Truth and Time in the Middle East
Claire Berlinski ·
Aug 15, 2010 at 7:13am
Just as "truth" is understood differently in this part of the world, so is "time," and this point is made beautifully today in The New York Times by Anthony Shadid. Whatever the Times' prejudices, they do still occasionally live up to their reputation. This piece could easily be expanded into a book; it's one of those things that's so important to grasp, but so hard to grasp unless you've lived it day in day out for what would seem to an American a very long time, but here isn't much time at all.
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May '10
Re: Truth and Time in the Middle East
"Powerful but fickle, the United States has never seemed to understand time..." But we did in the Cold War, didn't we? More than anything, the implications of this piece seem to be that we need a cross-administrations, semi-consensual strategy for this next long-war, like "containment" back in the day. Nowadays, though, the politicizing of foreign policy precludes this unity of purpose. Not completely (e.g. Gates and co) but significantly. Afterall, one of our political parties refuses even to name our ideological enemy.
Not sure we can win if our "grand strategy" is stop-start, dependent upon the vicissitudes of our politics.
May '10
Re: Truth and Time in the Middle East
Eight hours later.... I wonder if in the past our foreign policy differences were more evenly dispersed between the two parties (for instance, most of today's "neocons" used to be Dems), and therefore it was easier to have constancy in policy through changing administrations.