Self-Determination: Give Credit Where It's Due

Left Behind Child, in discussing a recent New Republic editorial called Grudging Respect, has a few problems with the key assertion of the piece:

More immediately, liberals must realize that they have to be willing to support the Bush administration in the Middle East if they want to have anything to say about democracy elsewhere in the world.

LBC makes some good points about the fallaciousness of this notion, with the help of Fareed Zakaria, and I would like to add my two cents about why liberals don’t need to realize anything of the sort.

Because it’s fucking racist.

Denying the efficacy of the peoples of the Middle East in favor of the illusory “domino effect” of Bush's policies is to suggest that it never would have happened without western (i.e. white) involvement. And that is something with which I refuse to go along—and so should any other liberal with a lick of sense. The notion that a country with a brown-skinned population will never see an organic growth of democracy within its borders is exactly the kind of bullshit contention that leads Bush and his cronies to believe they need to be the stormtroopin’ saviors of the Middle East in the first place. As I recall, there was no small amount of tut-tutting from Lefties when President Bush said:

[Some] people don't believe Iraq can be free; that if you're Muslim, or perhaps brown-skinned, you can't be self-governing or free. I'd strongly disagree with that.

Why were we annoyed by that? Because we wanted to know to whom, exactly, he was referring—what strawman was the alleged purveyor of such nonsense?

I certainly didn’t expect that it would be the New Republic to fill the role so adeptly.