Dear James Taranto

Dear James Taranto,

In your amusing commentary on the Washington Monthly debate about democracy in the Middle East, you quoted a small part of my argument about the importance of the Arab media in driving indigenous reform movements.  You then wrote this:

       "it would be a lot easier to take the left's post hoc analysis seriously if anyone on that side of the fence had the foresight to see, ante hoc, that democratic changes were coming in Eastern Europe and the Arab world."

I'd be happy to help you out with your little problem.  I would never presume to speak for "the left", but I'm happy to speak for myself. 

I published my first article about the transforming political impact of the the Arab media in the journal Politics and Society in March 2003 (it was based on a conference paper originally presented in the late fall of 2002).  I laid out the policy implications of this argument in Foreign Affairs in September 2003.  I further discussed its impact on reform in two articles published by the Arab Reform Bulletin, in April and November 2004.  (All links can be found in the right sidebar, or at my homepage).  Some of these pre-dated the invasion of Iraq, all pre-dated the popular stirrings of January and February 2005. 

My analysis may be completely wrong, and there are no doubt a thousand criticisms to be made of my argument.  But "post hoc" is not one of them. 

I hope this helps you in your efforts to take my "ante hoc" arguments about the importance of the Arab media revolution for political change seriously.

With warmest wishes,

etcetera....

Comments

[lamont cranston]

c'mon, the president claims he didn't even read Condi Rice's Foreign Affairs article (setting out his 2000 campaign's foreign policy platform). what makes you think wingnuts will read yours?

:0)

lc

[Nur al Cubicle]

The Aardvark is a smooth operator, I tell you, with a slapdown dagger so sharp that you're smiling and shaking hands with him before you realized that he's slashed your gut.

[hk]

Oh, come on. People can't be expected to think that what they don't know about actually exist.

[Matt]

"But the possibility remains (and in the opinion of this writer it is a strong one) that Soviet power, like the capitalist world of its conception, bears within it the seeds of its own decay, and that the sprouting of these seeds is well advanced."

Kennan said that in 1946. But Taranto seems to want any analysis of the sociopolitical structure of foreign countries to be reduced to the rep/dem politics of today.

Hence "This is very similar to the rationale we heard for not crediting Ronald Reagan with the democratic revolution that toppled the Soviet Empire: The Soviets were going to collapse of their own accord anyway; Reagan was just in the right place at the right time. Of course, by the time Reagan died last year, hardly anyone was still claiming this..."

What a joke.