Bret Stephens: We're (Almost) All Neocons Now
[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.]
As Moammar Gadhafi's man in Washington, Ali Aujali used to deliver the standard bromides of the Arab ambassadorial class. But now that he's defected to the opposition, he has a new message for Americans: "You should not feel guilty for helping people to regain their democracy and make their future," he told me Saturday. "Without your help, Gadhafi will destroy every city in Libya."
Could it be that deep within the breast of every Arab apparatchik there lies the warmly beating heart of an interventionist neoconservative? So it would seem. And what goes for those apparatchiks goes for many others as well.
In a 2009 column, I wrote that the reason neoconservatism refused to die after the Bush years was that the world's tyrants refused to go away. Now it is positively in vogue. There you have the Arab League, calling for Western intervention in the domestic affairs of an Arab state. There you have David Cameron, who once promised to "think through much more carefully" whether to send British troops to war, pushing for war. There you have the president of France—France!—eager to fire the first Western shot over Libya...
Read entire article at WSJ
As Moammar Gadhafi's man in Washington, Ali Aujali used to deliver the standard bromides of the Arab ambassadorial class. But now that he's defected to the opposition, he has a new message for Americans: "You should not feel guilty for helping people to regain their democracy and make their future," he told me Saturday. "Without your help, Gadhafi will destroy every city in Libya."
Could it be that deep within the breast of every Arab apparatchik there lies the warmly beating heart of an interventionist neoconservative? So it would seem. And what goes for those apparatchiks goes for many others as well.
In a 2009 column, I wrote that the reason neoconservatism refused to die after the Bush years was that the world's tyrants refused to go away. Now it is positively in vogue. There you have the Arab League, calling for Western intervention in the domestic affairs of an Arab state. There you have David Cameron, who once promised to "think through much more carefully" whether to send British troops to war, pushing for war. There you have the president of France—France!—eager to fire the first Western shot over Libya...