Monday, December 13, 2004
Who the Devil Really Was
Good article today from Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek on the upcoming elections in Iraq. I generally share most of Zakaria's viewpoints on the Middle East, and his criticism of the handling of the Iraq war's aftermath has provided some interesting food for thought (he generally remains a supporter of the war, just not of some of the White House's policies). Anyway, he closes with this bit:
The current issue of Foreign Affairs has an exchange between two scholars, Tony Smith and Larry Diamond. Smith accuses Diamond, a longtime supporter of human rights, of making a "pact with the devil" by working (briefly) for the United States in postwar Iraq. Diamond, who had opposed the war, responds: "I do not regard the post-war endeavor as a pact with the devil. Let Smith and other critics visit Iraq and talk to Iraqis who are organizing for democracy, development, and human rights. Let them talk to the families that lived under constant, humiliating, Baathist rule. Let them see some of the roughly 300 mass graves of opponents of the regime who were brutally slaughtered in the hundreds of thousands. Then they will find out who the devil really was." I can't say it better.Neither can I.
# posted by Paul Zummo : 10:10 AM
