago when an ash cloud hovered over the crater in Manhattan, we need to reflect on a few often-forgotten realities.


Please read it all:

Don’t Stop Now