A Reaganite conservative asks a vital question:
What would the Reagan White House have said had some Russian apparatchik decreed that an innocent victim of torture deserved neither a hearing nor redress? Two decades ago the cold war definitions were clear: the West was a pluralistic coalition of nations big and small. We stood four-square against a cruel superpower willing to torture, kidnap, slaughter and invade in order to install an ideologically driven, once-size-fits-all system claiming historical inevitability.
Today, brandishing ideologies that appeal to domestic political audiences and intimidate everyone else, American and British leaders sound like Leonid Brezhnev. A current Afghan joke asks the difference between Americans and Russians, and the bitter answer is: “The Americans are better paid.”
By the standards of Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, our neoconservatives are not conservative, they are neosoviet. In the process, George Bush and Tony Blair are losing the so-called war on terror. Their policies backfire and play into the hands of Osama Bin Laden.
His analysis of our mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan seems very persuasive to me. This is a long war; and we have to both make compromises on the ground and always maintain our moral standing. We have, alas, been inept at both.