Realpolitik Redefined

Stephen Schwartz and Bill Kristol have a short piece in The Weekly Standard about our Uzbekistan policy that's well worth a read. An excerpt:

But the character of the Karimov regime can no longer be ignored in deference to the strategic usefulness of Uzbekistan. The Taliban has been defeated, and, with the liberation of Iraq, the nature of the global struggle to which the Bush administration is committed is no longer exclusively focused on the destruction of terrorist redoubts. We are now committed to a democratizing effort that challenges tyranny along with terror as threats to peace and freedom around the world. The Uzbek regime that was part of the solution in 2001 is now, with its bloody suppression of protests, part of the problem.

This echoes almost exactly what I wrote a week ago about the doctrine of "sonofabitchism" and why what was once realpolitik is now in fact dangerous, antiquated idealism. We are at a fulcrum point; we can evaluate our relationships with bad actors like Karimov in terms of how we think they might help us now, or how we know they will hurt us down the road.

The alternative to choosing the right path is waiting for the mess to jump over the gates of our fortified embassies in Tashkent, Riyadh, Cairo, Islamabad, Amman and half a dozen other places. And, in light of 9/11, we may be lucky if that's all that happens. Do we really need to relearn the lessons of 1979 Iran?