Speaking as a liberal, I would be just as pleased to see the dictatorship in Iran be replaced by messy capitalist democracy as I was when it happened in Eastern Europe.
And, then as now, I don't think that there's much that we can do about it.
What did you say had changed, remind me?
That middle part about how there's not much we can do about it. I can tell you that the Left definitely did think there was something we could do about it back in the 1950s and 1960s.
I'm not trying to score a point here, but make one. Think of how the Republicans evolved from the party of the Union, to the party of State's Rights, or how the Democrats went from being the party of Segregation to the party of Affirmative Action.
It's this odd little dance like the famed mirror gag in Duck Soup, where there are two identical-looking people on each side of the supposed mirror (which is actually an empty hallway). The one guy moves his right hand and quickly the other guy moves the corresponding hand on his side, but the left one in his case because of the supposed mirror image.
Of course, isn't that part of what the parties do on every particular issue? Each side stakes out territory on anything controversial, with a weather eye to presenting the mirror argument to the other.
The highlight of the mirror gag comes when the two guys actually do a neat little semi-circle around each other, breaking the mirror illusion and yet maintaining it at the same time. This is what has happened on multiple issues like states' rights over the years.
On these sorts of foreign policy issues I do think that the example of Iraq has quite simply changed the default thinking of both the liberals and the conservatives, with the former now resigned to leaving dictators in place and the latter dreaming of better times for the downtrodden citizens of a corrupt regime.
And as a reminder, since I did have some neoconservative chops at one point, I've always felt that the neocons should have been the most suspicious of the whole Iraq incursion; one of the central tenets of neoconservatism is that government doesn't do big things well, and it's hard to imagine a bigger task. So right now I'm pretty much in your camp; there's not much we can do. But it seems strange to be left of the idealists.
