First, in the NYT "Week in Review" section for December 13, on page 2 under the headline "Our Decade of Deluded Thinking," an unsigned comment makes some astonishing comments, one astonishingly good but most astonishingly bad. First the good: the article admits that Mossadegh did not fall in 1953 owing mainly to the intrigues of U.S. intelligence. That's of course right, and the same can be rightly said about Allende in Chile in the early 1970s. It's nice to see this in the NYT, and it may come in handy one day when the common reverse view shows up there, as it certainly will. But the piece starts, "It is not often that large-scale crises are due to intellectual error,. . ." Oh yes they are: They are more than often so; they are almost invariably so. Thus Auguste Comte: "Intellectual confusion is at the bottom of every historical crisis." Score one for Comte; the NYT is wrong. And last, at the bottom of the second paragraph, Francis Fukuyama is once again, for the umpteenth time, vulgarized into holding the view, twenty years ago, of the very modernization theorists with whom he has always disagreed--that all modernization is of a piece and leads to Westernization. That's not what he meant by the phrase "end of history", but it's his own fault for using a philosophical concept and ever expecting that most people, journalists certainly not excepted, would ever understand what he meant. If a typical Washington-beat journalists ever sits down and actually reads Hegal, I am sure the world will suddenly come to an end. But I am not worried about that happening
Second, Joshua Kurlantzick, in the "Outlook" section of the Washington Post, same day, front page, under the title "A Nobel Winner who went wrong on rights", takes the President to task for deemphasizing democracy and human rights. He contrasts the Nobel speech, the best speech by far the Preisdent has given while in office, with the Administration's prior policy choices, as best he can make them out. The Administration is right; Kurlantzick, and all the other people who like to wear human rights on their sleeves--and who have no understanding at all of Samuel Huntington's "democracy paradox"--are wrong. The best way to advance human rights and democracy is slowly, steadily, in the context of other dimensions of policy, and with full understanding of the opportunities and limits afforded by political culture. It is not by sounding like the mother-in-law of the world. And it is not by presuming the ridiculous argument that realism and its interests--like preventive mass violence, preserving civil and interstate order and the principles that order enables to become reality, and so forth--have no moral implcations. The President was channeling Reinhold Niehbur in Oslo. He could do a lot worse, and Kurlantzick should do some reading.
Third, Ed Begley's new book, Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters (Yale), reviewed in this week's New York Times Book Review, p. 30, carries a thesis that sounds very much overstated but that is, in any case, not original: that the sins of the French government against Dreyfus resembled the "crimes" of the George W. Bush Administration. I can prove it isn't original. Just read the TAI essay by the historian Paul Schroeder, "Mirror, Mirror on the War," Spring 2006--that's more than three years ago. I commissioned that essay, and while I do not agree with parts of it (and did not at the time, either), I think it's a brilliant essay. I wonder if Begley's book is as good. Naturally, I also wonder, but cannot expect to ever find out, where he got his idea.
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