Why do liberals (and some old-guard conservatives) hate Paul Wolfowitz so much? David Brooks gives the intellectual hawk his due and Jeff Jarvis seconds the congratulations to a man who has been “an ardent champion of freedom” going back 25 years, often when the realists in Republican administrations were rhetorically slapping friendly dictators on the back. Jarvis says appreciate the message if not the man:
I don’t even care if you don’t want to give credit to Wolfowitz and Bush; I just don’t want to see the fruits of their strategy rejected just because it is their strategy.
There’s a hole in the dam of tyranny in the Middle East and freedom is flowing. Damnit. We should be holding the United Nations accountable for spreading freedom and not standing in the way. We should be figuring out how we can support movements of freedom — without invasion — in Lebanon, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain…..
One small way to do that is to give voice to the freedom-loving people of those nations. That’s the small thing we can do.
As I’ve mentioned before, Wolfowitz himself is an aggressive reader of weblogs. He reads them in Iraq and Iran because they sometimes give him better intelligence about what’s really happening than his own intelligence forces. And he clearly reads them because he likes to hear the voice of freedom.
So there: That’s something about which every one of you can agree with Paul Wolfowitz. Don’t let that scare you.
I have a feeling, if a Kerry administration picked the Democratic version of Wolfowitz (Lieberman?), we’d be hearing what a friend to oppressed peoples of the world that person was. But Republicans who agitate for humanitarian foreign policy for a quarter century are just promoting instability.
I’m a tech journalist who’s making a TV show about a college newspaper.