The Fisking of David Brooks

By Scott Horton

Last weekend, David Brooks offered us a profoundly revealing reflection on a recent function he attended with “moderate Arab reformers” in Jordan. Actually, I thought, it revealed Brooks as someone tightly set in his way of thinking and unable to learn from interaction with people from outside the narrow beltway class he inhabits. I have spent some time lately working in the Middle East and interacting with just the sort of people that Brooks describes. I have also had some occasion to examine AEI types attempt the same. Watching them invariably leaves me embarrassed. Brooks presents himself to us as a pop sociologist who ridicules the nation's pop culture. Sometimes he does this with a touch of humor and offers some useful insight. But Brooks on the foreign policy front is an astonishingly narrow-minded and uneducated man.

Barney Rubin, the nation's premier Afghanistan scholar, performs the ultimate fisking on this piece. Indeed, it’s a work of art to be consumed in its entirety, but I offer just a couple of nuggets:

Brooks continued with his depressing discovery:

But there was nothing defensive or introspective about the Arab speakers here. In response to Bernard Lewis’s question, "What Went Wrong?" their answer seemed to be: Nothing’s wrong with us. What’s wrong with you?

I'd like to ask David Brooks: Were any of the AEI speakers "defensive or introspective" six years after this?

At his first National Security Council meeting, President George W. Bush stunned his first secretary of state, Colin Powell, by rejecting any effort to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. When Powell warned that "the consequences of that could be dire, especially for the Palestinians," Bush snapped, "Sometimes a show for force by one side can really clarify things." He was making a "clean break" not only with his immediate predecessor but also with the policies of his father.

Did they say anything defensive or introspective about invading Iraq under false pretenses, failing to secure the country, wasting billions of dollars on no-bid contracts, and sparking an insurgency and sectarian war that has caused two million of 24 million Iraqis to flee abroad, a million and a half to flee their homes inside the country, and, according to the only scientific study done on the subject, killed over 600,000 Iraqis? Or did they tell the moderate Arab reformers, "Nothing’s wrong with us. What’s wrong with you?"

. . .

It is hard to reform when you feel you are under attack. It is hard to express self-criticism to representatives of the world's most powerful state who refuse even to entertain the idea that their own disastrous policies might have some connection to the reasons people distrust and even hate them.

There is a problem in the relations between the United States on the one hand and the Arab and Muslim worlds on the other. Unless you believe that those who oppose the U.S. are simply "evil," you have to address their grievances politically. The first rule in improving any relationship is to recognize the concerns of all parties. Remember "diplomacy?" That's what it's about: finding the "points in common" and "bracketing" the disagreements to work on them.