Back in May, when I was guest-blogging for the Washington Monthly with Dan Drezner, James Taranto of OpinionJournal.com complained that " 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." Others, like this comment today by David Kane, echo this.
Now, there's obviously lots of ways to critique my argument - if it wasn't controversial, what would be the point of making it? - but the claim that I didn't make it until after the fact is wrong. As I pointed out at the time, even if I didn't predict any specific event, I made these arguments about the democratic possibilities unleashed by the Arab media, as well as the limitations of this approach to reform, well before the Iraq war. I presented a paper called "Arab Arguments About Iraq" to the MESA conference in November 2000 that previewed the argument about the transformative effects of the new Arab media, and published a revised version of it as "Beyond the Arab Street", in the March 2003 issue of the journal Politics and Society (keep in mind the roughly 9 month lead time in academic publishing). 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.
That doesn't mean I was or am right... but it's not the case that this was an after the fact explanation.
Great stuff! Could you put up a copy of this paper (ideally the earlier one)? I am certainly not the only one would like to read it.
Posted by: David Kane | January 14, 2006 at 09:43 AM