And as for Glick's latest attempt to portray Israel's predicament as absolutely hopeless practically and morally, why exactly would anyone find overwhelming negative opinions of Jews among Palestinians, Lebanese, and Egyptians surprising? Glick ascribes what is at base an anti-Israeli attitude to every other explanation other than the behavior of Israel. She notes the prevalence of extremist anti-Semitic propaganda in the Arab world, especially in Egypt, without asking why the populace might be susceptible to it.
However, as Gerecht points out, it may not be a big help.
"Liberal democracy with an Egyptian character" may need a very long time to develop. Internal and external forces may prevent a rapid evolution that affects more than a sliver of society, or does much more than open a somewhat larger space for a democratic civil society to develop. We'll see. That doesn't mean that the events of the last couple of weeks are unimportant.
yes, I see. a guy’s not walking toward you, really, but you think he is.
Once you yell “Stop or I’ll shoot” it’s important that you plug the guy because if you don’t, the other guys won’t believe in your resolve.
Now you know that's a bad analogy, and the question wasn't whether Gerecht's arguments were perfectly sound, but whether he made foolish predictions.
Of course, the other argument he was making, the one that went that the other guys are going to continue to do what it is that they think to be in their best interest with little extra regard for your actions, might not smoothly mesh with this one.
Again, you can argue that his picture was faulty, but there's no contradiction in asserting that inability to follow through on your major initiative might alter others' calculations about how best to safeguard their interests across a wide range of situations.
That's the "feared than loved" piece, from April '02.
The Necessary War piece argues, from the perspective of Oct '02, that reversing course would be devastating to US cred, and therefore to the WOT - both of them by then fully identified with Bush.
Even if you stipulated that OIF was ill-conceived, immoral, and badly executed, too, Gerecht's argument might remain tenable from a realpolitik/Machiavellian perspective. What it really means is that the war train was already heading down the tracks at speed by late 2002, and that only a major political derailment, breakdown or breakthrough, was gonna stop it.
@ fuster:
The Gerecht pieces I could scare up from the pre-OIF period tend to be less Polyannish than you described. They suggest that good things might flow from being "feared rather than loved" in the ME, that bad things might flow from being seen as weak, and that certain fears from the anti-war side were overblown. You have to count him as bottom-line pro-intervention, whatever his analytical-prognostical successes and failures, so, if you've decided the "fiasco" was a fiasco, then you can count him as having been on the wrong side, but if you're going to call him a fool and a crank, you should bring better evidence to the table.
@ fuster:
I don't consider Gerecht infallible by any means, but he's usually smart enough, and a good enough writer-analyst, to restrain himself when tempted to make unhedged predictions of the sort you're attributing to him. More than a few of us lost our heads in '02-'03 and beyond, though, so I suppose he may have joined the club. But I'm now going to waste a few minutes seeing if I can scare up his writings from the relevant period. Any you can recollect more specifically?
"They have an unfavorable opinion of us... Therefore, let us act even worse!"
And as for Glick's latest attempt to portray Israel's predicament as absolutely hopeless practically and morally, why exactly would anyone find overwhelming negative opinions of Jews among Palestinians, Lebanese, and Egyptians surprising? Glick ascribes what is at base an anti-Israeli attitude to every other explanation other than the behavior of Israel. She notes the prevalence of extremist anti-Semitic propaganda in the Arab world, especially in Egypt, without asking why the populace might be susceptible to it.
@ fuster:
It's the same with all of the people that Don Miguel links: If you don't share their presumptions, you're on the other side.
@ miguel cervantes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Gomaa
However, as Gerecht points out, it may not be a big help.
"Liberal democracy with an Egyptian character" may need a very long time to develop. Internal and external forces may prevent a rapid evolution that affects more than a sliver of society, or does much more than open a somewhat larger space for a democratic civil society to develop. We'll see. That doesn't mean that the events of the last couple of weeks are unimportant.
fuster wrote:
Now you know that's a bad analogy, and the question wasn't whether Gerecht's arguments were perfectly sound, but whether he made foolish predictions.
Again, you can argue that his picture was faulty, but there's no contradiction in asserting that inability to follow through on your major initiative might alter others' calculations about how best to safeguard their interests across a wide range of situations.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/151afgru.asp
That's the "feared than loved" piece, from April '02.
The Necessary War piece argues, from the perspective of Oct '02, that reversing course would be devastating to US cred, and therefore to the WOT - both of them by then fully identified with Bush.
Even if you stipulated that OIF was ill-conceived, immoral, and badly executed, too, Gerecht's argument might remain tenable from a realpolitik/Machiavellian perspective. What it really means is that the war train was already heading down the tracks at speed by late 2002, and that only a major political derailment, breakdown or breakthrough, was gonna stop it.
@ fuster:
The Gerecht pieces I could scare up from the pre-OIF period tend to be less Polyannish than you described. They suggest that good things might flow from being "feared rather than loved" in the ME, that bad things might flow from being seen as weak, and that certain fears from the anti-war side were overblown. You have to count him as bottom-line pro-intervention, whatever his analytical-prognostical successes and failures, so, if you've decided the "fiasco" was a fiasco, then you can count him as having been on the wrong side, but if you're going to call him a fool and a crank, you should bring better evidence to the table.
@ fuster:
I don't consider Gerecht infallible by any means, but he's usually smart enough, and a good enough writer-analyst, to restrain himself when tempted to make unhedged predictions of the sort you're attributing to him. More than a few of us lost our heads in '02-'03 and beyond, though, so I suppose he may have joined the club. But I'm now going to waste a few minutes seeing if I can scare up his writings from the relevant period. Any you can recollect more specifically?