Revolution Imposed From Outside

Here is a pertinent historical analogy, comparing the Iraq War with Napoleon's conquests in Europe. In both cases, democratization was imposed from outside, and in both cases, for similar reasons, failure resulted:

But the Exodus story -- like that of the American Puritan migration and the civil-rights movement which it inspired -- shows us that oppressed people struggle to transform themselves and embark on their journey out of bondage with help only from God's “mighty hand and outstretched arm.” These are popular, bottom-up struggles, fraught with self-doubt and corruption but redeemed by indigenous spiritual and political leadership and the courage of countless ordinary people. No foreign army invaded Egypt to set off the Exodus, or England to loose the Puritan migration, or the American South to begin the civil-rights movement. (The federal marshals and National Guard troops in the South came long after the movement was well underway, and they were Americans.) And leaders such as Moses, John Winthrop, and Martin Luther King, Jr. came from the people they led. Bush is no Iraqi Moses, Dick Cheney no Aaron, Donald Rumsfeld no Joshua, Condoleezza Rice no Miriam.

A better model than the Exodus for Brooks’ sophistical exegesis of the Iraq War is Napoleon. Claiming the mantle of the French Revolution, he tried to use the French army to liberate other peoples who weren't ready to liberate themselves. Napoleon’s misappropriation of France’s already-fraught revolution resembles the Bush administration's use of the American republican tradition to justify its crusade to spread democracy to the Middle East. Brooks' conflation of Bush's crusade and American "national greatness" with the Hebraic covenantal tradition and its Puritan and American-revolutionary emulations is even more gross a miscarriage of any American civic-republican mission than Napoleon’s vision was of the France's revolution.

... If Berman, Krauthammer, Brooks, Beinart and other philo-tyrannical minds aren't going to keep on shouting triumphally about democracy amid the fog of war they helped to create, let them join Fukuyama in an exodus off the stage, rather than standing just inside the exit, bidding him good riddance. Let them stop deflecting their political and moral discomfort -- as some on the left have done, too -- into attacks on the few who’ve demonstrated some intellectual honesty amid so much intellectual disgrace.