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Tuesday, June 05, 2012

Continuity in an Age of Hope and Change

Back during the Bush administration, I wasn't persuaded that we were in the wrong just because opinion polls in Arab countries showed that people were opposed to us fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. My view was that if popular opinion was against us liberating Moslems from thug regimes, there was a problem with that popular opinion and not us.

And now, with a post-Cairo speech outreach and all the hope and change you can stomach with our foreign policy, when the United States went to war with yet another Moslem country (as the above-mentioned critics described our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan), Arab public opinion still opposes American use of force to rescue Moslems:

Gallup data from 2012 show pluralities in the Arab world opposed NATO's intervention in Libya in 2011[.]

As a bonus, we had Arab League approval (sort of, since they publicly just asked for a no-fly zone) and managed to get a UN Security Council Resolution (well, sort of, since we had to twist it to justify regime change). Even as some here argued for R2P (responsibility to protect) as a doctrine for the use of military force, Arab popular opinion continues to insist that they don't like it when someone protects them from their own murderous rulers.

So whatever we do in Syria, don't expect to be loved for it. Whatever we do--or whatever we don't do--or even whenever we do or don't do whatever we do or don't do--will be justification for a pluralities or majorities to oppose our intervention against a thug ruler who murders Moslems at will.

And perhaps we can stop blaming George W. Bush for this tendency in the Arab world to resent us and all we do.