Anti-Climacus

QUOTE: Paul Wolfowitz:

"That's all important, but it's the past. The future is creating a country in the heart of the Arab world that has an independent judiciary, that respects minority rights, that respects the rights of women, that observes democratic practices.

"That's going to have an influence. It's not a domino effect -- that's an absurd comparison. But it will have a broad influence in the Middle East in the way I believe Japan had a great influence on East Asia, and subsequently Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong had a broad influence on China. It's very important to demonstrate to the Arabs that given the right circumstances, they can achieve what the rest of us have done."

One of the interesting things that occurred to me last night is that I remember arguing, when all the Iraq 'trouble' started last year, that expecting things to right themselves in 6 months, or a year, or five years, was hopelessly optimistic: you can't make any very good judgments on where things are going based on where they are at any given moment. My favored comparison at the time was that it took, after the end of the Revolutionary War, about 40 years for the U.S. to have something resembling full territorial sovereignty, and even that was incomplete.

So it strikes me that what's going on right now is probably the equivalent of Shay's Rebellion: it makes it clear that there are some big outstanding problems, and institutions are needed that can cope with those. But just as some crazy farmers in Western Massachusetts didn't doom the US, neither do the various crazies in Iraq doom them.