Middle Eastern politics
From Freedom to Justice
The idea that the United States is fighting for “freedom” in Iraq, and in the greater Middle East, is the last reed the Bush administration seems to be clinging to as the turbulent waters of sectarian civil war rise higher. Unfortunately, it is a weakly rooted reed, and clinging to it has about as much promise as adhering to a strategy of clear-hold-and-build, or clinging to the fragile, suspect Iraqi regime.
The desire to advance human liberty is certainly laudable, but the problem is that the administration has emphasized freedom as a policy goal at the expense of clearly articulating another social value, justice, which is much more deeply rooted in Arab culture. The result has been to cloud our understanding of the conflict, to limit our options for dealing with it, and to distort badly our entire foreign policy in the Middle East.
