I’m concerned that while we’re sitting around discussing what it is to be a moderate, in the Middle East at the moment, the situation is spiraling out of control. Part of the reason things are getting so bad so quickly is because the arab moderates are unable to force people to work for peace.

Andrew Sullivan has a synopsis up of Tom Friedman’s thinking about what is going on. Sullivan’s take is interesting, but Friedman’s is definitely worth reading if you have access to the New York Times Select section.

“Tom Friedman has the best analysis I’ve yet read of what’s going on in the Middle East. He’s protected from a general readership by his bosses, so I’ll paraphrase his argument. It’s no accident that extreme violence is occurring in Lebanon, the Palestinian territories and Iraq right now. Why? They’re the three Arab countries with democracies, and the Islamist factions in their elected governments, having seized a sliver of power through the ballot-box, are now using it to radicalize the Arab ‘street’, foment sectarian violence (in some cases to create the chaos that helps Islamo-fascists seize dictatorial power), and to polarize the region still further. Other democratic factions have to cope with the terror these various militias and terror groups – the Mahdi army, Hamas, Hezbollah, and others – unleash. It’s tough. And Arab culture is far more accustomed to stand-offs, fatwas and street warfare than compromise, dialogue and parliamentary accountability.”

The danger is, as Friedman points out, that the roots of democracy in the Middle East are too shallow, and because of this the entire post 9/11 experiment to bring democracy to the area is in danger of going up in smoke in the near future.

Read the rest here: The War

(Via Andrew Sullivan | The Daily Dish.)