Bret Stephens is a Wall Street Journal columnist who declares the Iraq war won today:
does not sponsor terrorism, and is unlikely to again seek WMD. We have
a democratic government, a first for the Arab world, and one that is
increasingly capable of defending its people and asserting its
interests.
Please. All you can say about Iraq right now is it is approaching greater stability. Wonderful. Let it flourish. The rest of this is bunkum. Stephens aims his ideological darts at Francis Fukuyama. He justifiably criticizes Fukuyama for objecting to the Iraq war in '03 in only a "whisper"–myself I was in the streets shouting against the disaster–but ventures that in ten years time Fukuyama will celebrate Iraq's "liberation."
It's startling that the U.S. media is still hosting this sort of dazed arrogance, with its hidden agenda unspoken, even after Joe Klein bravely dimed out the Zionist host� of "benign domino" theorists whom Klein himself traveled with in his pro-war days. Zionism/non-Zionism is the faultline under Stephens's column, and of course in all neoconservative declarations about
remaking the Arab world into democracies by smashing their societies. Stephens is a former Jerusalem Post editor who once baited Ian Buruma when he dared to criticize Israel:� "Are you a Jew?" Meaning that if he wasn't, he had no standing.� Guess what, everyone has standing. Fukuyama, a man of artistic temperament, has largely abdicated his own standing to criticize the neocons and Israel since Charles Krauthammer accused him of antisemitism, though his fine book America at the Crossroads, which upset Stephens, pointed out that Arabs are angered by U.S. policy in the Mideast and trying to ascribe their rage to the downfall of the Caliphate is patronizing psycho-claptrap. Maybe he will remind Stephens of the tremendous suffering these policies have caused.
