Kissinger didn’t tell Sadat to hold elections

For once, a sensible and inoffensive article by Patrick Buchanan. He looks at two periods of U.S. involvement in the Middle East, the 1970s and today, comparing the realism of Nixon and even Carter (successful) to the pie-in-the-sky democratism of Bush and Rice (counterproductive). Nixon and Carter worked with Sadat, though he had been a Nazi ally, and got great results. Bush insists on Egyptian democracy, and ends up advancing the Muslim Brotherhood.

Buchanan concludes:

So it goes. We hail the fall of Czar Nicholas and get Lenin. We go to war to hang the Prussian Kaiser and get an Austrian corporal named Hitler. We cut off aid to the “corrupt” regime of Chiang Kai-shek and get Mao Zedong. We denounce Lon Nol and get Pol Pot. We destabilize the shah and get the ayatollah.

How many times must we relearn the lesson? The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and the fruits of Wilsonian idealism are rarely ideal.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 05, 2006 10:57 PM | Send