J
jlw
Guest
A very reasonable and thoughful post. Thanks!I don’t really disagree, but would be interested to hear what his point is. I remember just that question being debated when I was in high school: should the United States support regimes that oppose the USSR and her enemies, even if those regimes are morally reprehensible themselves? Should the United States oppose all communist regimes, even if they are democratically elected? I’m not saying Iran was ever communist, just that these were big questions without simple answers.
I think we made some mistakes, but hindsight is 20-20. If it is 1980 and Iran’s democracy has been gone for 20+ years, what are you going to do about it? As Mr. Clinton knows very well, wringing your hands and wishing for a time machine is not foreign policy. If Iran and Iraq are the most unstable countries in the Middle East and Iran hates the United States, do you let Iran take over Iraq with the help of the USSR, hoping the US-friendly monarchies of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait don’t meet the Shah’s fate? It is glib to say the oil was too important to let that happen, but really, the choice was between the economy–how many Americans are we going to send into hardship and poverty–and foreign policy–how much responsibility are we going to take for the lives and civil liberties of the citizens of our allies? I would like to think that there was a third way, but I was 17 years old at the time, so I can’t say. What I do know is that we did not even imagine ourselves “the world’s lone superpower.” Every question seemed to have annihilation of either the entire democratic experiment or the world as we knew it as the worst-case scenario. When your legitimate concern is an outcome far worse than 9/11, that changes your outlook.
I’m not saying we might not look back and ask questions, but let’s be honest about what the conditions and the stakes were.