The same goes for the Dems as a whole. Until the opposition party presents a progressive, democratic agenda to reform the Middle East – as Blair has done in Britain, for example – there’s no reason to take them seriously on national security. ~Andrew Sullivan

Very nice how Sullivan is willing to accept antiwar criticism, provided that it provides an ideological roadmap that is identical to the one he already endorsed and which is entirely fantastic in its expectations.  In other words, Sullivan refuses to listen until antiwar people say exactly what he already wants to hear, in spite of the fact that at least some antiwar people, myself included, think that creating a “beachhead of modernity and democracy” in the Islamic world is somewhere between foolish and mad. 

To the extent that “Islamist terror” is rooted simply in Islam, there is no “progressive, democratic agenda to reform the Middle East” that anyone in the West can propose that will significantly change a thing.  To the extent that it is a response to occupation and hegemony, liquidating the hegemony and ending the occupation would be significant strides forward; they might not “solve” the problem (which may not have a “solution” at all), but they would assuredly “contain” it.  To the extent that it is itself a hybrid of modernity and Islam, “political Islam”/Islamism is not something that can be uprooted anymore than we can get the Chinese to cease being Chinese nationalists.  It is, like Islam itself, an unavoidable part of a reality that we cannot substantially alter nor should we feel as if we are obliged to alter it.  Vigilance, defense of our own country, targeted, limited responses to violent provocations and a guiding principle of avoiding all unnecessary interventions would be among the first things in my list of recommendations for an alternative approach to the entire policy area. 

There continues to be an astonishing amount of arrogance among the ideological supporters of the war that the notion of fundamentally reodering and transforming the Near East in a controlled, more or less directed way is not only still desirable but actually feasible.  If the last year has shown anything, it is that intervention has knock-on effects that we cannot control and may not even be able to foresee.  Above all, pushing this agenda in the Near East plainly has nothing to do with national security, and everything to do with ideological posturing about our devotion to modernity and democracy; the ideologues who want to push these things in the rest of the world do not wish to do so to benefit the recipients, but simply to confirm their own commitments and demonstrate their fidelity to the idea of progress.  Like all other believers in that idea before them, they will fail and produce heinous catastrophes, some of which may come back to haunt this country.  So again I ask, what does national security have to do with Sullivan’s “progressive, democratic agenda” and why should anyone opposed to the Iraq adventure have to provide a policy to try to accomplish something that may be impossible and is certainly unwise?