Misreading Lewis. Newsweek senior editor Michael Hirsh has a silly piece on Bernard Lewis in the Washington Monthly, claiming Lewis fathered the idea of imposing democracy on Iraq. So read this reporter's summary of a Washington lecture Lewis delivered a few months before the war: Lewis "said flatly that the idea of third parties producing and applying modern institutions in the Arab Middle East is 'unrealistic'. If the initiative is viewed by Arabs as a 'forced change by an external force', Lewis said, it is doomed to backfire, particularly if the democratizing initiative is accompanied by a prolonged U.S. military presence. Lewis said that Israeli forces were initially warmly welcomed as liberators in South Lebanon, but before long, the perfumed rice and flowers that were thrown at them turned into rockets and bombs." Hirsh missed that because he relied exclusively on Lewis's critics, who read Lewis selectively and with malice.
Tue, Nov 9 2004 5:36 pm
No man can be a Politician, except he be first an Historian or a Traveller; for except he can see what Must be, or what May be, he is no Politician: Now, if he have no knowledge in story, he cannot tell what hath been; and if he that not been a Traveller, he cannot tell what is: but he that neither knoweth what hath been, nor what is; can never tell what must be, or what may be.
- James Harrington, THE COMMONWEALTH OF OCEANA, 1656
Sunday, December 05, 2004
Bernard Lewis discredited?
To which Martin Kramer replies "Fie!" More?
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