And hey, I see “liberal” in your ideology, too. Maybe that makes you only half braindead.

O, and then we also have the Kurds.

I dunno, maybe Liberalism really is dead.

It is not dead, its ideology simply does not take reality into account. You could call it braindead;)

With all due respect Tom, I’ve never really felt that this argument has ever been truly qualified by those who make it.

How will things improve? Will Sunnis and Shi’ites join together to make a peace? Isn’t it more likely that they will continue to kill each other over years of grudges and favoritism from the Baathists? Isn’t it much more likely that countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran will enter in order to merely protect their own ethnic and security interests?

This strikes me as a symptom of the progressive foreign policy outlook–American presence=very bad, no matter what.

I dunno, maybe Liberalism really is dead.

Tom, do you believe that these warring tribes and sects will simply never be able to negotiate, or is your greater concern that it would require us being there too long to mediate it

Actually, neither. Well, the second one kind of, but I think it’s more a case of our presence may be making things worse. I suspect once we’re gone things will eventually improve, but as Michael posted above on another topic, things will get worse in the short term in order to get better in the long term.

Because the reason we have a civil war in Iraq is that the Shiites and Sunnis and Kurds don’t get along and don’t want to share the same space. It’s not the same situation we have with various ethnic groups in the US.

Our own history if full of ethnic groups that killed each other (and still happens) Through the passage of time did we learn to live together as human beings. This happens in spots all over the world every single day.

Our efforts can get Iraq to a much better place politically, and I don’t believe we need to “fix” years of ethnic opposition in order to do it. So as a way to dismiss the war effort, I find this rather moot. Yes, democracy is hard. But we don’t need to leave Iraq as a shining example of deliberative action. We do need to plant the seeds.

So yes…that quote! But not merely that. There seems to be an acceptance on the Left that the Middle East just can’t do it. You see it elsewhere of course, and it was how Reagan viewed the region (and the people).

Maybe I’ll post on this, but there is a bit of Liberal idealism/anti-authoritarianism that has died on the Left. I know there’s a debate going on elsewhere over who killed it, or if it ever really went anywhere, or if it’s sound policy, etc.

Tom, do you believe that these warring tribes and sects will simply never be able to negotiate, or is your greater concern that it would require us being there too long to mediate it?

Whenever I try to chart a course between the “Iraq would have been great if we’d just had smarter people in charge of the occupation” and the “Arabs can’t handle democracy” school of thought, I tend to come back to things like this — the great difficult Belgians have in creating a viable, legitimate binational democratic state. Or think of the Canadians. Or the endless problems in Spain with the Basques. It’s genuinely difficult to work these kinds of things out.

. I don’t get the impression that he’s of the “Arabs can’t handle democracy” school; he seems to be saying that ethnic divisions are common and difficult to bridge.

But every democracy that exists today was once composed of warring factions, rival tribes and territorial states. I don’t mean to accuse you of anything in particular, but if you read the Yglesias, Drum, Klein etc. crowd, you pick up a certain kind of tone. Yglesias did it just yesterday.

I can’t chock it up to anything other than some predisposition against the idea of Arab democracy. It’s not like the conversation has never been had, but I just find it peculiar that it’s what we hear EVERY TIME there’s some level of progres somewhere.

I guess I can see your point if you suspect that these areas are only pacified for the moment, but again, these areas were “homogenized” a year ago, too. But it was still a chaotic warzone.