What I said about John Kerry and Egyptian strawberrries

“Our decades-long bungling in the Middle East is a good example of this (professional deformation) phenomenon. For years our foreign-policy establishment has looked on disorder and conflict in this region through a Western paradigm that has downplayed or ignored other motives and beliefs, and failed to imagine worldviews radically alien from our own. Thus this paradigm is based on questionable assumptions, such as economic development, anti-colonialism, and nationalist self-determination as the prime movers of social and political unrest. Western colonial empires and then post-colonial interference, so the story goes, had brutally suppressed nationalist aspirations for autonomy and freedom. Economic development had likewise been thwarted to serve the colonizers’ own interests, leading to poverty and lack of opportunity that feed despair and drive the oppressed to violence. Get the neo-imperialists out, create democratic institutions, aid economic development, and all will be well. Peace, prosperity, international cooperation, and global order will follow.”

(Giving the Muslim Brotherhood $190 million and opening the strawberry market will not buy off the Brotherhood or any other Islamist or mainline Muslim organization. People running the State Department are breathing old air and will keep on doing so until removing their heads from collective cranial inversion.)

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/american-foreign-policy-and-the-tyranny-of-old-ideas/