A DEMOCRATIC WORLD

The New Yorker is quickly becoming my favorite magazine. If you can get through this lengthy George Packer essay, it is without a doubt one of the best pieces on U.S. foreign policy I have ever read. HANDS DOWN! Here are some excerpts regarding the war on terrorism to give you a taste,

"...the President and his spokesmen have regarded the crisis as a test of personal will. Do you pass or not? So they’ve waged the war by self-assertion, guided by the assumption that American might always equates with freedom. But when promoting democracy seems in practice to mean bullying other people into doing what you want, the poetry is lost on the world, and not even the overthrow of tyrants is taken as proof of America’s sincerity...

...In treating the war on terrorism as a mere military struggle, the Administration’s mistake begins with the name itself. “Terrorism” is a method; the terror used by the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka is not the enemy in this war. The enemy is an ideology—in the German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer’s phrase, “Islamist totalitarianism”—that reaches from Karachi to London, from Riyadh to Brooklyn, and that uses terror to advance its ends. The Administration’s failure to grasp the political nature of the war has led to many crucial mistakes, most notably the Pentagon’s attitude that postwar problems in Afghanistan and Iraq would essentially take care of themselves, that we could have democracy on the cheap: once the dictators and terrorists were rooted out, the logic went, freedom would spontaneously grow in their place. As Lakhdar Brahimi, the former United Nations envoy to Afghanistan, recently told the Times, “There is now a very well-meaning and welcome Western interest in supporting democracy everywhere, but they want to do it like instant coffee.” Instead, in both countries the real struggle has just begun, and it will last a generation or more, with little international help in sight and victory not at all assured....

...The parallels between the early years of the Cold War and our situation are inexact. The Islamist movement doesn’t have the same hold on Westerners that Communism had. It draws on cultures that remain alien to us; the history of colonialism and the fact of religious difference make it all the harder for the liberal democracies of the West to effect change in the Muslim world. Waving the banner of freedom and mustering the will to act aren’t enough. Anyone who believes that September 11th thrust us into a Manichaean conflict between good and evil should visit Iraq, where the simplicity of that formula lies half buried under all the crosscurrents of foreign occupation and social chaos and ethnic strife. Simply negotiating the transfer of sovereignty back to Iraqis has proved so vexing that an Administration that jealously guarded the occupation against any international control has turned to the battered and despised United Nations for help in dealing with Iraq’s unleashed political forces. Iraq and other battlegrounds require patience, self-criticism, and local knowledge, not just an apocalyptic moral summons."

This guy's on point.