I'm trying to imagine the uproar if Saudi diplomats went to Austin to tell the Texas Board of Education they really had to do something about the crazy things they are making publishers put in their school textbooks.
At some point, America has got to accept some limits on its right (and ability) to tell the rest of the world how to live their lives, order their societies, and, yes, teach their children.
Otherwise, our constant, not always well-intentioned, and deeply resented cultural meddling is going to generate far more terrorism than we can ever hope to prevent by forcing the Saudis (or anyone else) to revise their curricula.
It seems like a lot of people -- not including Dr. Cole, of course -- are missing the bigger story here.
Yes, the embassy trashings show that the Salafis understand how secular democractic freedoms can be used to undermine secular democracy (not exactly a new discovery). And the Bengazi attack shows that Al Qaeda know how to exploit what the mainstream Salafis are doing.
But those are just the trees. The forest is that, thanks to the Arab Spring, the Islamist movement writ large has been drawn into the game of democratic politics, and is starting to play by the rules of that game.
The fact that the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Nahdah are having to keep a wary eye on the more hardline parties and factions to their right, while the hardline parties -- like Egypt's Salafi Nour -- try to prove (or at least pretend) that they, too, are "respectable" political players, is a sign of how much has been changed by the revolutions, not how much remains the same.
The fact that the Obama administration can successfully put pressure on the Ikhwan -- because the Ikhwan is now in power, and thus has something to lose -- is a diplomatic revolution in itself, compared to the days when authoritarian regimes could usually count on Uncle Sam's unqualified backing, secure in the knowledge that they were seen as indispensable bulwarks against "the Islamist threat."
I don't want to sound like a Pollyanna. Of course it's possible that the Salafist ultras will eventually manage to use democracy to destroy democracy -- just as a certain extreme nationalist party managed to do in a certain central European country in the early 1930s. Let's face it: The economic and demorgraphic realities in the MENA region are truly grim, if not disasterous.
But they were also pretty disasterous in most of the Western world in the 1930s, and yet fascism did NOT triumph in most of them, while the split between the revisionist Social Democrats and Lenin's Communists pretty much took the wind out of the sails of Marxist revolution.
It's that last historical example that seems most relevant. Just as the Social Democratic entry into parliamentary politics eventually turned them into "respectable" bourgeois parties -- to be followed, a generation later, by the Euro Communists -- the political normalization of the Islamist movement should lhave the same effect -- IF it can be sustained.
That would leave the jihadists doubly isolated -- both in the world of Islamic politics and even inside the hardline Salafist minority within that world.
But how the US reacts to the inevitable bloody setbacks along the way will have a lot to do with whether that actually happens.
I'm trying to imagine the uproar if Saudi diplomats went to Austin to tell the Texas Board of Education they really had to do something about the crazy things they are making publishers put in their school textbooks.
At some point, America has got to accept some limits on its right (and ability) to tell the rest of the world how to live their lives, order their societies, and, yes, teach their children.
Otherwise, our constant, not always well-intentioned, and deeply resented cultural meddling is going to generate far more terrorism than we can ever hope to prevent by forcing the Saudis (or anyone else) to revise their curricula.
It seems like a lot of people -- not including Dr. Cole, of course -- are missing the bigger story here.
Yes, the embassy trashings show that the Salafis understand how secular democractic freedoms can be used to undermine secular democracy (not exactly a new discovery). And the Bengazi attack shows that Al Qaeda know how to exploit what the mainstream Salafis are doing.
But those are just the trees. The forest is that, thanks to the Arab Spring, the Islamist movement writ large has been drawn into the game of democratic politics, and is starting to play by the rules of that game.
The fact that the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Nahdah are having to keep a wary eye on the more hardline parties and factions to their right, while the hardline parties -- like Egypt's Salafi Nour -- try to prove (or at least pretend) that they, too, are "respectable" political players, is a sign of how much has been changed by the revolutions, not how much remains the same.
The fact that the Obama administration can successfully put pressure on the Ikhwan -- because the Ikhwan is now in power, and thus has something to lose -- is a diplomatic revolution in itself, compared to the days when authoritarian regimes could usually count on Uncle Sam's unqualified backing, secure in the knowledge that they were seen as indispensable bulwarks against "the Islamist threat."
I don't want to sound like a Pollyanna. Of course it's possible that the Salafist ultras will eventually manage to use democracy to destroy democracy -- just as a certain extreme nationalist party managed to do in a certain central European country in the early 1930s. Let's face it: The economic and demorgraphic realities in the MENA region are truly grim, if not disasterous.
But they were also pretty disasterous in most of the Western world in the 1930s, and yet fascism did NOT triumph in most of them, while the split between the revisionist Social Democrats and Lenin's Communists pretty much took the wind out of the sails of Marxist revolution.
It's that last historical example that seems most relevant. Just as the Social Democratic entry into parliamentary politics eventually turned them into "respectable" bourgeois parties -- to be followed, a generation later, by the Euro Communists -- the political normalization of the Islamist movement should lhave the same effect -- IF it can be sustained.
That would leave the jihadists doubly isolated -- both in the world of Islamic politics and even inside the hardline Salafist minority within that world.
But how the US reacts to the inevitable bloody setbacks along the way will have a lot to do with whether that actually happens.