Driving home today I heard Elliot Abrams on NPR in an interview. He opened with this:
Mr. ELLIOTT ABRAMS (Senior Fellow, Middle Eastern Studies, Council on Foreign Relations): What the president began to say after 9/11 was that there was no special exception for the Arab world, that we had supported stability in the Middle East at the cost of liberty. And that we weren’t going to get stability either. And, of course, this is at a time when most of these regimes look completely stable. So the point I was making is he had it right in saying that these were not as stable as they appeared to be.
Elliot Abrams is right.
His comments are exactly correct. That was the one thread of Bush’s blunderfooted post-9/11 direction that I always agreed with while I rapidly became dissatisfied with his method. That one part of his legacy is quickly being proven as a real inflection in western policy. It isn’t OK to support tyranny ever, no matter what benefits it has for you.
It was true in Taiwan sixty three years ago this Monday. We should do what we can so that in sixty three years there are only stone markers to the follies of the past.