PROMOTING DEMOCRACY….Josh Marshall is right: this TNR article about Dick Cheney by Franklin Foer and Spencer Ackerman is pretty damn interesting. It’s hardly a pro-Cheney piece, but it’s not entirely unsympathetic either. Here’s the final paragraph:
Cheney will continue to push the agenda he set out 15 years ago: aggressive promotion of democracy through military power. This is no mere intoxication with ideas of the moment, spurred by a zealous staff or the pain of September 11. This is who Dick Cheney–the most powerful vice president in history–is.
When you strip away all the surface chatter, this is probably the key foreign policy question of our time. Everyone’s in favor of promoting democracy, but can it be done primarily through military power?
Dick Cheney apparently thinks so, and while I can’t say with certainty that he’s mistaken, history seems unkind to the idea. I sure hope that history turns out to be wrong.
