Iraq is Arabic for Weimar

Bombarded with bad news getting worse in the Middle East, from Iraq to Lebanon to Palestine, and coming soon to Pakistan (yikes!), my mind drifts to my favorite piece of writing by John Maynard Keynes: "My Early Beliefs," written in 1939. In that essay Keynes reflected on how the events of World War I, the peace treaty, the Depression, and the rise of fascism had altered the utopian world view he and his compatriots had held before the war. He wrote:

In short, we repudiated all versions of the doctrine of original sin, of there being insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men. We were not aware that civilisation was a thin and precarious crust erected by the personallity and the will of a very few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skilfully put across and guilefully preserved. We had no respect for traditional wisdom or the restraints of custom. We lacked reverence... for everything and everyone. It did not occur to us to respect the extraordinary accomplishment of our predecessors in the ordering of life (as it now seems to me to have been) or the elaborate framework which they had devised to protect this order.

... I can see us as water-spiders, gracefully skimming, as light and rasonable as air, the surface of the stream without any contact at all with the eddies and currents underneath... this thin rationalism skipping on the crust of the lava, ignoring botht he reality and the value of the vulgar passions...

That's a more sympathetic view than I'll grant the neocons whose utopian belief that a few well-timed military interventions, a few words put into a state of the union address, could transform the Middle East into a democratic idyll. But maybe it applies to those in the press and the voting public who bought into the neocon arguments. Maybe we're now ready to accept a dose of realism in foreign affairs, that there's some value to the plodding, glamorless, often infuriating work of diplomacy and compromise. That you've got to keep working at peace and stability, or it crashes around you before you know what happened. Sadly, while Keynes came to this realization early, for the rest of us it took another set of cataclysms to bring the point home.