Reality Bites the Left

In past posts I have written about the "frame game" in which supporters and critics of the President's foreign policy seek to frame our understanding of the recent wave of Middle East liberation movements to their advantage. Generally speaking Bush's supporters claimed that his decision to invade Iraq was the cause of change throughout the Muslim world. Opponents insisted instead that Bush's role was marginal and that the change was due to local and indigenous circumstances. In this debate Bush's supporters seem to have finally and decisively gained the upper hand. I offer in evidence Andrew Sullivan, a supporter of the Iraq adventure who backed Kerry because he felt Bush was incompetent to prosecute the war. "Excitable Andrew" has suddenly caught the faith. He writes:

THE BUSH REVOLUTION: I think even the fiercest critics of president Bush's handling of the post-liberation phase in Iraq will still be thrilled at what appears to me to be glacial but important shifts in the right direction in the region. The Iraq elections may not be the end of the Middle East Berlin Wall, but they certainly demonstrate its crumbling. The uprising against Syria's occupation of Lebanon is extremely encouraging; Syria's attempt to buy off some good will by coughing up Saddam's half-brother is also a good sign; ditto Mubarak's attempt to make his own dictatorship look more democratic. Add all of that to the emergence of Abbas and a subtle shift in the Arab media and you are beginning to see the start of a real and fundamental change. Almost all of this was accomplished by the liberation of Iraq. Nothing else would have persuaded the thugs and mafia bosses who run so many Arab nations that the West is serious about democracy. The hard thing for liberals - and I don't mean that term in a pejorative sense - will be to acknowledge this president's critical role in moving this region toward democracy. In my view, 9/11 demanded nothing less. We are tackling the problem at the surface - by wiping out the institutional core of al Qaeda - and in the depths - by tackling the autocracy that makes Islamo-fascism more attractive to the younger generation. This is what we owed to the victims of 9/11. And we are keeping that trust. [emphasis mine]

Read Sullivan's postings here.

Sullivan was often ambivalent about Bush. Not so the President's self-proclaimed "enemies" on the left -- but even they are being force to grudgingly acknowledge his contributions.

Jonathan Freedland, writing in the left-wing organ, the Guardian, illustrates the agony of the left.

He starts off with the standard argument for marginalizing Bush's contribution.

He writes:

[E]ach one of these hopeful [Middle East] developments has its own origins and dynamics, distinct from the Iraq war. Syria may well have set in train the current Lebanese revolt last year when it sought a change in the country's constitution to keep a pro-Damascus president in place. If that was not provocation enough, the murder of Hariri in the heart of Beirut and in broad daylight seems to have been the last straw.

It's true, too, that those Gulf states now embarked on tentative reform, including Saudi Arabia, were spooked less by the Iraq war than by a post-9/11 fear of a US crackdown on the Islamist extremists in their midst. And in Israel-Palestine, the key shifts have been the death of Yasser Arafat, which has unblocked movement on the Palestinian side, and the realisation on the Israeli right that retention of Palestinian lands spells demographic peril for Israel's chances of remaining a Jewish state. Neither of those have anything to do with the bombing of Baghdad.

But then he has to admit:

Even so, it cannot be escaped: the US-led invasion of Iraq has changed the calculus in the region. The Lebanese protesters are surely emboldened by the knowledge that Syria is under heavy pressure, with US and France united in demanding its withdrawal. That pressure carries an extra sting if Damascus feels that the latest diplomatic signals - including Tony Blair's remark yesterday that Syria had had its "chance" but failed to take it and Condoleezza Rice's declaration that the country was "out of step with where the region is going" - translate crudely as "You're next".

Similar thinking is surely at work in the decisions of Iran and Libya on WMD and Saudi Arabia and Egypt on elections. Put simply, President Bush seems like a man on a mission to spread what he calls the "untamed fire of freedom" - and these Arab leaders don't want to get burned.

Freedland then admits that confrontation with reality has caused a problem for the left.

This leaves opponents of the Iraq war in a tricky position.... Not only did we set our face against a military adventure which seems, even if indirectly, to have triggered a series of potentially welcome side effects; we also stood against the wider world-view that George Bush represented.

He asks, "What should we say now?"

and answers:

First, we ought to admit that the dark cloud of the Iraq war may have carried a silver lining. We can still argue that the war was wrong-headed, illegal, deceitful and too costly of human lives - and that its most important gain, the removal of Saddam, could have been achieved by other means. But we should be big enough to concede that it could yet have at least one good outcome.

Second, we have to say that the call for freedom throughout the Arab and Muslim world is a sound and just one - even if it is a Bush slogan and
arguably code for the installation of malleable regimes. Put starkly, we cannot let ourselves fall into the trap of opposing democracy in the Middle East simply because Bush and Blair are calling for it. Sometimes your enemy's enemy is not your friend.

Read the whole article here.

This is the problem that the Left has had all along. Their hatred of Bush and his Iraq adventure have placed them in the position of siding with some of the most repulsive regimes in recent history and opposing principles of freedom and democracy for which the Left has long stood. So long as progress in Iraq was problematic, they could argue that Bush's motives, however well-intentioned, were wrong or wrongly applied. But now that there are unmistakable signs of progress not just in Iraq, but also throughout the region, they are denied even that fig leaf.

Bush, and the liberation movements popping up around the world are forcing the left to confront a reality that is quite different from what they theorized it to be. Bush is winning the frame game because his view of the world is the "reality based" one.