Recommended: The Failed Grand Strategy in the Middle East

The Wall Street Journal a week or so ago (August 24) had a very well-reasoned and thoughtful article by Walter Russell Mead: The Failed Grand Strategy in the Middle East.  I highly recommend it.

Mead argues that the administration had a well-thought out, consistent and plausible (from the American viewpoint) strategy for the Middle East, and followed it pretty consistently, but that it has failed because of some fundamental misunderstandings among the Washington policy elite about the real situation and political dynamics in that area of the world.  He goes on to analyze these misunderstandings in some detail.

The Middle East will never be a place that Americans understand well.  There is simply too much cultural difference between us to be bridged with anything less than a lifetime of serious study. People in the Middle East, except possibly for some few educated in the West, simply see the world differently - neither better nor worse, but just differently.  They value different things, they have a profoundly different world view, they have different social and political expectations, etc, etc, etc.

American attempts to impose a Western-style democracy on such cultures, and especially to expect to do so in a generation or less, are simply unrealistic and naive.  Yet Washington ruling elites in both parties continue to believe in the possibility.  There is no doubt that more democratic systems would be good for Middle Eastern cultures, but democracy requires a whole series of culture prerequisites (see Fareed Zakaria' s 2003 book  The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad for a good discussion of this) which would take a generation or more to establish under the best of circumstances, and far longer so long as the Middle East continues to be ruled by repressive authoritarian or theocratic governments.

Mead's article is well worth reading.