"We must not curl up like bovine Pavlovians"

Greg Djerejian of the belgravia Dispatch is a conservative blogger of the non-neocon kind. He's long since lost confidence in the Bush administration and the neocons who do its thinking for it. Today, he is at his finest as he identifies two straw-men the ultra-right use to attack those who don't believe the PR on Bush's regime-change misadventures. There's the "soft realist" straw-man: "They argue that democratic governments require democratic cultures, which develop over centuries, and have never developed at all in the Arab Middle East" and the "hard realist" straw-man, those who supposedly: "think democracy in the Middle East may be possible, but it is not desirable because elections are likely to bring anti-American radicals like Hamas to power."

Greg firstly notes the reason these straw-men are set up:

You see this argument peddled around many of the more boorish blogs (and there are many)--most of which don't care a whit for innocent Arabs being felled by collateral damage (whether in Lebanon, or Iraq, or wherever), but erupt into spasms of self-righteouseness if one questions Bush's breezy 'freedom is on the march' nostrums. How dare you question the freedom agenda? Are you racist? Do you think Arabs are not fit for democracy? Disgusting! And so on.

Then he has what is perhaps the most eloquent single paragraph explaining the need for can be called "progressive realism" I have seen yet.

Unfortunately, Gerson neglects to mention a third category in his little schema. Call us skeptical realists, perhaps. Don't get me wrong. We are not but unsentimental Palmerstonians, to a man. Beyond direct calculations of national interest, we certainly believe there are moral considerations that need to be brought to bear in the foreign policy decision-making process. For instance, we found Reagan's stance against Soviet totalitarianism wise and effective (note, of course, that Reagan actually talked to the Soviets). So we understand that a moral dimension has its place, and always will, in the prosecution of U.S. foreign policy. We realize too, as security hawks, that the spread of democracy typically has the effect of reducing the specter of war and conflict. Which is to say, we like democracy, and we are happy to see it spread. But we are not fanciful adventurers--and we want to ensure requisite resources are brought to bear, and utopic outcomes are not breezily assured, and we suspect the effort will take place in gradualist fashion, via economic liberalization as much as political reform, and certainly not under the barrel of Israeli (Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon) or American (Iraq and, for some of the dimmer neo-cons salivating away, prospectively 'Syran') guns. We realize too that democracy is more than a 'ballot-cracy', more than waving purple fingers around in what was mostly a national census showcasing the rise of Shi'a revanchism in Iraq. We further realize that Bush's clumsy attempts to spread democracy in the Middle East are flailing rather dismally (see, again, the 30-day carte blanche to Israel to engage in a fanciful expedition to 'eradicate' Hezbollah, which helped put another nail in the coffin of America's repute in the region, not to mention the Cedar Revolution, or the emptily quixotic exercise that were the Palestinian elections, swiftly met with aid cut-offs which predictably have spurred on a grave humanitarian situation, and most of all, an Iraq adventure that has unleashed, in the face of our inability to provide for basic order, national furies that most Americans don't even begin to understand, as well as great skepticism about America's policy objectives in the region), and that in the face of such debacles, we must not curl up like bovine Pavlovians and ask for more of the same--but rather demand strategic changes. To do so, we must face reality square-on, learning from our mistakes and re-appraising our strategy, rather than rushing blindly towards the next misadventure with open arms.

Great stuff, and the rest of a long post is just as good. Go read it.