President Bush takes a lot of flack over his ostensible lack of intellectual curiousity. In a technocratic age that fetishizes degrees and academic attainment, Bush seems a bit primitive.
I'm certainly not opposed to education. True learning makes us liberal in the best of senses. But certain fields have become so inbred and provincially-minded they make Arkansas seem cosmopolitan. Women's and the various Ethnic Studies fields are of course the most obvious examples -- the work coming from them written in hermetic in-group language and bearing little resemblance to the world outside. Middle Eastern studies suffers from the same problem. It's strongly pro-Arabist and so fixated on imperialism and victimology that everything is filtered through this paradigm.
The foreign policy types at Foggy Bottom have their opinions formed by these Arabists, and suffer from two other fatal weaknesses -- a positive view of human nature and a thoroughgoing moral relativism. Like Carter, most of them seem to believe that the rest of the world is motivated by the same humanitarian and profit motivations that we are. People are basically reasonable and good, so if you can just TALK with them, things can be worked out. Sting wrote the theme song for this type of thinking with his "Russians Love Their Children Too."
Bush, for all his lack of sophistication, has a much more worldly-wise viewpoint than these alleged experts. He said this on Sunday: " "It is clear that the free world, those who love freedom and peace, must deal harshly with Hamas and the killers. And that's just the way it is in the Middle East..."
He recognizes that religion isn't just a mask for economic or political impulses. He understands that the culture of the Middle East truly is different than ours. Fanatics with a medieval mindset don't see concessions made to them to be an incentive to compromise, but rather a reason to push for further concessions. The relativists at the State Department can't understand the absolutist mindset. Bush does.
Posted by Discoshaman at juin 16, 2003 07:24 PM | TrackBack