The Historical Perspective

Writing in Slate, Fred Kaplan impatiently takes Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to task for invoking an historical perspective on recent events in the Middle East.

Rice reportedly stated with regard to the recent conflict in South Lebanon:

I'm a student of history, so perhaps I have a little more patience with enormous change in the international system. It's a big shifting of tectonic plates, and I don't expect it to happen in a few days or even in a year.

Kaplan, in standard Slate style, lifts this quote out of context and uses it to suggest that the Bush administration is horrifyingly indifferent to the short-term human consequences of their actions or inactions. He writes:

[H]ow long it does take to go through "a big shifting of tectonic plates." If not "in a few days or even in a year," then what—in a year and a half, five years, a decade, a century? And does the United States—the one power that could impose a cease-fire if its president so desired—really have to wait until the earthquake dies down before stepping into the fray?

Of course, Condi was in no way suggesting that an understanding of long-term historical processes in any way precludes taking action in the here and now, but it serves Kaplan's purposes [sliming Bush] to pretend that she did.

Read it here.

But Condi is on to something. Focusing exclusively on the immediate context can produce a false image of universal chaos and catastrophe, and certainly journalists, especially those hostile to the administration, favor such a dramatic perspective, but placing those events in a broader historical context can reveal other, perhaps more useful, perspectives. Such is the approach of Peter Wehner, writing in the Wall Street Journal on the consequences of Bush's democratic initiative.

Responding to those who argue that democratization has produced uniformly negative results, such as the electoral successes of Hiz'bullah or Hamas, Wehner writes:

Hezbollah is powerful not because of the number of its parliamentary seats (14 out of 128); it is so because it is an armed, brutal militia that exists in a weak state and a fledgling democracy. Beyond that, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood were not the creation of free elections. None was radicalized by them; all were dangerous before them. It's also worth noting that radical Islamic governments have come to power through means other than the ballot. It's not as if an undemocratic Middle East is a region characterized by peace and harmony.

Elections are not the problem; rather, they reveal what problems exist and remind us what tyranny in the Middle East has wrought. Liberty is the antidote to the virus, not the virus itself. But freedom requires more time to work in the Middle East than the blink of an historical eye.

Perfection cannot be the price of support for democracy, and the fact that not every election goes as we might hope does not invalidate support for the effort to promote liberty. Freedom has a remarkable track record, including in regions that were once thought to be inimical to it. But it takes commitment to see it to success. We may well be present at the creation of something remarkable in the Arab world; but it will not come to pass without hardships. That is the nature of historic transitions, which can be jolting and where progress can be uneven.

Read it here.

Of course, one cannot honestly exclude either perspective -- one must simultaneously view both the forest and the trees. Condi, as a student of history, understands this. I wonder if Fred Kaplan does.