This is a preview from this week’s Spectator, available tomorrow:
Peering down from the Olympian heights of the New York Times, the columnist David Brooks writes that “We are now living in what we might as well admit is the Age of Iraq.” There, in the Land of the Two Rivers, he continues, a succession of American presidents has confronted the “core problem” of our era: “the interaction between failing secular governance and radical Islam.”
To Brooks and other hawkish right wingers, but also to considerable number of militant liberals, the antidote to this problem is clear: the application of military power to defeat the jihadists and lay the foundation for a humane and stable political order, beginning in Iraq but eventually extending across the Islamic world.
There are several problems with this analysis. For starters, it glosses over the fact that military power in the form of the 2003 Anglo-American invasion created the opening for the jihadists in the first place.
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